> This sentence is just wrong. First of all a rational actor will not intentionally pay a worker the value of their production; you get no profit. The textbook

> This sentence is just wrong. First of all a rational actor will not intentionally pay a worker the value of their production; you get no profit. The textbooks are talking about economic profit, not absolute profit. In very in-precise terms, it’s the expected profit for the given amount of risk, which to massively oversimplify can be represented by beta.