The reason is that capitalists compete with each other in order to make a profit; hence they have an incentive to develop new, ever more efficient means to produce goods, creating a large material surplus without which socialism would not be feasible.
It's that surplus, and a very material surplus indeed, that frees the hands for the division of labor in the "information economy".
Packer's jadedness has grown out of his need to spend more, or to force himself into some new evolutionary stage of being, allowing him to be at one with riches, which in a mysterious, super-contemporary sense, have gone beyond mere material surplus.
These advantages may outweigh the additional costs of prepackaging and other possible drawbacks such as material surplus (invariably, not all components are used) and a certain inflexibility because the same manufacturer must be used for the individual components.
Most metal and plastic parts are designed to be manufactured, which means they can be clunky and contain material surplus to the part's function but necessary for making it.
In our view, at the press rumoured price of $1.4bn (assuming there is no material surplus capital to be injected into the business before sale) is correct, then relative to historic earnings of around $80m, it does not stand out as being obviously cheap (around 17.5 times earnings) on a headline basis for an asset manager.
"I think because of our wealth, our material surplus, we can treat these animals as if they were our children," Ms. Benton said, "but some people are just so fixated on that animal that they run into trouble, because it's not an accurate perception of the animal".
Yet for all his prescience and critical insights, Grantham misses the most fundamental factor in the great unravelling in which we now find ourselves: the transition to a low EROI future in which we simply cannot extract the same levels of energy and material surplus that we did decades ago.
Within local operational and ethical guidelines it is acceptable to use human amniotic membrane (material surplus to clinical requirements) for research without consent if it is anonymous and unlinked.
Whether the American queue of weapons plutonium awaiting conversion into reactor fuel will grow longer is not clear; first, a president would have to declare additional material as surplus.
