Needs and Wants
This chapter discusses the ideas of needs and wants of a citizen and a Utopian society. A need is that thing which when not satisfied causes harm, and a want is that thing which when not satisfied causes only disappointment. Needs can be broadly classified in the following categories: urgent, essential and desirable. There is no need to classify wants for this kind of discussion.
It is not the case that just people have needs and wants. The entire society also has its needs and wants. A society aspiring to be an ideal society will need its citizens to be independent and self-sufficient. To become independent and self-sufficient, a citizen would need some resources, and the citizen may not have them. So, a society aspiring to be an ideal society would want to help those who need help in being independent and self-sufficient so that the society's objective of being an ideal society is also accomplished.
The contents of this chapter establish the context for the chapters on the Utopian Payment Model.
The section, "Needs and Wants of an Individual", lists some of the most commonly occurring needs and some not so commonly occurring needs of individuals.
The section, "Needs and Wants of the Society", lists some of the most commonly occurring themes in the needs and wants of a society.
The section, "Satisfying Needs and Wants", will first discuss the means to satisfy our needs and wants and the challenges in doing so. We will consider both an individual and the society. Then we will consider an individual who cannot satisfy some essential need and what courses of actions the individual could take and its consequences. After considering all that, we will conclude that ideal societies or societies striving to be an ideal society will help their citizens in satisfying their essential needs. Currently, the need to give help is great, but it will not disappear in an ideal society. Moreover, giving this kind of help is a high priority; higher than satisfying wants. Finally, we will discuss why an ideal society or a society striving to become an ideal society realizes that making every citizen independent and self-sufficient is the responsibility of the society.
In the life of a citizen, there will be times when the citizen needs help. When society is the one giving help, in effect, we all are giving that help. For this, we will need to have some "Principles of Giving Help in Satisfying Needs". We will discuss these in the most general terms.
The section, "The Next Few Chapters", gives an overview of the next few chapters that deal with this idea of "giving help" and its implementation in the form of the Utopian Payment Model.
Needs and Wants of an Individual
If we consider the needs of individuals, then high on the list would be air, water, food, clothing, shelter, healthcare and education. Of these, air, water and food are required for basic survival. Clothing and shelter are required for basic comfort. Healthcare is required for maintaining health and without good health, independence and self-sufficiency is in jeopardy. Education is required because without education the chances of an individual becoming independent and self-sufficient are next to nothing.
When a person is independent and self-sufficient, then this person can take care of his or her own needs regarding food, clothing and shelter. Of course, this assumes that this person's environment has naturally available clean air and freely available clean water. Healthcare is a need that has enormous cost variability for individuals. Some people will find satisfying their healthcare needs easy and others will find it financially impossible. How is a child supposed to satisfy his or her own educational needs? Some would say the parents should. How are poor parents supposed to do this?
When thinking about needs, we usually ignore those needs that are being fulfilled; we take them for granted. For example, our most important needs are oxygen and water. Our air is about 20 percent oxygen, and we do not have to do anything to have oxygen around us. Imagine that we are on the surface of the moon or Mars; we will quickly recognize that oxygen is needed for survival. Yet, here on Earth, we never think about oxygen as a need. We take it for granted because this need gets satisfied for everyone without anyone taking any effort. Imagine if we were needed to buy our daily supply of oxygen!
Similarly, in those countries that are sufficiently developed, citizens don't think of drinking water as a need. They just use tap water for drinking. In such countries, citizens can do so because the need for clean drinking water was recognized as a need and fulfilled for everyone by setting up the necessary infrastructure to provide water that is sufficiently clean for drinking purposes and such water is made available as tap water. Citizens of such countries may not think of this water as a need. Ask citizens in developing countries who do not have water flowing through their household taps or even if it flows it cannot be used for drinking purposes. Imagine a country that does not have clean drinking water flowing through their taps. Citizens of such countries could still buy such drinking water if someone supplies it for their personal profit. Citizens will have to buy their drinking water, but it should not be too expensive - certainly not too expensive for citizens who are poor.
