Reply #81: I agree we can do better on global trade. And going from subsistance

[applegrove]

agriculture to sell your produce at a market is huge. It is a huge increase in wealth. And though it shows itself as the person having very small amount of extra cash - each and every one of our ancestors who walked off a farm made that choice. Something as simple as people going to market and pooling their resources to rent a few engineers to dig a well 300 feet down and buy a mechanical hand pump - so that women do not spend half their day walking to collect water from some bug infested pond - is huge.

So too is being able to buy wood. If you sell your stuff in a market you have a few cents to buy wood. And the family that runs around and collects wood can specialize in that. More hours saved in a day.

Those first few pennies have the utility of the biggest stack of gold a neocon has ever seen. That is how important being able to make those first few choices is to the lives of people. Don't belittle that.