Given that most people spend many more hours of most days working than
consuming, this blind spot is huge. It also raises several questions that the differentiated model in Fig. 3.2 picks up on: Do humans not enjoy engaging in productive activities? Do we not all participate in providing and receiving services like
cooking or dancing without pay? So why not emphasize need satisfaction during
productive processes instead of sacrificing them to serve sacrosanct productivity
goals? What have we gained if there are ever more goods and services to choose
from but we have no time to really enjoy them anymore? Yes, willingness to pay for
compensatory measures and convenient ‘to-go’ solutions might even increase, but
does this really indicate overall better need satisfaction?
3.1.2 Is ‘Having’ Really All the Fun There Is?
Manfred Max-Neef developed a helpful tool to understand human needs that
increases the creative imaginary space for sustainable innovations that target
experienced utility and well-being. This popular Chilean development economist
has called himself the “barefoot economist” after spending 12 years with the
poorest communities in Latin America. His moment of revelation came when
understanding that none of the mainstream market-based economic concepts were
of any relevance to them. Much of his work has thus been built on proper empirical
experience in non-marketized societies. It therefore provides some fascinating
reflexive systemic insight into the effect that living with certain institutional setups
has on the way actors see and experience the world.
In an interview with Democracy Now! Max-Neef explained that his return to
immersing himself in experience rather than deducing theoretical models made him
conclude that we need an entirely new language in order to understand better what
people really need. According to him, mainstream economics has nothing to say in
support of the poorest people in the world if strategies are supposed to emerge from
local systems rather than disrupting them. If you live in poverty, behaving like the
selfish, insatiable atomic accumulator of mainstream theory won’t get you very far,
says Max-Neef: “You cannot be an idiot if you want to survive; you need networks
of cooperation and mutual aid.” In those communities, he observed, competition
and the promise of monetary gain are not required for people to demonstrate
enormous creativity, innovation and willingness to collaborate (Max-Neef 2010).
To illustrate which fundamental human needs he observed instead, Max-Neef
has developed a matrix whose key messages I summarized in Table 3.2. The matrix
limits the number of existential human needs to approximately nine. He does not
argue that the list of nine existential needs is definitive or set in stone, but he says he
is confident that a change in those basic needs would at best occur at a very slow
pace. Also, these needs should be understood as interrelated and without hierarchies, except for the need of subsistence or survival, which comes first (Max-Neef
1992: 204–205). Here Max-Neef differs from other need-satisfaction approaches,
many of which place self-actualization at the top and social, as well as material
3.1 How Mainstream Economics Views Human Needs and Their Satisfaction
63
consuming, this blind spot is huge. It also raises several questions that the differentiated model in Fig. 3.2 picks up on: Do humans not enjoy engaging in productive activities? Do we not all participate in providing and receiving services like
cooking or dancing without pay? So why not emphasize need satisfaction during
productive processes instead of sacrificing them to serve sacrosanct productivity
goals? What have we gained if there are ever more goods and services to choose
from but we have no time to really enjoy them anymore? Yes, willingness to pay for
compensatory measures and convenient ‘to-go’ solutions might even increase, but
does this really indicate overall better need satisfaction?
3.1.2 Is ‘Having’ Really All the Fun There Is?
Manfred Max-Neef developed a helpful tool to understand human needs that
increases the creative imaginary space for sustainable innovations that target
experienced utility and well-being. This popular Chilean development economist
has called himself the “barefoot economist” after spending 12 years with the
poorest communities in Latin America. His moment of revelation came when
understanding that none of the mainstream market-based economic concepts were
of any relevance to them. Much of his work has thus been built on proper empirical
experience in non-marketized societies. It therefore provides some fascinating
reflexive systemic insight into the effect that living with certain institutional setups
has on the way actors see and experience the world.
In an interview with Democracy Now! Max-Neef explained that his return to
immersing himself in experience rather than deducing theoretical models made him
conclude that we need an entirely new language in order to understand better what
people really need. According to him, mainstream economics has nothing to say in
support of the poorest people in the world if strategies are supposed to emerge from
local systems rather than disrupting them. If you live in poverty, behaving like the
selfish, insatiable atomic accumulator of mainstream theory won’t get you very far,
says Max-Neef: “You cannot be an idiot if you want to survive; you need networks
of cooperation and mutual aid.” In those communities, he observed, competition
and the promise of monetary gain are not required for people to demonstrate
enormous creativity, innovation and willingness to collaborate (Max-Neef 2010).
To illustrate which fundamental human needs he observed instead, Max-Neef
has developed a matrix whose key messages I summarized in Table 3.2. The matrix
limits the number of existential human needs to approximately nine. He does not
argue that the list of nine existential needs is definitive or set in stone, but he says he
is confident that a change in those basic needs would at best occur at a very slow
pace. Also, these needs should be understood as interrelated and without hierarchies, except for the need of subsistence or survival, which comes first (Max-Neef
1992: 204–205). Here Max-Neef differs from other need-satisfaction approaches,
many of which place self-actualization at the top and social, as well as material
3.1 How Mainstream Economics Views Human Needs and Their Satisfaction
63