{
  "id": "cost.economic",
  "term": "cost",
  "sense": "economic",
  "pos": "noun",
  "status": "review",
  "level": 8,
  "arena": "EmergenceLexicon",
  "domain": "everyday",
  "style": null,
  "definition": "the quantity of work that is loss for a product",
  "folk_gloss": null,
  "emergence": {
    "components": [
      "work.effort",
      "loss.economic",
      "products.goods"
    ],
    "interaction": "work is given up and is loss for a product",
    "novel_properties": [
      "exchange value",
      "monetary measure"
    ]
  },
  "examples": [
    {
      "text": "The construction of the Three Gorges Dam required 100 million person-days of labor, displacing 1.3 million people.",
      "domain": "engineering"
    },
    {
      "text": "Apple's 2023 supply chain absorbed $29.8 billion in losses from factory downtime and logistics disruptions.",
      "domain": "economics"
    },
    {
      "text": "Photosynthesis in Amazonian trees converts sunlight into biomass at an average metabolic cost of 4.5 grams per square meter daily.",
      "domain": "biology"
    }
  ],
  "relations": [
    {
      "id": "price.economic",
      "note": "is-a",
      "type": "is-a"
    }
  ],
  "used_by": [
    "financial.economic",
    "no-free-openings.no-openings",
    "rental.economic",
    "stranger.unmodeled"
  ],
  "forms": [
    "cost",
    "costed",
    "costing",
    "costs"
  ],
  "closed": true,
  "provenance": {
    "author": "openrouter:openai/gpt-oss-120b",
    "date": "2026-07-29",
    "confidence": 0.6
  },
  "canonical": "https://emergencemachine.com/tools/lexicon/what-is-the-meaning-of-cost.economic"
}