A question: production

I messed up the scheduling for auto-posting what should have been last Thursday's post. Here it is with the usual apologies for lateness. Have a happy Saturday After Thanksgiving.

Today I'd like to pose a question. It's one that's too tough to answer, but it's fun to think about how one would even go about trying to answer it. That said, here's the question.

How much of what all of humanity consumes is not produced by humans?

Some of what we consume is produced because of human-driven processes, and some of what we consume is not. For example, only humans are capable of assembling the laptop I'm using to compose this blog entry, and thus laptop assembly is produced by humans. However, the sweet potato I'm planning on eating for supper tonight was created due to many non-human inputs, such as sunshine and photosynthesis, and if I didn't buy my food through the grocery store and the industrial agriculture machine but instead grew the potato myself then the percentage of non-human inputs could have been larger. For example, the potato could have been grown without chemical fertilizers or irrigation but instead only have used naturally existing soil nutrients and rainfall. Well, probably not rainfall. Not here in Phoenix.

Indeed, little is entirely human- or non-human-made. The most “natural” of resources must often be transported to their place of consumption, and transportation involves some bit of human input, whether it's trucked (a complex activity) or tossed into a river to float downstream (a simple activity). Contrary, the most “unnatural” of resources, such as my laptop, contain countless raw inputs that cannot be synthesized through human means alone. In the case of my laptop, even the humans assembling it require countless non-human-made inputs, especially if they're eating organic sweet potatoes on their lunch breaks. An input of an input is still an input.

The proposed question is hard exactly because it seeks to quantify a supply chain that, in theory, regresses backwards in time to a seeming infinity of breadth. Each supply-chain input to my laptop has its own production process involving many more inputs, each with its own production process with even more inputs and so on. If you go back far enough, everything we touch, including ourselves, is nothing but exploded stardust. But the question isn't intended for reduction to absurdity. Rather, it's intended to ask: how much of what we're consuming can we give ourselves credit for producing? Do humans account for the production of even half of what we consume?

These questions have to do with a problem with modern mainstream economic thought: that which cannot be monetized cannot be accounted for and therefore isn't accounted for. My laptop cost me about 1,000 sweet potatoes (I know, I overpaid for that video and memory upgrade), a comparison that I can make because both laptop and sweet potato alike can be converted to a common medium, the dollar. But how much is the air I'm breathing worth, measured in dollars? Right now, it's worth nothing because there's no shortage of it (and no control over it). But if there were a shortage then it would become priceless. Either way, air is something that cannot easily be priced, and yet air is obviously critically important and oxygen specifically—volatile and short-lived free oxygen—is available only because of the biosphere's photosynthetic processes going on right now. No laptop is going to be assembled without those photosynthetic processes. How does one account for that in the ledger? Think about the matter a little more and you'll undoubtedly be able to come up with many more natural, “priceless” supply-chain inputs like sunshine and rainfall for the production of nearly anything, but being priceless, the inputs aren't accounted for and cannot be accounted for. But of course, not being accounted for doesn't make an input any less critical.