By specialising in those things that we are better at, we all gain and the cake gets bigger – this has been a fundamental driver of our move from agrarian economies, where we all had to do a variety of tasks to survive, to modern economic systems where we all specialise in a single area. Just as this argument applies to individuals, it also applies to countries – one of Adam Smith’s insights in his remarkable book The Wealth of Nations, published as long ago as 1776.
