You don’t need a concept of aggregate utility to see why there’s gains from trade. Trade increases efficiency. This means everyone’s individual utility can, maybe after income redistribution, be weakly increased, i.e. everyone’s can be made better off (at least, no worse off). 
 
The typical economist answer to your concern about meeting displaced workers at the mall, etc is that we should be able to come up with a compromise to compensate the losers from trade. In fact, these compromises usually come in the form of retraining programs, etc. 
 
Also, given trade increases efficiency, its not just that it allows people to buy cheaper products, it means more stuff is being produced. This is the same effect that technology improvements have. Actually, with this analogy, many economists wonder why trade is such a political hot potato whereas technological innovation is almost universally praised.

Can you take me through this one? I think I know why it might be lower, but why would Nm be higher?

bryan was wandering in “let us assume” land and then deriving from models based on his assumptionsIn any case, he was misunderstanding Clark’s view on the theory too. When Clark says “in equilibrium real incomes would still be higher,” he means that ignoring the dynamics in the transition from equilibrium to equilibrium, when the economy settles down again into its new equilibrium, incomes will be higher. I assume, by endorsing the diagram linked to in the update, Clark would agree that in the transition to the new equilibrium, incomes might be smaller.  
 
Clark is doing what economists call comparative statics. This is just answering questions like: All else equal, do societies with more diseases have higher incomes?  
 
I’m surprised Caplan got tripped up by that because economists rarely discuss transition dynamics.

I should have mentioned that the short term effect, due to a technology shift, of disease may be negative, but the long-term effect, due to the death schedule shift, is positive. 
 
The short term drop in incomes “fixes” itself in the long run (as people die) and all we’re left with is the long-run positive effects of disease. 
 
Compare two societies, one with some disease and the other with the same disease and one other. The second society would have a death schedule pushed more to the right and thus higher incomes per person. This is true even if the second societies technology schedule is lower than the first’s.

Technological shifts have short-term consequences for income per person in the Malthusian logic. Shifts in the death schedule has permanent consequences. 
 
A a new disease, even one that makes people less productive, may have a short term hit on incomes via the technological shift, but it has a permanent effect on the death schedule. 
 
The black death was a “one-time” event. Its a nice case of the perversity of the Malthusian trap, but I don’t think its what Prof. Clark had in mind in the quote Caplan cites at the beginning of his first post on the subject.

Related news:

John Snow was in China last week, and met some mid-level (?) officials from State Council.

New bulletin in Chinese:
https://www2.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=12265028&postID=2060227561534528190

I think Fox canned it because it’s not that funny..

Well, it’s actually a dark comedy so it’s primarily meant to be clever, not amusing.

Nonetheless, Steve’s fixation with the film continues to mystify.

[i might be opaque and jargonistic on occassion, but even i have my limits -razib]

Edited By Siteowner

[stop the stream of consciousness already -razib] 
 
Razib – I am sorry to see that you find epistemological scepticism so disconcerting that you see fit to censure it. All I am trying to point out is that we have arranged for ourselves a world in which we can live – by the postulating of bodies, lines, surfaces, causes and effects, motion and rest, form and content: without these articles of faith no one could manage to live at present. But for all that they are still unproved. Life is no argument; error might be among the conditions of life.

[stop the stream of consciousness already -razib]

