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You hear a lot of this sort of thing. We ship them coal, they ship us steel. We ship them logs, they ship us dining-room sets. At best, it betrays a basic confusion of concepts — what is sometimes called the value-added fallacy. What companies want are higher profits. What workers want are higher wages. What both want is higher productivity. It’s productivity that ultimately determines wages and living standards — not where you happen to be in the value-added chain.

This value-added fetish is often rooted in a kind of “techno-aesthetic intuition” (to use the economist David Henderson’s phrase) that certain activities — manufacturing rather than resource extraction, high technology rather than low — are more befitting of an advanced economy. Hence that most Canadian of fears, being “hewers of wood and drawers of water,” in a country with one of the world’s richest supplies of both.

By contrast, the strange, unworldly theory to which economists so stubbornly adhere is merely to suggest that, rather than issue grand pronouncements on what sectors “we should” be investing in, based on little more than hunches, we would do better simply to compare the relative costs and benefits of each. If there are greater returns to be had from producing raw materials, then raw materials it is. Which offers the better returns: to sell crude whatsit for $6 that costs you $2 to produce, or to “move up the value-added chain” and sell refined whatsit for $8 that cost you $6?

And who better to make these comparisons than the people whose money is actually at risk? Refining bitumen is an expensive, capital-intensive business. If it were really wiser to refine it here than sell it to refiners elsewhere, investors are at least as capable of realizing it as anyone else. If instead they choose to export, why not trust their judgment — why, other than the sort of divine dogma the Practical Man claims to disdain?

The fox, it is said, knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one thing. The Practical Man knows nothing. But he knows it with utter certainty.