Ecological Economics 28 (1999) 421 – 441

ANALYSIS

Consumption, sustainable welfare and human needs—with

reference to UK expenditure patterns between 1954 and 1994

Tim Jackson *, Nic Marks

Centre for En6ironmental Strategy, Uni6ersity of Surrey, Guildford, Surrey, GU2 5XH, UK

Received 25 September 1997; received in revised form 1 July 1998; accepted 9 September 1998

Abstract

This paper explores the complex relationship between economic consumption and human welfare (or well-being).
Conventional economics suggests that increasing levels of economic consumption lead to increasing levels of
well-being. However, this view has been criticised on both environmental and social grounds. On the one hand, the
material impacts of increasing consumption are environmentally unsustainable. On the other hand, material
consumption can conflict with crucial social and psychological components of human welfare. This paper develops a
perspective on human welfare which is based on Max-Neef’s characterisation of human needs. It discusses the
implications of this alternative perspective for the conventional viewpoint and illustrates the importance of it with
reference to patterns of consumer expenditure in the UK over the last 40 years. The authors suggest that — from this
perspective—modern societies may be seriously adrift in their pursuit of human well-being. However, they also point
out that addressing this situation provides far more opportunity for ecologically-sustainable development than is
generally recognised. © 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Consumption; Sustainability; Human needs; Well-being; Economic welfare

1. Introduction Product (GNP) (Fig. 1). It would be conventional

Real consumer expenditure has more than dou-
bled in the UK in the last 4 or 5 decades, reflect-
ing a similar growth in the Gross National
* Corresponding author. E-mail: t.jackson@surrey.ac.uk
to interpret this kind of economic success as an
indication that people are considerably better off
today than they were 40 or 50 years ago. Better
nutrition, healthier lives, improved longevity,
greater adult literacy, lower infant mortality,
more mobility, an abundance of labour-saving
devices and improved recreational and leisure fa-

