Satiation

“You only have to look around you at all the people who are dieting and jogging to realize that, with respect to some needs at least, a large part of the advanced countries' populations have not only reached but passed the point of satiety.” So noted economist Tibor Scitovsky in his essay “Growth in the Affluent Society” (1987/1995, 97).

Almost sixty years earlier, John Maynard Keynes in his essay “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” had envisioned a not-so-distant future society in which the economic problem, the struggle for subsistence and absolute needs, would be solved. The problem then, he stressed, would be to shed the old habits belonging to that struggle and to embrace “the new-found bounty of nature” (1931/1972, 328). Keynes anticipated that, with time and experience, this struggle too would be won, at which point future generations might cultivate the “art of life itself” rather than selling themselves for the “means of life” (328).

Karl Marx and so, too, John Stuart Mill had believed in similar future possibilities. In their imagined futures, technical progress would have made readily available all of humankind's basic needs, freeing workers from the mind- and character-destroying narrowness of tasks that Adam Smith had associated with division of labor. Instead, they would be free to pursue any and all things that moved them, attending, above all, to the development of the human spirit.

It is not difficult to agree with Tibor Scitovsky that this future has arrived. Yet the realm of true riches, comprising leisure and freedom to pursue the art of living, does not seem to have engaged most of us. How to explain this paradox?

One possibility lies in a set of wants noticed by Keynes but also economists before him, namely, wants that defeat satiety because they are unrelated to absolute physiological needs but rather to the relative wants of superiority and status. But why are these insatiable? The reason given by social critic Fred Hirsch was that, in the positional economy, a relative advantage gained by one comes at the expense of someone else. Competition for relative position thus becomes an unending social game where, as in an arms race, the stakes always increase and there is no final winner.

Nor are these the only insatiable wants. As Scitovsky reminded us, addictions and strong habits generally may become the source of never-to-be-satisfied desires. Once a habit has been formed, both the need to compensate for the loss of pleasure due to habituation and the need to avoid the pain of breaking the habit provide incentives to escalate consumption. According to this view, then, the economy continues to grow but only to feed wants that provide no lasting individual or social gain.

Still, one can argue that not all insatiable wants and desires have this self-defeating quality. There are some forms of consumption that, for their complexity, internal variety, and combinatory relations with other activities, are able endogenously to produce change and become a source of ever-new, sustained pleasure. Engaging in conversation and in the arts, reading a novel, listening to music, though also playing sports and facing intellectual challenges, are forms of consumption and experiences that Scitovsky called creative. They are not subject to satiety. They can stimulate demand and feed the growth of the economy without the welfare losses that habits and status competition bring with them.

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