[mping]

It's woefully short sighted, as it misses the long-term prospect of economic output, as most classes of people you mentioned provide some economic benefit in one way or another. Cynicism should be precise, in my opinion.

[scotty79]

You can swing to the opposite end of the spectrum and argue that everybody is economically useful indirectly to the point that any meaningful definition of economic utility is gone.

I think emotional opposition to what I wrote comes mainly from the fact that people tend to give moral valuation to economic usefulness. If you are not useful, you are bad. And since they don't want to think about large amount of people as bad, cognitive dissonance arises and forces them to extend the definition of economic utility till they feel comfortable again. Till they narrowed down the amount of bad people to fit their comfortable world view.

I think much healthier way is to say that economic utility and morality are orthogonal and it's perfectly fine that retirees or learners don't have economical utility without any additional justifications. This approach allows making moral judgements more freely and accurately. In this framework, being economically useful can't be used to cover immoral behavior and lack of usefulness can't be used to stigmatize perfectly harmless people or even those useful in other ways.