more needed $10.4 million, and those with a half million to $1 million said they needed
$2.4 million (Marglin 2010: 200, citing PNC Advisors 2005).
So first and foremost, people’s ideas about what they need increase in line with
what they have. Here, financial security represents people’s perception of being
able to continue living the life they know. So, just taking numbers into consideration does not tell you much about what people need in order to feel that their lives
are rich. Only if we contextualize survey data in the socioeconomic environment
can we start understanding the specific connections between income and
well-being. If, for example, former citizen entitlements like public health care,
education, pension schemes, etc., are increasingly turned into commodities sold in
the market, your access guarantee starts depending on your private wealth. Thus,
the more monetized and privatized a society’s relationships, the more central
income will be to people’s sense of security and the quality of goods and services
that they can afford. It does not necessarily mean that they also feel happy,
however.
The role of reliable income in feeling secure is confirmed in many studies in
richer societies that find secure income ranks higher than a growing absolute
amount. They also support the need to contextualize: connecting income level with
other losses, like a blow to health, for example, has shown that people with higher
incomes suffer a less dramatic drop in life satisfaction (Kahneman/Krueger 2006:
14). And in all societies the wealthier strata are on average happier than the poor.
As long as societies hold money to be the single most powerful access mechanism to experienced utility or need-satisfaction strategies, income will be very
important; but only as long as I can buy much more treatment and services to
alleviate my disabilities than I could get without private pay. Max-Neef has taught
us to understand the relationship between physical goods and artifacts like money
and the role they play in allowing for a need-satisfaction process to emerge.
Without such processes they are rather useless things.
So the use of qualitative findings to capture the relationships within a given
system in a holistic way gives rise to much better insights into the property and role
that individual elements play within it. Reflexive sciences would insist that the
characteristics of individual elements cannot be fully captured without checking for
the relationships in which they are embedded. In his 2010 meta-study on happiness
research and its relevance for policy, Derek Bok, former Harvard University
president, offers a rather anecdotal account of the relational benefits that being rich
brings to people: “Their jobs tend to be more interesting, they have more control
over how they spend their time, and they are more likely to give orders than to
receive them. The mere fact that they have succeeded in what they set out to
achieve should make them more satisfied with their lives” (Bok 2010: 15). Here we
find a lot of pointers for satisfiers in the category of doing, being and relating, that
could be served with qualitative rather than quantitative changes in economic
processes like work. Max-Neef’s barefoot economist findings in poor communities
are seconded by data from rich societies: the range of possible satisfiers is far wider
than what markets offer.
3.1 How Mainstream Economics Views Human Needs and Their Satisfaction
71
$2.4 million (Marglin 2010: 200, citing PNC Advisors 2005).
So first and foremost, people’s ideas about what they need increase in line with
what they have. Here, financial security represents people’s perception of being
able to continue living the life they know. So, just taking numbers into consideration does not tell you much about what people need in order to feel that their lives
are rich. Only if we contextualize survey data in the socioeconomic environment
can we start understanding the specific connections between income and
well-being. If, for example, former citizen entitlements like public health care,
education, pension schemes, etc., are increasingly turned into commodities sold in
the market, your access guarantee starts depending on your private wealth. Thus,
the more monetized and privatized a society’s relationships, the more central
income will be to people’s sense of security and the quality of goods and services
that they can afford. It does not necessarily mean that they also feel happy,
however.
The role of reliable income in feeling secure is confirmed in many studies in
richer societies that find secure income ranks higher than a growing absolute
amount. They also support the need to contextualize: connecting income level with
other losses, like a blow to health, for example, has shown that people with higher
incomes suffer a less dramatic drop in life satisfaction (Kahneman/Krueger 2006:
14). And in all societies the wealthier strata are on average happier than the poor.
As long as societies hold money to be the single most powerful access mechanism to experienced utility or need-satisfaction strategies, income will be very
important; but only as long as I can buy much more treatment and services to
alleviate my disabilities than I could get without private pay. Max-Neef has taught
us to understand the relationship between physical goods and artifacts like money
and the role they play in allowing for a need-satisfaction process to emerge.
Without such processes they are rather useless things.
So the use of qualitative findings to capture the relationships within a given
system in a holistic way gives rise to much better insights into the property and role
that individual elements play within it. Reflexive sciences would insist that the
characteristics of individual elements cannot be fully captured without checking for
the relationships in which they are embedded. In his 2010 meta-study on happiness
research and its relevance for policy, Derek Bok, former Harvard University
president, offers a rather anecdotal account of the relational benefits that being rich
brings to people: “Their jobs tend to be more interesting, they have more control
over how they spend their time, and they are more likely to give orders than to
receive them. The mere fact that they have succeeded in what they set out to
achieve should make them more satisfied with their lives” (Bok 2010: 15). Here we
find a lot of pointers for satisfiers in the category of doing, being and relating, that
could be served with qualitative rather than quantitative changes in economic
processes like work. Max-Neef’s barefoot economist findings in poor communities
are seconded by data from rich societies: the range of possible satisfiers is far wider
than what markets offer.
3.1 How Mainstream Economics Views Human Needs and Their Satisfaction
71