Real Time Strategy: New Rules for Global Markets

The idea of trade is almost as old as the world itself. Very early in the Agrarian Age, farmers grasped the concept that we now call “comparative advantage”; i.e., that some people or groups are more efficient than others in creating certain kinds of consumables, and that everyone benefits from specialization. Historians tell us that the result was that a new class of people, traders, grew amidst the mostly agrarian populace of 7,000 to 8,000 years ago. The first traders worked up and down the Nile River, bartering goods from one area to another.