Now consider that instead of water, some specific citizen requires insulin for survival and the daily cost of insulin is much larger than the cost of drinking water. What is this person supposed to do if he or she is poor? Die? If indeed the society in this country is of the opinion that every person is fully responsible for their personal needs, then such people will not survive for long after developing the need for external insulin. If we would like our society to be Utopia, what sort of system when established will ensure that such needs for individuals are met without bankrupting them? Different people could have different needs, and satisfying those needs could cost vastly different amounts of money. If some unfortunate individual encounters a need that is very expensive to fulfill, what choice does this individual have? What if a person encounters two grave illnesses? What if a person encounters three or four grave illnesses? Surely some will say that we need to have "free healthcare" and some others will say we need "insurance based healthcare". There seem to be at least two ways of going about satisfying our healthcare needs.
Now consider that citizens in some countries enjoy clean air, whereas citizens in many countries wish that they had clean air in their country. Would clean air be considered a need? People suffer plenty due to polluted air. Thus, if the people do not have clean unpolluted air, then they will encounter some harm. In this sense, clean, unpolluted air is a need. Could a citizen go and buy clean air? Is this a kind of need that can be satisfied by individuals just for themselves? Clean air is a kind of need that cannot be bought by individuals as per their whims and fancies. Either they have an environment which has clean air or they don't. When faced with a situation where their air is polluted, these citizens can collectively resolve to have clean air, find the causes of pollution and collectively go about eliminating these pollutants. The most effective solution to this problem is for their society to collect taxes and use that money to find and eliminate sources of air pollution. This is a kind of need that only society can satisfy.
There are many other things that many of us may consider as needs, and a lesser proportion of the population may consider some of these as important needs. If we want to make our society a Utopia, then in the matter of "what are the important needs of citizens?", we must consider the opinion of all citizens. Better still, we need a way for all citizens to provide their input in collectively deciding their most important needs.
Needs and Wants of the Society
Just like individuals have needs, the entire society also has needs. Here are some examples of society's needs.
We routinely encounter hurricanes, tornadoes, forest fires, floods and many other kinds of natural phenomena. When some people get impacted by such phenomena, these people need urgent assistance. When numerous people get impacted by such natural phenomena, then providing these people urgent help becomes a need of the society. Society fulfills Urgent Help needs by pre-allocating some resources in anticipation of some such calamity based on previous statistics of such events. Sometimes, unanticipated and harmful natural phenomena surface, society deals with them on a case-by-case basis. Usually society does not just sit back and do nothing about these situations. Society allocates additional resources and mitigates the harm caused by these unanticipated situations.
People live in villages, towns and cities. We attempt to make our lives as comfortable as we can. We live in close to each other as there are advantages in doing so. All this is possible because we take care of the essential needs to make this kind of life happen. For example, we ensure that wild animals do not form habits of routinely visiting towns and cities. We arrange for clean drinking water for our towns and cities. We build and maintain roads so that people can travel and transport goods. There are many other things that we do to make our current way of life possible. We do this not as individuals, but as a society. We do it because we need to do it in order to have our current way of life. The kinds of activities mentioned above are the "essential needs" of society. Society collects taxes, sets up infrastructure to fulfill these needs, and also maintains such infrastructure.
Then there are things that are not absolutely necessary for survival, but if available would improve our basic quality of life. For example, flu vaccinations prevent people from getting sick and infecting others and hence improves our basic quality of life. In this sense, a flu vaccine is considered desirable because without it, we would have inconveniences ranging from some individuals getting sick to worldwide pandemics. It is entirely possible that a majority of people may consider the flu vaccine essential. Another example is energy efficient devices. Without energy efficient devices, we still can function, but we would be expending more energy on these devices and hence waste it and hence deny ourselves the opportunity to use it for better purposes and that lost opportunity would lower our basic quality of life. Society mostly deals with the desirable things either by mandating them (as in the case of vaccines for some diseases) or by encouraging them (as in the case of providing rebates for clean-energy devices and energy efficient devices).