0921-8009/99/$ - see front matter © 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.
PII: S 0 9 2 1 - 8 0 0 9 ( 9 8 ) 0 0 1 0 8 - 6
422 T. Jackson, N. Marks / Ecological Economics 28 (1999) 421–441
cilities are amongst the many benefits which
economic growth is deemed to have delivered
and is expected to go on delivering. In short,
the growing wealth of the nation is supposed to
ensure the continuing welfare of its people.
However, as we discuss in the early part of
this paper, the popular equation of wealth with
well-being has come under scrutiny over the
years from a number of different quarters and
for a number of different reasons. The funda-
mental question raised by these critiques is
whether conventional development paths — char-
acterised by increasing economic consumption —
are capable of increasing or even maintaining
human well-being in the long term.
In this paper, we address this question with
specific reference to actual consumption patterns
in the UK over the last 4 decades. In contrast
to the conventional characterisation of economic
welfare, we adopt a conception of well-being in
which human development is characterised in
terms of fundamental human needs. Our empiri-
cal analysis categorises personal consumption in
the UK between 1954 and 1994 in terms of the
attempted satisfaction of these underlying hu-
Fig. 1. Personal Consumer Expenditure and GNP in the UK 1950 – 1996.
man needs. The object of the analysis is to ask
whether (or to what extent) it is possible to cor-
relate increases in personal consumption in par-
ticular categories with increased satisfaction of
needs (and therefore increased well-being) in
those categories.
Although the empirical analysis should be re-
garded as illustrative, a number of important
conclusions follow from our discussion. Firstly,
we find that—in spite of its material nature —
much of the increase in consumer expenditure in
the last 4 decades can be construed as an at-
tempt to satisfy social and psychological (non-
material) needs rather than material needs such
as for food and shelter. Secondly, we find little
evidence to support the idea that increased con-
sumer expenditure in these ‘non-material’ cate-
gories leads to increased satisfaction of the
underlying needs. In fact, there is some evidence
to suggest that increased expenditure actually
hinders the satisfaction of the underlying needs
in certain categories. In the light of these find-
ings, we discuss the implications of this needs-
based approach for conceptions of sustainable
development.
 T. Jackson, N. Marks / Ecological Economics 28 (1999) 421–441
2. Does economic growth deliver increasing
welfare?
National economic performance is commonly
measured through macroeconomic indicators such
as the GNP. Conventional wisdom suggests that
rising GNP (economic growth) is a good thing.
When GNP falls, on the other hand, it is bad
news: businesses go bust, jobs get lost, homes are
repossessed, consumer spending falls, personal
savings may be reduced, public sector borrowing
and trade deficits rise and a government which
fails to respond appropriately is likely to find
itself under threat of losing office. It is for these
kinds of reasons that economic growth is a key
policy objective of practically every government
and almost every political party in the world. By
the same token, increased personal disposable in-
come becomes an almost ubiquitous social
objective.
Nevertheless, there are now long-standing cri-
tiques of conventional assumptions about eco-
nomic growth and human development (e.g.
Herber, 1963; Schumacher, 1974; Max-Neef,
1991), about the relationship between national
income and social equity (e.g. Kuznets, 1967;
Easterlin, 1974) and about the correlation of per-
sonal income with happiness (Mill, 1957; Fromm,
1976; Oswald, 1995). More recently, environmen-
tal concerns have motivated a further critique of
the conventional equation (Meadows et al., 1972,
1992, Daly, 1991, 1996; Daly and Cobb, 1989;
Jacobs, 1991). This critique has been enshrined in
the calls for and discussion of the concept of
sustainable development (WCED, 1987).
A detailed analysis of these arguments is be-
yond the scope of this paper, but useful overviews
of the critical literature and its relevance for eco-
logical economics are to be found elsewhere (e.g.
Dodds, 1997). The crucial question raised by these
critiques is whether or not there is any robust
correlation between national economic perfor-
mance—as measured by macroeconomic indica-
tors such as the GNP — and the level of well-being
enjoyed by members of society.
In a seminal paper, entitled ‘Is growth obso-
lete?’, Nordhaus and Tobin (1972) attempted to
answer this question by constructing a ‘measure
423
of economic welfare’ which adjusted the GNP to
account for some of the known omissions and
failings of GNP as a welfare measure. The results
of that exercise indicated that for the USA, be-
tween 1929 and 1965, economic welfare—as mea-
sured by the Nordhaus and Tobin index—
increased consistently, albeit at a slower rate of
growth than the growth in GNP. The authors
concluded from this analysis that growth was not
obsolete; that, on the contrary, it continued to
deliver increasing levels of welfare.
When Nordhaus re-examined the same question
from an environmental perspective 20 years later
in a paper entitled ‘Is growth sustainable?’ (Nord-
haus and Tobin, 1972), he discovered that his
(revised) measure of economic welfare had begun
to diverge more substantially from GNP in the
later years of the study. Nordhaus attributed this
increased divergence to ‘conventional sources like
declining productivity growth and dwindling sav-
ing’ rather than to the unsustainable use of natu-
ral resources. But a number of other authors were
coming to rather different conclusions.
The Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare
(ISEW) was first developed for the United States
by Daly and Cobb (1989) and subsequently re-
vised by Cobb and Cobb (1994). The index ad-
