The world is a finite place, and a dairy calf is only productive if you have an excess of grass, water, space, and milking equipment.  If you have to struggle to provide even a few of those things, or cause others to become unproductive by taking away their needs in order to supply the calf’s…  the word liability does come into play.

Millions of people are starving.

Millions more dying in warfare and genocide.

Billions are unable to contribute their ideas to first-world ‘progress’ because they are insufficiently provided with first-world resources, or first-world problems to solve.  Billions are crowded into living conditions we would cringe at to put food on the table in order to merely survive.  Where is Simon’s marginal benefit to their existence?  Where is the realm of innovation (that which improves hummanity’s collective situation) coming out of their workshop?

Oh.  Sorry.  They had to work overtime tonight painting plastic toys with lead paint, or threshing the harvest, or setting IEDs.  No time to cure cancer or invent a dye-based solar panel.

I don’t mean to attack capitalism, but Simon’s fervor for the free market runs on the same rules as many other economists – they assume that all other things remain constant, that long-term supply of all natural resources is infinite, that demand is inexhaustible, that there are no limits to exploitation of the world, that there are no limitations on invention other than population, and that localized economic competitiveness (whether ‘our city’ or ‘our country’ or ‘our family’) is the end-all of human existence.

Thanks for the thoughtful comment Squalish, you got me thinking!

I don’t believe the world to be a finite place. It may seem so in the short term, once in a while, but eventually I believe we can always keep stretching its resource bounds. I believe resources are created not discovered (oil was waste for much of human existence) and not only do I believe that view to have been validated over and over through time but I believe it to be the only useful way to face the world—assuming an answer can be found is the best way to find one.

A dairy calf is only productive if you care for milk (a nontrivial invention) and if you have invented and mastered enough other resources to sustain it in stride. We now raise far more calves than was thought possible just a century before because it was indeed impossible (not productive) to raise more calves until we invented a whole slew of other resources like animal science, biotech or milking equipment.

There are indeed billions of poor people out there but consider two things. First, if they live in capitalism, if they earn a freely given wage, they are taking as much as they’re giving. Yes, they could give (and take) so much more if given the right resources (chief of them being private property, the machinery of freedom), and their inability is our loss, but that is exactly the point: people are the ultimate resource.

Second, we, first world, are an extreme, unprecedented anomaly in our wealth—the most abject poverty is far and away humanity’s historical average. Even more crucially, massive abject poverty is an extreme, unprecedented anomaly—early, stupid death is far and away humanity’s historical average.