Steve Talbott

...It is fine to say that your profit from the sale of apples is $1000, and your profit from the sale of oranges is $1000. But if apples are not the same as oranges, neither are profits from apples the same as profits from oranges - or profits from cocaine the same as profits from penicillin. Yet everything in the distinction is lost as soon as you say, "Total profit = $2000" and proceed to crank that figure into still other calculations, heedless of concrete realities - the real world - from which the numbers arose.