Trade is made of...

Prof. Art Carden examines how trade creates wealth, by allowing people working together to produce more than they could individually. Using a simple two-person example, he shows another example of how cooperation during production benefits everyone.

Credit to Marginal Revolution.

A Coase Theorem in Action

Credits to Greg Mankiw.

The theorem brings forth the idea that what really matters is that everything is owned by someone and that, initially, who owns what doesn't matter.

There sure is nothing like a free lunch.

It might've been the only sensible conclusion that I would make out from a recent class I sat through in Optimisation Techniques so I take a minute to rewrite it here.
The discussion rotated around functions and the different possible manipulations that make them fancier to suit the economist's intentions as it is for most mathematics for economists.

Concentrating on the cost function for the purpose of making my point, I came to piece it together that one is justified in saying there is nothing like a free lunch because the cost function is an increasing function in all possible domains that it can be extended to cover. The baker definitely incurs expenses and probably due to inflation these rise with time t eventually bring about actual price rises. Not that there'd be free lunch if costs stayed stagnant because I'd still assume that there'd still be fixed costs to be covered. If there was depreciation, then I'd also assume that lunch would get more affordable but not completely free. When a charity gives lunch for free, assuming bread constitutes lunch, there still needs to be someone somewhere who sponsors that meal or the participants themselves donate at their own discretion.

There is no free lunch in deed.

Pareto Efficiency?

Whoever said that a distribution set can be Pareto efficient and disgusting was right on the money. In fact I tend to think that the latter is sufficient for the former, practically. Enough said.