Edited By Siteowner

Over immense periods of time the intellect produced nothing but errors. A few of these proved to be useful and helped to preserve the species: those who hit upon or inherited these had better luck in their struggle for themselves and their progeny. Such erroneous articles of faith, which were continually inherited, until they became almost part of the basic endowment of the species, include the following: that there are enduring things; that there are equal things; that there are things, substances, bodies; that a thing is what it appears to be; that our will is free; that what is good for me is also good in itself. It was only very late that such propositions were denied and doubted—it was only very late that truth emerged, as the weakest form of knowledge. It seemed that one was unable to live with it, our organism was prepared for the opposite; all its higher functions, sense perception and every kind of sensation worked with those basic errors which had been incorporated since time immemorial. Indeed, even in the realm of knowledge these propositions became the norms according to which “true” and “untrue” were determined—down to the most remote regions of logic. Thus: the strength of knowledge does not depend on its degree of truth but on its age, on the degree to which it has been incorporated, on its character as a condition of life. Where life and knowledge seemed to be at odds there was never any real fight; but denial and doubt were simply considered madness. Those exceptional thinkers, like the Eleatics, who nevertheless posited and clung to the opposites of the natural errors, believed that it was possible to live in accordance with these opposites: they invented the sage as the man who was unchangeable and impersonal, the man of the universality of intuition who was One and All at the same time, with a special capacity for his inverted knowledge; they had the faith that their knowledge was also the principle of life. But in order to claim all of this, they had to deceive themselves about their own state: they had to attribute to themselves, fictitiously, impersonality and changeless duration; they had to misapprehend the nature of the knower; they had to deny the role of the impulses in knowledge; and quite generally they had to conceive of reason as a completely free and spontaneous activity; they shut their eyes to the fact that they, too, had arrived at their propositions through opposition to common sense, or owing to a desire for tranquility, for sole possession, or for dominion. The subtler development of honesty and skepticism eventually made these people, too, impossible; their ways of living and judging were seen to be also dependent upon the primeval impulses and basic errors of all sentient existence.— This subtler honesty and skepticism came into being wherever two contradictory sentences appeared to be applicable to life because both were compatible with the basic errors, and it was therefore possible to argue about the higher or lower degree of utility for life; also wherever new propositions, though not useful for life, were also evidently not harmful to life: in such cases there was room for the expression of an intellectual play impulse, and honesty and skepticism were innocent and happy like all play. Gradually, the human brain became full of such judgements and convictions, and a ferment, struggle, and lust for power developed in this tangle. Not only utility and delight but every kind of impulse took sides in this fight about “truths”; the intellectual fight became an occupation, an attraction, a profession, a duty, something dignified—: and eventually knowledge and the striving for the true found their place as a need among other needs. Henceforth not only faith and conviction but also scrutiny, denial, mistrust, and contradiction became a power, all “evil” instincts were subordinated to knowledge, employed in her service, and acquired the splendor of what is permitted, honored, and useful—and eventually even the eye and innocence of the good. Thus knowledge became a piece of life itself, and hence a continually growing power: until eventually knowledge collided with these primeval basic errors, two lives, two powers, both in the same human being. The thinker: that is now that being in whom the impulse for truth and those life-preserving errors clash for the first fight, after the impulse for truth has proved to be also a life-preserving power. Compared to the significance of this fight, everything else is a matter of indifference: the ultimate question about the conditions of life has been posed here, and we confront the first attempt to answer this question by experiment. To what extent can truth endure incorporation?—that is the question, that is the experiment.

I don’t think it was a case of secularism forcing Christianity to back down, rather that Christianity itself became more secularised. I would hazard a guess that many if not most of the great Europeans were Christians in addition to being committed to the ideals of rationalism.  
 
The obverse of the Nietzschean logic is that forcing secularism on the religious would merely inflame their anger and strengthen their resolve.

Sorry, I actually meant progressive in the sense of progress towards secularism. According to the Nietzschean logic, it would be wise to protect Islam from criticism and ridicule precisely in order for the cooler, more rational heads to prevail over the demagogues and rabble rousers.

Uhm, “progressive” is meant in the sense of “right”, of course.

Dobeln, you agree therefore that the progressive strategy at this stage would be for the state to suppress overt criticism and ridicule of Islam?

Dobeln, it is precisely “tolerance” that  
is at issue. One is either tolerant because one doesn’t really care or else because one perceives one’s own beliefs to be immune to criticism. The mullahs would be right to perceive in tolerance the actual threat since, as Nietzsche said, in order to discredit religion it needs to be put on ice. Religion thrives on the flames of intolerance.

Liberalism a Fishy faith? 
Check out 
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/12/opinion/12fish.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print&oref=slogin