Just like people have wants, a society also has wants. For example, a society may want to achieve things like landing humans on the moon, landing a spacecraft on the far side of the moon, owning the podium at the Olympic Games, setting up giant telescopes to seek knowledge about the origins of the universe, setting up a colony on Mars, mining asteroids and comets, etc. When a sufficiently large number of citizens provide their backing to such wants, society can commit some amount of wealth in pursuing such wants, achieving them and then enjoying the feeling of collective social pride from such achievements.
Satisfying Needs and Wants
When society has needs that have not yet been satisfied, it merely has to accept that there are some unsatisfied needs, resolve to satisfy those needs, collect taxes and commit resources to fulfilling those needs. A society is usually in a position to allocate resources to newer needs.
When society wants something, society spends money on such wants, of course it does so by collecting taxes and allocating money for those wants.
Society can even "print money". This can be done both physically and digitally.
Thus, society has the resources to satisfy its needs and wants. However, for an individual, that is not necessarily the case.
For individuals, in order to satisfy their own needs and wants, those individuals must become independent and self-sufficient. If citizens are independent and self-sufficient, then they can satisfy their needs and wants commensurate with their capabilities. Such citizens, either, will have the capability to directly satisfy their needs and wants, or they can offer their knowledge and skills and earn some money and use that money to satisfy their needs and wants. Only a very few citizens are rich enough that they do not have to depend on the prior two methods.
The process of gaining independence and self-sufficiency takes a considerable amount of time and there could be setbacks in that process and while this process is going on the individual still has his or her current needs to be satisfied.
When an individual has a need, an essential need, that is beyond the individual's normal capability to satisfy, someone needs to provide help to that individual. If a society starts placing the responsibility of helping individual citizens on other individual citizens, then it means that the entire society is saying "we are not responsible for individual citizen's well-being".
In such a society, what choice does such an individual have? The choices are: borrow, beg or steal. When the choices are explored in that order, the citizen is trying to be law-abiding, but the citizen bears the cost of being law-abiding. In borrowing, the citizen's financial situation will get worse. In begging, the citizen's pride takes a beating. When both these choices fail to obtain help, the citizen is left with no other choice but to steal. Thus, the society's unwillingness to provide help, in unfortunate situations, leads to crime.
There is one more worse case than a citizen stealing. What is a citizen supposed to do if the citizen can neither borrow, beg nor steal? Such situations can happen when either the citizen is incapable or unwilling to explore getting help in satisfying their own need by using one of the three choices. Such citizens will suffer whatever suffering arises due to an essential need not getting satisfied.
Society's unwillingness to help citizens in need of help for procuring their essential needs, leads to crime or to suffering. An ideal society will find both these possible outcomes unacceptable. A society striving to become an ideal society will also recognize that these outcomes are unacceptable.
Thus, ideal societies or societies striving to be an ideal society will help their citizens in satisfying their essential needs.
Money, a proxy for wealth, is our primary mechanism for satisfying our needs and wants. Individual citizens can offer their time, money and skills and in return get some money. Individual citizens can get products and services in exchange for their money.
Currently, there is a vast disparity in the distribution of wealth. By some estimates, the richest 20% of people own over 70% of the wealth, the poorest 20% own about 2% of the wealth, and the remaining 28% of wealth is owned by the remaining 60% of people. The richest 20% of people are richer than everyone else combined! When we consider the average amount of wealth per-person, the total number of people who have wealth at or below the average wealth is far more than 50% and that is because the richest 20% are so much richer than the rest of the population. Because of this wealth disparity, currently many people are unable to satisfy their needs because they do not have the resources to satisfy them.
When the concepts, ideas, principles and systems mentioned in the chapters on Wealth Redistribution, Wealth Based Taxes, Fiscal Policy, Monetary Policy and Foreign Trade are implemented, then the enormous wealth disparity that we can easily observe today will vanish. It will still exist, but it will not be easily observable.
