Ricardo's Law of Comparative Cost

Ricardo investigated the effects of trade between two areas unequally endowed by nature. The gains derived from the division of labor are always mutual, he said. Ricardo was fully aware of the fact that his law of comparative cost is a particular instance of the more universal law of association. We conceive what incentive induced people not to consider themselves simply as rivals in a struggle for the appropriation of means of subsistence made available by nature. In order to comprehend why man did not remain solitary, we do not need to have recourse to a miraculous interference of the deity or to the empty hypothesis of an innate urge toward association. Neither ethnology nor any other branch of knowledge can provide a description of the non-