The Importance of Productivity

Every type of organism lives by some process. But for every other organism, the process has some fixed set of inputs. Human beings don't do that. There's nothing in our environment that we just need. And if we get it, we live. And if not, we die. We create what we need out of raw materials. This is a tremendous and underappreciated fact about our species. It means that human beings are not fundamentally in competition with one another. That's so different than the other species out there. Of course, there are all kinds of competitions between people,. but it's not fundamental that device.