Even when our society reaches a state of well-being that is so great that we are willing to call our society a Utopia, there will still be rich people and there will still be poor people. The wealth disparity in Utopia will be much lower than current levels, but everyone will not have the same amount of wealth. This is because we have freedom to pursue whatever we want to do with our life, our time, our money, our talents and our skills. Some people will have the advantage of better talents, skills and ability to pick the better choices. Others lack at least some of these advantages. Because of these relative advantages and disadvantages, some people will get rich and others will become poor. The most unfortunate people will be very poor. Even in Utopia, some people becoming very poor is unavoidable.
Even in an ideal society, a citizen may need help; even after considering the effects of the wealth redistribution, wealth-based taxes, etc. So, the situation that society needs to help its citizens is not just applicable to current societies; it is applicable to ideal societies as well.
Let's discuss the priorities.
Society can have wants and can go about fulfilling them by merely raising taxes. A single individual does not have such luxuries. If we would like our society to have wants and commit resources towards fulfilling them, then even before that, society must think about and provide for the needs of all its citizens in an equitable way. It is contrary to the idea of Utopia for the society to seek social wants and yet ignore the needs of those individuals who do not have plenty of wealth. It is a social duty to take care of those who have limited capacity to take care of themselves.
Once the needs of the society and all its individuals are taken care of, society can prioritize the wants of the society.
Considering the distinction between needs and wants, society may not want to be held responsible for the wants of individuals. However, if society puts in the appropriate effort in making citizens independent and self-sufficient and succeeds at this task, then satisfying an individual's wants can be easily done by the individual and society need not take any responsibility for it.
A side note: A society can also strive to inculcate the right attitude in its citizens toward those wants that cannot be satisfied so that such unsatisfied "wants" do not cause excessive disappointment. We won't be discussing this aspect.
While all the high-importance needs of all citizens are not being satisfied, society should not attempt to address the wants of individual citizens.
What is society's role in a citizen becoming independent and self-sufficient?
A society can take care of its needs and wants by means of collecting taxes. This is true even today. In order for an individual to be able to satisfy his or her needs, that individual needs to become independent and self-sufficient.
When citizens become independent and self-sufficient, they can definitely take care of their own needs. That is, they will have enough wealth to take care of their own needs, and they would no longer need assistance from anyone. An ideal society expects every independent and self-sufficient citizen to take care of all his or her normal needs.
Even in an ideal society, different individuals could be in different stages of being independent and self-sufficient. Being poor is a clear indicator that the individual has challenges in being independent and self-sufficient. Being a child is another indicator that the person is not yet independent and self-sufficient.
We have already discussed that when citizens need help in procuring essential needs, an ideal society provides adequate help.
If society does not help its citizens become independent and self-sufficient, then the society will either have to help these citizens for their entire life or the society will just not care about giving them help. Both these outcomes are totally unacceptable from a Utopian perspective.
The key idea is that if society helps its citizens become independent and self-sufficient, then the citizens can take care of themselves and won't need society's help in satisfying their own needs and wants.
Thus, a ideal society considers itself responsible for helping citizens become independent and self-sufficient. An ideal society is willing to do whatever it takes to help its citizens in becoming independent and self-sufficient. An ideal society also is willing to remove a reasonable amount of monetary impediments that are preventing citizens from being independent and self-sufficient.
An ideal society or a society striving to become an ideal society realizes that making every citizen independent and self-sufficient is a need of the society. Hence, making every citizen independent and self-sufficient is a social responsibility.
Principles of Giving Help in Satisfying Needs
The previous chapter introduced the concept of independent and self-sufficient citizens. Based on our "fairness ideals", we would like to have the freedom to seek profit in our activities of creating products and services. We would like to have a better quality of life for ourselves to the best of our ability. We would like all citizens to be independent and self-sufficient so that they all can have a good life. Such citizens should be considered to be fully capable of satisfying all their normal needs.
Even for such independent and self-sufficient citizens, there can arise an abnormally large need and such citizens may need help. We should not hesitate in giving help when needed to those who previously appeared to be independent and self-sufficient.
