Economic surplus

From Hobson's Choice

In classical economics, "economic surplus" refers to the output from a society minus the cost of sustaining that activity, as, for example, the cost of feeding, clothing, sheltering, and organizing the population; cost of seed corn, feeding flocks of domesticated animals, and so forth. Among the nomadic tribes of the indigenous American peoples, economic surpluses were negligible: increases took the form of movable wealth like bears teeth necklaces, and the like.