There is some subset of the world's population who are a net negative in wealth creation, especially those living in expensive markets. (The very ill, mentally ill or drug addicted homeless people, most of the elderly.) Children also count if you're looking on a short time horizon, but you could do discounted future incomes to account for that.
There are values other than pure economic utility, but from a pure economic utility function, a poor person consuming medical services doesn't help the economy. The money paid (via taxes to doctors, equipment vendors, etc.) would be more efficiently used for another purpose -- it's the broken window fallacy.
It would be interesting to figure out where the net consumers stop and net producers begin, and maybe graph that over time and culture.
There are a lot of good reasons to favor an economy which is slightly less productive than optimum, but where a larger percentage of people are net-contributors; redistributing income or wealth from the positive outliers to invest in making more people net-contributors, vs. trying to maximize the total contribution, is probably a good social choice. But it's not the purely efficient choice.
There are values other than pure economic utility, but from a pure economic utility function, a poor person consuming medical services doesn't help the economy. The money paid (via taxes to doctors, equipment vendors, etc.) would be more efficiently used for another purpose -- it's the broken window fallacy.
It would be interesting to figure out where the net consumers stop and net producers begin, and maybe graph that over time and culture.
There are a lot of good reasons to favor an economy which is slightly less productive than optimum, but where a larger percentage of people are net-contributors; redistributing income or wealth from the positive outliers to invest in making more people net-contributors, vs. trying to maximize the total contribution, is probably a good social choice. But it's not the purely efficient choice.