It is common to find that two traders both think their counterparts are idiotically overpaying: that is the beauty of Ricardo’s magic trick. ‘The English have no sense,’ said a Montagnais trapper to a French missionary in seventeenth-century Canada. ‘They give us twenty knives for this one beaver skin.’ The contempt was mutual. When HMS Dolphin’s sailors found that a twenty-penny iron nail could buy a sexual encounter on Tahiti in 1767, neither sailors nor Tahitian men could believe their luck; whether the Tahitian women were as happy as their menfolk about this bargain goes unrecorded. Twelve
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