Wants and needs (Was Re: Blumenstock's Beef)

["Bruce R. McFarling" <ecbm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, 26 Oct 1997 16:40:10 -0500 (EST), Harry Veeder
<aa361@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>A "want" is not the same thing as a "finite capacity to consume".
>Perhaps, it should be stated like this instead:
>
>      Each person has a finite capacity to consume over any given
>      interval of time due to physical limitations.

	Let me draw your attention to Frank Ackerman's paper, "Perspectives
on the Economics of Consumption," in the Sepetember 1997 Journal of
Economic Issues.  Frank cites a study by Tibor Scitovsky, _The Joyless
Economy_, 1976, from the Oxford University Press, in which Scitovsky
points out the distinction that psychology draws between two different
types of consumer Satisfaction: comfort and pleasure.  Nearly all desires
for comfort are satiable -- and Hyman's paradigmatic example of food
is a good example of this: the discomfort associated with hunger is
satisfied by consuming food, and there is a limit on the amount of food
of adequate quality that is required to alleviate this discomfort.  The
exception is the comfort of belonging -- of social acceptance -- and if
society is organised so that the discomfort of lack of social acceptance
is alleviated by acquisition and display of positional status goods,
then the demand for these positional goods need not be satiable, since
an increased abundance of a positional status good simply increases the
amount that must be displayed as a marker of a given position.
	It is consuming for pleasure that is potentially insatiable,
since the pleasure derived from consumption is in part due to novelty,
so that the pleasure derived from maintaining a given level of consumption
declines over time.  For durables in particular, the old novelties
accumulate while most of the pleasure is derived from playing with the
most recently acquired possession.

	Quote.
	This leads Scitovski, like Galbraith and Hirsch, to skepticism
about the urgency of incessant growth in production.  That attitude
is reinforced by Scitovsky's answer to the second question [that is,
which satisfactions are necessarily obtained through purchases in the
marketplace?]: many of lifes most important satisfactions come from
non-market activities or from the process of work, rather than from
consumption of purchased goods and services.
	Unquote. pp. 658f.


Virtually,

Bruce McFarling, Newcastle, NSW
ecbm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx