Paraphrased from my econ 101 textbook: Suppose in a given day, Henry can catch up to 4 deer, or 6 antelopes. John can catch 24 deer, or 12 antelopes. John can

Paraphrased from my econ 101 textbook: Suppose in a given day, Henry can catch up to 4 deer, or 6 antelopes. John can catch 24 deer, or 12 antelopes. John can catch way more of either animal than Henry, so we say John has an absolute advantage in both products. You might think that John can not benefit from trading with Henry, because he can produce every product better than Henry can. However, we can break it down another way: It costs Henry 3/2 antelopes to catch 1 deer, and 2/3 deer to catch one antelope (prove it to yourself: 6/4 and 4/6). It costs John 1/2 antelope to catch 1 deer, and 2 deer to catch one antelope. Thus, it costs less for Henry to specialize in catching antelopes, and for John to specialize in deer. This is comparative advantage. Then, when they trade at a rate between the two opportunity costs, they can achieve a combination of products unattainable individually: Before trade: - Henry: 6 antelopes, 0 deer - John: 0 antelopes, 24 deer After trade: - Henry: 4 antelopes, 2 deer - John: 2 antelopes, 22 deer While their totals are the same here, because an exchange rate of 1 antelope to 1 deer works out here, it helps to look at it graphically: For this, we can make a production possibilities curve (or line, to keep it simple), which is a graph of possible outputs where the axes are the amount of each product that John or Henry can produce in a day. Here's Henry's: https://i.imgur.com/k9xS7Sj.png https://i.imgur.com/k9xS7Sj.png (vertical axis is antelopes, horizontal is deer) Henry can obtain any point on or inside the purple. Any point outside of that is unobtainable. However, with trade, he can obtain it! The result of trade is the green dot. Here's John's: https://i.imgur.com/V6aFZkm.png https://i.imgur.com/V6aFZkm.png As you can see, they both obtain points outside of what's possible to produce alone, due to comparative advantage! Note: I don't claim to be an economics expert (just a high schooler taking the AP course!), and I'm sure there will be lots of better explanations in this thread!