justs personal consumer expenditure to account
for a variety of social and environmental factors
and provides a picture of the trend in sustainable
economic welfare which differs markedly from the
trend in GNP. While GNP in the US grew sub-
stantially over the period examined (1950–1988),
the ISEW began to stabilise and even decline from
about the mid 1970s onwards. The basic method-
ology of the ISEW has subsequently applied to a
number of other countries including Germany
(Diefenbacher, 1994), the UK (Jackson and
Marks, 1994; Jackson et al., 1997), Austria (Ober-
mayr et al., 1997), The Netherlands (Rosenberg
and Oegema, 1995), Sweden (Jackson and
Stymne, 1996) and Chile (Castaneda, 1997). The
UK index is illustrated in Fig. 2.
Each of these studies presents a similar picture.
In particular, they each suggest that sustainable
economic welfare grew more or less in line with
GNP until about the mid-1970s or early 1980s;
but that it has since stabilised or declined, in spite
424 T. Jackson, N. Marks / Ecological Economics 28 (1999) 421–441
Fig. 2. Per capita ISEW vs. GNP in the UK: 1950 – 1996.
of the continued growth in GNP. The reasons for
this divergence are complex and differ slightly
from country to country. Amongst the principal
factors in the UK, for example, are an increasing
inequality in the distribution of income and the
accumulation of ecological ‘debts’ from resource
depletion and environmental degradation. In
other words, these studies all tend to suggest that
economic growth, at least as presently conceived,
is far from able to ensure non-declining levels of
welfare.
These results have been cited by Max-Neef
(1995) as evidence of a kind of ‘threshold hypoth-
esis’ about the relationship between economic
growth and human welfare. He argues that eco-
nomic growth may indeed lead to increased hu-
man welfare up to a certain point, but that,
beyond that threshold, the environmental and
social costs of growth begin to make an impact,
effectively reducing welfare in spite of continued
economic development. This thesis begs a number
of crucial questions about the complex interac-
tions between the economic system, human wel-
fare and the environment. The technological
system of the economy delivers economic ‘goods’
to human society with the aim of providing for
human needs. In the process, however, it appears
to impose three kinds of economic ‘bads’ which
ultimately tend to obscure the main aim of im-
proving welfare. Firstly, it depends heavily on the
depletion of natural resources. Secondly, it inflicts
different kinds of damage (some long term and
irreversible) on the natural environment. Thirdly,
it incurs a variety of social and human costs. The
suggestion here is clearly that economic develop-
ment—at least as witnessed in conventional de-
velopment—has in some sense become
‘misaligned’ with the best interests of delivering
human welfare. What is the nature of this mis-
alignment? How has it occurred? How can it be
corrected?
3. Consumption and welfare
At the heart of these questions lies the issue of
material consumption. In the conventional pic-
ture, increasing economic consumption is the
means of ensuring increasing welfare. Conven-
tionally at least, economic consumption has essen-
 T. Jackson, N. Marks / Ecological Economics 28 (1999) 421–441
tially been synonymous with material consump-
tion. Western economies have developed on the
back of rapid increases in the throughput of mate-
rial commodities. These commodities have relied
on the increased utilisation (and depletion) of
natural resources; and they have led to an escalat-
ing burden of material emissions from the eco-
nomic system into the environment. The material
implications of economic consumption therefore
lead directly to the first two of the three economic
‘bads’ mentioned above: resource depletion and
environmental degradation.
There is of course a wide range of broadly
technological responses to this situation (Jackson,
1993, 1996). For instance, the concept of eco-
nomic de-materialisation has emerged in recent
environmental literature as one of the principle
technological avenues for achieving sustainable
development (Schmidt-Bleek, 1993; Hinterberger
et al., 1994). The idea is essentially that improve-
ments in technological efficiency can reduce the
material intensity of economic growth and
thereby reduce its environmental impact. It has
been argued that such reductions in material in-
tensity are absolutely vital if humanity is to hope
for sustainable development. For instance, the
Carnoules declaration of the Factor Ten Club has
called for concerted international action towards
a 10-fold reduction in material intensity per unit
of services delivered by the economic system (Fac-
tor Ten Club, 1994; von Weizsacker et al., 1997).
But technological measures offer at best partial
solutions to the problematique which we have
highlighted. In the first instance, there are some
clear physical limitations to technological effi-
ciency improvement (Jackson et al., 1993). Per-
haps more importantly, such solutions fail to
address the final ambivalent aspect of conven-
tional development— its problematic relationship
with human and social welfare.
4. Well-being as needs-satisfaction
The perspective which we develop in this paper
starts from the assumption that human well-being
is related to the satisfaction of human needs. The
welfare of an individual may be said to be high
425
when that person’s needs are largely satisfied.
Collective welfare is high when the needs of the
population generally are satisfied. Conversely, in-
dividual or collective welfare is low when many
such needs remain unsatisfied. There is a sense in
which this assumption is tautological. It is almost
a matter of definition that in order to be well, a
human being requires certain things: food, water,
shelter, protection from disease and so on.
There is a sense in which this assumption also
underlies the conventional view of economic de-
velopment. But there is one small but crucial
difference between the view we are espousing and
