Previously we had some lumber worth $10 and now we have a chair worth $250 dollars.
Where did the $240 dollars come from? Was it stolen from somebody else?
Previously we had some lumber worth $10 and now we have a chair worth $250 dollars.
Where did the $240 dollars come from? Was it stolen from somebody else?
All of those factors have hidden externalities baked into them that erode the net value you're creating. My argument is that it's all just a shell game where we're passing costs down the line to future generations while telling ourselves we're creating something valuable from nothing because it's what we need to do to sleep at night. We just don't perceive the longer-term externalities in a lot of cases.
But let's just say that you priced all of the externalities perfectly. In this hypothetical example, can you really make an argument that all of that adds up to more than, say, 100 dollars?
And if you can't, then you still have a lot of "value" to account for.