Re: The lessons from our childhood have not been heeded.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/10/22/3045130.htm



By Leigh Sales

Updated Fri Oct 22, 2010 7:28am AEDT
Well-readhead: What is enough?

"What is enough?" It's a question that seems to be coming up a lot in public debate, particularly around issues of sustainability. (ABC News)

Remember all the things you learned at school: the periodic table and calculus and Egyptian pharaohs and dangling participles and the causes of the First World War.

Now think about what you learned at school that is actually useful in your everyday life today. Excluding obvious basics such as reading, writing and arithmetic, I'd nominate two things, neither of which I imagined would turn out to be so handy. The first is touch typing. The second is what the teacher announced in the opening class of Grade 11 economics: wants are unlimited but resources are limited.

It's something I think about all the time. For example, I like to imagine that if I had an iPad with The New Yorker application on it, I'd be perfectly happy for the rest of my life. Sadly though, I predict that soon after, there'd be a strong hankering for a stylish red leather pouch for said iPad. The wants/resources issue is not just about 'stuff' either. It equally applies to ambitions, relationships, work, food, everything.

When I recently tweeted the wants/resources maxim, I was surprised at how many people identified with it. It prompted others to write of economic concepts that had made lasting impressions because they offered life lessons not just economic ones: opportunity cost, the law of diminishing returns and marginal utility among them.

The idea that "wants are unlimited but resources are limited" leads to the thought, "What is enough?" It's a question that seems to be coming up a lot in public debate, particularly around issues of sustainability. Last week, the environmentalist David Suzuki appeared on Lateline.

"We're not asking the important question: how much is enough? Because with all of this profusion of stuff, there's certainly no correlation with the improvement in whether we're happy; whether it's helped the poorest people in our society," Suzuki argues.

Suzuki believes we focus too much on economic growth as the key mark of progress in society. Of course, the counter-argument is that economic growth has improved living standards all around the world and that human inventiveness could be the solution to issues such as over-population and resource shortages.

Wherever you stand on that question, it seems clear - particularly watching the current debate about the Murray-Darling Basin - that the relationship between wants and resources remains as intractable as ever.

Nonetheless, an iPad with The New Yorker app would be nice. Tweet