Picking up the oranges that Krugman and Obstfeld deploy, Pietz diagnoses the sleight of hand by which this “Disneyfied picture of simple commodities circulating across cleanly drawn national borders” attempts to rationalize the inequalities of global exchange. In the meantime, the very idea of growing oranges in Norway comes coded by a ridiculousness that almost demands that you set out for the supermarket-on principle. ![]() Never mind the scale according to which both countries measure their “comparative advantages.” Things will even out eventually. Never mind the differential in labor time. They trade with still other nations than Norway, whose refrigerators remain entirely remote to them-something encountered only by way of the global structure of a market that tells them the price of their oranges and the cost of those refrigerators. Indonesians, likewise, get their refrigerators, or, actually, wait a minute, they don’t. Norwegians get their oranges, and they get more of them and of a higher quality than they could hope to grow at home. According to this feel-good logic, everybody wins. “Their natural resources and technology give them a comparative advantage.” It just makes better sense for “some underdeveloped nation in the tropical South (Indonesia say)” to grow the oranges. “Norwegians can get more oranges for the same amount of labor by making some other commodity (refrigerators say),” observes Pietz. ![]() As anthropologist of the fetish extraordinaire William Pietz informs, it’s this dearth of home-grown Norwegian oranges that those “secular clerics of the latter-day House of Orange,” economists Paul Krugman and Maurice Obstfeld, reach for “to bring home the point that in global free trade everybody gains, even those who are exploited in the Marxian sense that the goods they receive ‘contain’ less labor time than the goods they sell.” Ĭlimactic conditions in northern Europe (for now) preclude the cultivation of citrus fruit other than in greenhouses, the cost of which remains commercially unviable-hence the good sense it makes to import them from a warmer climate instead. And this difficulty, while not exactly insurmountable, turns out to be one of the favorite examples for illustrating the benefits of global capitalism. It is difficult, so I am told, to grow oranges in Norway. Johannes Baptista Ferrarius, Frater, Hesperides, Sive de Malorum Aureorum Cultura et Usu One of Hercules’ labors was to go to the gardens, kill the appalling dragon that guarded the golden apples, and bring out to the woods of Media and to the savage regions of the outskirts of civilization the apples of edible gold. The story of the glorious labor of Hercules, when he stole the golden apples, has suggested to me the framework on which I might develop my story of the golden apples. ![]() Krugman and Maurice Obstfeld, International Economics: Theory and Policy Shouldn’t Americans buy American goods whenever possible, to help create jobs in the United States? Many people are skeptical, however, about the benefits of trading for goods that a country could produce for itself. Everybody knows that some international trade is beneficial-nobody thinks that Norway should grow its own oranges.
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