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All agree with the obvious. So?
When I say that "at least some humans survived disease in spite of medical ignorance," the point is that medicine nevertheless made improvements in this department and others. You stated that relatively free trade seemed to have contributed to growth worldwide. The connection between both comments is extremely obvious: it's not because you think something works that it excludes the possibility of improving upon it in one way or another.
If so they can be improved on with more inventions and more free trade. Make sense?
In a linear gaussian world, this makes sense. Unfortunately, our reality is plagued with asymmetries, multimodality, fat tails, and nonlinear responses. One thing freer flows of goods and services are more drastic winner-takes-all circumstances. It might not seem like much of an issue, assuming you have little concern over inequalities per se as I suspect you do not, but it has aggregate consequences. One way you can generate inordinately large responses in dynamic systems is when otherwise weakly related parts start to exhibit coordination. In physics, pressure can do that which is why you need a pressured balloon if you want an explosive pop. In economics, it's shared risk exposure and the adoption of similar strategies and freer flows of goods and services might have something to do with this sort of dynamic, though we don't have the models yet to look into that.
If you want an example from financial markets, think about the last crisis. Banks made bond-like securities out of mortgage and consumer credit contracts. Many large investment banks and institutional investors had a lot of those securities in their portfolio. There seems to also have been agency problems in the evaluation of people who contracted mortgages, as well as in the evaluation of the risks of the securities whose cash flows derived from payments to those contracts. A large portion of the financial system was exposed to one type of risk -- and possibly more so than they knew. It didn't matter that some people defaulted on their mortgage. One guy defaults because he got laid off. The other had too much credit card debt. They don't all do it at the same time, for the same reasons or at the same point in their mortgage. The real problem is when housing prices went passed a critical point down. Enough people reacted in the same way, at the same time, just as some of the largest investment banks in the world faced exactly the same margin calls and took the same kinds of actions to raise liquidity.
The same comment about Joe and Jane defaulting on their loans can be made about countries: it's the coordination that makes the difference between the small shocks that stop quickly and the small shocks that become very, very large. If you concentrate wealth and integrate markets worldwide, you get in a situation where this kind of story is more likely.