Skip to main content

Survival, Safety, Comfort, Leisure


It strikes me that an easy shorthand for the form of the satisfactions we make goals of may be to rank them in terms of their position, working from mere survival up to totally frivolous leisure.

In our minds we organise our goals according to what might be thought of as a hierarchy of wants. This means that, put simply, we will come up with goals based on the urgency of the thing we want. If the thing and the use of it assures mere survival, and your survival is imperilled, then that use is the one you will choose.

Neoclassical economics employs the concept of utility functions, and Austrian econ the almost identical concept of value scales. The difference is that Austrian value scales are always reckoned to rank preferences ordinally, whereas utility functions can be ordinal or cardinal. Well, some dispute that, but it has held in econ textbooks and, I'm pretty sure, the working behind Principles of Economics by Marshall!

I am not presuming to have my own alternative to either approach. This is supposed to be a kind of supplement. If some day I or somebody else refines it enough that it becomes to economics what Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs is to psychology, then hooray. For now, no such luck.



~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
SURVIVAL
Merely not death. Wants whose satisfaction merely leads to the continuation of organic function.

FOOD
CLOTHING
SHELTER



~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
SAFETY
Wants whose satisfaction causes a person to feel physically secure both in the moment and contemplating at least their short-term future.

MARTIAL ARTS TRAINING
WEAPONS AND WEAPONS TRAINING
SECURITY SERVICES
DISPUTE RESOLUTION SERVICES



~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
COMFORT
Physical ease in terms of addressing uncomfortable health problems, enjoying appropriately sized, cut and worked goods, and hygiene of one's person and surroundings.

WHITE GOODS
FURNITURE
ENERGY
HEALTHCARE
HYGIENE



~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
LEISURE
What it sounds like. Room to breathe! A kinda meta-layer atop the other three taking in flavour, romance and sex, and so on.

SPARE TIME
ENTERTAINMENT

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Zeitardation

A Youtuber called axe863 made a video in which he used scientific, mathematical and statistical common-sense to deliver the KO that the Venus Project and Zeitgeist Movement so richly deserved. If his approach seems weird and unconventional it's because he's not attacking from a tradition neoclassical or Keynesian perspective. Axe863's poison is complexity economics, something a good deal more dangerous to ideas like TVP and TZM. [ 2 ] Now to a couple of comment threads from below the video that I thought could od with being replicated just in case they get deleted at source! ~~~ AstralLuminary 1 year ago Why can't we generalize the consumption patterns of middle-income people in the western world, set our constraints equal to the amount of localized resources, and the rate of resource recovery, derive a population growth model that would be sustainable to said consumption patterns, and derive the necessary quantifiable amount of work required to expen...
Post a Comment
Read more

World Hunger - Getting Better or Worse?

Thinking about how rates of hunger have shifted over the last 25 years led me to the Global Hunger Index , which covers - wait for it - the last 25 years. What do we see by looking at their figures for hunger in different countries in the years for which data are available? The Global Hunger Index uses aggregated statistics to arrive at a 'score' for every country studied in a given year with 0 the ideal and 50+ an absolute nightmare of near famine-level proportions. If you were switched-on enough to follow the link above you probably noticed it includes an interactive world map showing the change in rates of hunger for folks in many countries that might best be described as low-income or middle-income. An illustration of the score system is just below. And just in case it wasn't already obvious that everything is getting better, here is the data for all of the individual countries measured on a scatter plot in terms of their reduction in GHI score from 2000...
Post a Comment
Read more

Commentaryism - The Death Toll of Capitalism

How many people have died because capitalism exists? How many would still be alive if it had never existed? Let's dig in! We will take two approaches over the course of this blog post by looking at the the death tolls attributed to the word in its broad popular definition - everything socialists don't like - versus the toll that fits the definition offered previously on this blog. By the same token I will not lay any outsized figures at any other mode of production's door except where that mode of production demonstrably caused the problem that killed people. It's political ideologies that really matter here, and this is where the first big problem with even trying to lay a specific body count before capitalism runs into problems - there is no political ideology called capitalism. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Now then, Alfonso Gutierrez says  in a comment thread that "capitalism and free-markets have murdered billions of people" which is a risky cla...
Post a Comment
Read more