Commentary Poets, songwriters, psychologists, romantics et al., have expounded on the human need for love, companionship, friendship, closeness, and so on. True. But one of the most important ways in which human beings need each other is rarely pondered and infrequently written or talked about: our economic need for each other. We need each other economically in order to achieve widespread prosperity. Wealth is not created in a vacuum. The fundamental factor that has driven the stupendous wealth creation and rising standards of living of the modern era is what economists call “the social division of labor.” An increasingly elaborate division of labor has lifted the mass of human beings from abject poverty to widespread prosperity over the last two centuries. Here is its essence: Rather than eke out a subsistence standard of living by having every individual perform the same few time-consuming, self-sustaining economic actions (i.e., producing food, making …