Based on our "humanitarian ideals", we would not like a human to be denied something that we consider essential just because that human does not have enough money to procure that essential. Not having enough money for an essential is a sign that the individual is not yet independent and self-sufficient. It is in society's best interest to ensure that essential needs get satisfied so that absence of essentials is not a hindrance in the citizen becoming independent and self-sufficient. Similarly, we would not like a human to be denied something that is considered urgent help just because that human does not have enough money to procure it.
In short, We would like to help those who cannot help themselves sufficiently. We would also like those who can help themselves to take care of themselves, so that we can use our resources to help those who need help.
There are several "practical aspects" that we also need to consider. If society provides for every need and want of every citizen, no one will have any motivation to do anything. Hence, society does not provide for the wants of any citizen. Similarly, society holds every citizen responsible for satisfying at least some of his or her needs. This needs to be quantified, and we will do it later. But there might be some citizens who may be severely lacking in their ability to provide their own essential needs, and society cannot shirk its own responsibility.
Society's main ability to give help is in terms of money that the society collects through taxes. When we are discussing "giving help", we are discussing giving monetary help.
Most non-monetary kinds of help can be thought of as a service that costs money in providing the service and the person availing that help is essentially availing a service by paying some money or availing it for no charge and society bears those costs or society pays part of the bill and the citizen pays the remaining. These are things like phone-call based help services that may translate to actual physical help.
There are some real non-monetary kinds of help that society can offer and no amount of money can take care of those specific needs and that kind of help should be given, but that kind of help is not the subject of this discussion. These are things like mandating wheelchair access to public places.
Society should not classify citizens into two categories: those needing some help and others needing no help. This would cause resentment among those that get classified as not needing help and hence do not get any help. This also implies that having multiple classification categories based on some arbitrary criteria is also not a good idea.
In those things that society provides help, society should provide lesser or greater help to all citizens on a gradual scale of their wealth. In this way, the fairness of the given help or assistance is not easily open for doubt.
Giving help to individuals should not be at the discretion of some other individual. No one should have discretionary authority to grant or deny monetary help to others. It should be based on simple criteria that a computer can implement.
The system that we set up should keep plenty of scope for individuals to make their own life better by their own efforts and at the same time provide them with a safety net that assures them that they will have help if and when needed, and that too without specifically "applying" for help.
The Next Few Chapters
Citizens take care of their needs and wants by paying for all the products and services using a variety of payment models.
In the next chapter, we will survey our "Current Payment Models" and evaluate their effectiveness in satisfying the needs of both the individual and society. We will find that there are deficiencies in our payment models, and none of these payment models satisfactorily fulfill the needs of those individuals that have very little wealth. Hence, citizens need a considerable amount of backing from society during times when they may have insufficient resources to satisfy their needs. We are not thinking about the society satisfying all the needs of such individuals, we are thinking of providing the right amount of assistance to those who need it and that too without discrimination and without needing someone to authorize such help.
In the chapter after next, we will look at the "Utopian Payment Model". The Utopian Payment Model aims to provide monetary help to those who need the help and in just the amount needed and in a way that is consistent with our humanitarian and fairness ideals and also considering all associated practical aspects. In short, certain kinds of needs qualify for help using the Utopian Payment Model. For these specific needs, the criteria that determines whether an individual needs help in satisfying those specific needs is the amount of wealth the individual possesses and the price of satisfying those needs. Implementation of the Utopian Payment Model will be using current technology.
In the three chapters after the chapter on the Utopian Payment Model, we will consider three different kinds of needs of individuals that society must help in satisfying if the individual is not fully capable of satisfying them. These kinds of needs are considered "essential needs". They are essential because if these needs are not satisfied, the ability of the individual to be independent and self-sufficient is greatly impaired. The primary aim of those three chapters is to present the reasons to substantiate the claim that those are indeed essential needs. The three essential needs are "Living Expenses", "Healthcare" and "Education". We will also consider how citizens should pay for these essential needs. In some cases, the Utopian Payment Model will be the best model to pay for those needs. In some cases, it may be the second-best model and in other cases one of our existing payment models may be appropriate.