Why does every village, city, state, country, and empire need to trade with entities external to itself to be economically viable, survive, and grow, but the Earth itself does not?
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They don’t, however the distribution of resources is a thing that all economies must do (if not the outright definition of an ‘economy’) and trade is a means of doing that. Some might say it being the dominant means of resource distribution is relatively new for humanity, with it largely being reserved for interacting with outgroups and internally things were handed around using social structures.
Also, I believe a lot of your question hinges on what ‘economically viable’ means and you haven’t defined what you mean by that. The explosive GDP growth the modern world is accustomed to, absolutely unsustainable without global trade. Just maintaining a stable population with a flat GDP with little external trade, very doable, we maintained feudalism for a thousand years.
> but the Earth itself does not?
Well for two reasons the Earth is not comparable to a nation state.
– The Earth is not a singular economic entity and likely wont be until the very far future.
– The Earth even in the above scenario is not purely an economic entity, it is a source of resources. Until everything is dug up and available to the economy, it wont reach a point where the Earth economy is just moving resources around and requires external inflows for growth.
If anything we humans trade labour with the Earth to pull out its raw material, if we look at this through a purely trade lens.
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