Courtesy used to cost nothing. But with the rise of artificial intelligence, that's no longer entirely true. As OpenAI CEO Sam Altman points out, polite words like "please" and "thank you" now come with a price tag in the tens of millions.https://www.notebookcheck.net/Being-kind-is-free-not-according-to-ChatGPT-which-pays-millions-for-please-and-thank-you.1002832.0.html
Wealthy nations produce things and develop new things that are more efficient, it is the poor nations that produce almost nothing that are the most wasteful.