We Solved Subsistence and Kept the Fear

For almost the whole of human history, the central problem of a human life was getting enough to eat and somewhere to sleep. Everything else was arranged around that. Politics was about who controlled the grain. Morality was largely about who was owed a share of it. Religion promised a place where the problem did not exist.

In the rich countries, that problem has been solved. I want to say that plainly, because almost nobody does, and then ask why.

Solved Means Solved

Not solved for everyone, and not solved for good. But solved in the sense that matters: the resources needed for existence are no longer scarce. A rich country produces more food than it can eat and throws a great deal of it away. It has more housing stock than households, badly distributed. The marginal cost of clothing, light, heat and information has fallen to nearly nothing.

Where people in rich countries go hungry or unhoused, it is a failure of distribution, not of supply. The thing exists; it is not reaching them. That is a real problem, and a political one, but it is a different problem from the one our ancestors had, where the thing did not exist at all.

We crossed that line in the last century. It is one of the largest events in the history of the species, and it passed without ceremony.

The Frame Did Not Move

Here is the odd part. The material condition changed; the way we talk about it did not.

Scarcity is still the organising frame of economics, which defines itself as the study of allocating scarce resources. It is still the frame of politics, where every debate is about who gets what out of a pool presented as too small. It is still the frame of ordinary life, where people who will never miss a meal work as though the next one depended on it, and feel, if they slow down, a fear that belongs to a different century.

The behaviour is calibrated to a world that no longer exists. I have written about dissatisfaction as partly biological, and part of this is that: the machinery that kept our ancestors foraging does not know the famine is over. But only part.

Who Needs the Fear

The rest is maintained, and it is worth asking by whom.

A population that has understood subsistence is no longer at stake is a population that can ask what it actually wants to do with its time. That question is dangerous to anyone whose position depends on the answer being "work, for me, at the going rate."

An employer needs employees who fear losing the job. A market in consumer goods needs consumers who feel that not having the thing is a deprivation. A political system that runs on promising to protect people from want needs people who feel want. Each of these has an interest in the existential frame surviving its existential basis, and each has the means to keep it alive: advertising, the rhetoric of competition, the constant reminder that somewhere the wolf is at the door.

Scarcity is maintained as the issue because of the fear that we might release ourselves from it. Not a fear held by the public, who would mostly welcome the release, but a fear held on their behalf by the institutions that would lose their hold.

What Releasing Would Mean

I do not know in detail, and I distrust anyone who claims to. But the shape is visible.

It would mean treating the remaining hunger and homelessness as the distribution failures they are, and fixing them as such, which is cheap, rather than as evidence that the ancient problem is still with us, which is what justifies leaving them alone.

It would mean asking, as a society and not just as individuals with the luxury to ask, how much of our lives the production of surplus should claim once the surplus exists. I have argued that we have no defensible system for distributing wealth; this is the prior question, of how much of it we need to produce at all.

And it would mean a culture in which the fear of want was recognised as a historical artefact, something to be understood rather than obeyed. That is the hard part, because the fear is old and the institutions that feed on it are strong. But the first step is available to anyone, and it is to say out loud that the problem our species organised itself around has, in the places where we live, been solved.