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Yes, you give someone the bare minimum they need to survive. Then they want more. Now you're back to the situation where you have a surplus and they're willing
by jjk166 5y ago
Yes, you give someone the bare minimum they need to survive. Then they want more. Now you're back to the situation where you have a surplus and they're willing to trade, the efficient thing is to trade your surplus. Continue repeating until one of you dies of old age, and the remaining survivor has all the bread.
So long as you have surplus, and that surplus has value, it makes sense to trade it, rather than have it sit idle.
- whimsicalism 5y agoYes, someone living their entire life on subsistence amounts of bread while the other person has a great 3 meals a day is not a welfare optima.
- jjk166 5y agoI don't think you're understanding this. As long as person A has more bread than they're going to eat, and person B still wants more bread, it is still optimal to trade. A well fed individual can do more labor than a minimally fed person who can in turn do more labor than a dead person. As person B's quality of life improves, they are in an ever better position to trade. The bread is worthless to person A, it doesn't matter how little person B gives for it, it is still optimal. It does not become Pareto efficient until person A is worse off by trading bread, by which point they no longer have enough to completely satisfy their needs.