About half of the people in the world, 4 billion of us, are struggling to meet our physiological needs. Poverty contributed to the deaths of about one-sixth to one-third of all the people that died in the last year.[1] That's 10 million to 20 million deaths every year. The causes are starvation due to crop failures, cooking over a smoky fire for years, or drinking contaminated water and not having access to vaccines and antibiotics, etc. These people are the most vulnerable to climate changes: drought, floods, sea level rise, desertification, increasing storms, extreme heat and humidity.
Then the wealthier 4 billion of us feel insecure and a little guilty. We feel insecure because we don't have much financial or social resiliency. If something unexpected happens in our lives, like a broken-down truck or a medical condition we could end up poor and on the street. We feel a little guilty reaping the benefits of people growing our coffee and mining our coltan while they experience the harsh working conditions and trauma of losing loved ones to lack of physical things costing less than $10.
Now for the good news. By having the good fortune of living in the United States we're surrounded by enough food, opportunity, and generosity that we don't need money to meet our basic needs.[2] (some social skills required) We're so used to using money to solve problems that we forget that we have an infinite number of other tools available. To quote Maslow, "I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail."[3]
To make it easier to understand let's suppose that one person can live an optimally happy life while spending in the Goldilocks range of $5,000 to $10,000 per year. Living on less than $5,000 probably requires some sort of free/inherited, minimally restricted land access which isn't the norm in this country. People that spend more than $10,000 usually have a lot of clutter in their house, garage, and storage shed. They also are throwing a lot of things away. Who actually likes having a ton of clutter? Who isn't annoyed when they buy something that breaks right away or doesn't work like they expected it to and has to send it to a landfill?
To address our guilt of 4 billion people living with lack of basic physical necessities the most straightforward approach is to get them things they need right now, and then help them figure out how to get it for themselves the next time. We'll get back to that. First let's explore optimizing happiness rather than maximizing consumption.
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