Absolute and Comparative Advantage

The Essential Question of our last economics unit is "Why do nations trade?"

Part of understanding this answer, economists say, is knowing about absolute and comparative advantage. Absolute advantage, as it turns out, is deceptively less important than comparative advantage in the scheme of things because comparative advantage determines who should specialize in producing a product to maximize efficiency.

I think it goes like this...

If there is an young man and an old man (I realize this is two agist blog posts in a row but oh well) living on an island we find that the young man has absolute advantage in everything because he is faster, stronger and smarter. But we also know it is not economically efficient for the old man to sit around and do nothing. Instead, the young man should do what he does best and what the old man cannot do at all - perhaps hunt.

Even if the young man is better at cooking the old man should cook because he has the comparative advantage in cooking. The reason for this is that the old man's opportunity cost for cooking (doing nothing) is smaller than the young man's (hunting).

Applying this analogy to the community or global level we encounter a very interesting truth: when people work together, they achieve more than they do apart. Further than this, maximum productivity is sometimes found when individuals sacrifice operating in their greatest strength for the overall benefit of the team.

This is profound to me.

I was once told that horses can actually pull more weight than the sum of each horses capacity to pull. Does this mean that if we put unity above personal performance that productivity is greater?