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JustLurking2022

It's good for someone on each side, but necessarily the population at large on each side...

Plenty of dictators will happily sell off their country's natural resources to line their own pockets, and the same general principal holds true for many other types of transactions.

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The only parties to a trade are the buyer and the seller.

If both don't think they'll be better off doing the trade, it won't happen. No one else is materially affected.

You can think of this as how trade creates wealth!

This assumes that both parties are rational agents acting with full knowledge, no coercion and no externalities. The rational agent in economics is similar to the spherical cow in physics. Great for modeling but pretty useless to a cowboy.

I think you missed the word "think".

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