the conventional view: neo-classical economics is
almost wilfully silent on the question of human
needs, choosing instead to cash out human wel-
fare in terms of preferences, reflected in monetary
terms in the market. In economics, as Allen (1982)
points out, ‘‘‘need’ is a non-word. Economics can
say much which is useful about desires, prefer-
ences and demands…. But the assertion of abso-
lute economic need—in contrast to desire,
preference and demand—is nonsense’’. Some
economists have gone even further to suggest that
‘needs turn out to be mere wants when we inspect
them closely…. Do we need water?’ Heyne (1983)
asks. ‘‘No. The best way to turn a drought into a
calamity is to pretend that water is a need’’.
Conventionally then, economics translates all
needs as subjective desires or preferences. The
satisfaction of these individualistic preferences, it
is argued, is best achieved through the mechanism
of consumer choice in open markets. This power-
ful equation is precisely what allows the neo-clas-
sical economist to equate increased economic
consumption with increased welfare. But it stands,
if it stands at all, only in the face of fierce
opposition (e.g. Lutz and Lux, 1988; Sagoff, 1989)
and it would be fair to say that there are a
number of reasons to dismiss the equation. In the
first place, it does not help us to understand the
failure of conventional development consistently
to deliver even freedom from material poverty, let
alone to ensure environmental quality or improve
social welfare. Equally, there are certain kinds of
entities—peace, tranquillity, freedom, creativity,
friendship, for example—which are not traded
and probably not tradable on the market. It
426 T. Jackson, N. Marks / Ecological Economics 28 (1999) 421–441
would surely be short-sighted to forego the possi-
bility that some of these entities might be the
object of human need.
In fact, as Durning (1992) points out in How
much is enough?, the philosophical and psycholog-
ical basis of the neo-classical economic equa-
tion —although imbedded deeply in the modern
world-view—is relatively recent and relatively
narrow. A similar argument was made by Fromm
(1976) in To ha6e or to be?. He identifies two main
psychological premises on which the modern eco-
nomic system is built:
1. That the aim of life is happiness, that is maxi-
mum pleasure, defined as the satisfaction of
any desire or subjective need a person may feel
(radical hedonism)
2. That egotism, selfishness and greed, as the
system needs to generate them in order to
function, lead to harmony and peace
Fromm admits that radical hedonism has been
practised throughout history, most particularly by
the richest proportion of the population, but
points out that, prior to the seventeenth century,
with only one exception in the philosophy of
Aristippus (a pupil of Socrates in the fourth cen-
tury BC), radical hedonism ‘was never the theory
of well-being expressed by the great Masters of
Living in China, India, the Near East and
Europe’.
Fig. 3. Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs.
By contrast, he argues that there is an essential
distinction—present in the writings of all the
great teachers and philosophers concerned with
humankind’s optimal well-being—between ‘needs
(desires) which are only subjectively felt and
whose satisfaction leads to momentary pleasure’
and ‘objectively valid needs’ which are ‘rooted in
human nature and whose realisation is conducive
to human growth’. This distinction raises two
important questions. Firstly, what are these ‘ob-
jectively valid’ needs? Secondly, what is the rela-
tionship between these objective needs to the
potentially infinite individual desires and prefer-
ences expressed through the market. The remain-
der of this paper attempts to address precisely
these questions.
5. Needs and satisfiers
Perhaps the best known recent work on human
needs is that of Maslow whose early characterisa-
tion (Maslow, 1954) postulated a hierarchical
pyramid of human needs stretching from basic
physical needs at the bottom to spiritual or tran-
scendental needs at the top (Fig. 3). The hierarchi-
cal nature of needs has a long historical
pedigree—Plato, for instance, declared that ‘‘the
first and chief of our needs is the provision of
food for the existence of life’’—and there is a
 T. Jackson, N. Marks / Ecological Economics 28 (1999) 421–441
Fig. 4. Max-Neef’s matrix of human needs.
sense in which that hierarchy is tautological. If the
need for food is not met, the organism dies and
the satisfaction of any other kind of needs is then
irrelevant. At the same time, there are some po-
tential difficulties with this hierarchical view. It
seems to suggest, for example, that personal de-
velopment is dependent on reaching a certain level
of material wealth and there is a wealth of evi-
dence against this. For example, individuals have
been known to compromise even their most basic
survival needs to the satisfaction of moral, psy-
chological or spiritual needs. So, for example, the
taboo against eating human flesh has often pre-
vented people from taking measures for their own
survival; the desire to fulfil a certain visual stereo-
type has led many people to starve themselves,
sometimes literally to death; and Salaman (1949)
describes how Neapolitans in the eighteenth cen-
tury refused to touch a cargo of potatoes which
was sent there to relieve a desperate famine simply
because they had never seen potatoes before. In
his later writings, Maslow revised the hierarchy to
place two different sets of needs on a more or less
equal footing, reflecting what he saw as a duality
in human nature (Maslow, 1968).
The work on fundamental or objective human
needs has been developed more recently by a
number of other authors (Doyal and Gough,
1991; Max-Neef, 1991). The particular characteri-
427
sation which we want to use in this paper is taken
from Max-Neef’s work. The basis of that work
was an international collaborative project on ‘hu-
man-scale development’ hosted by the Dag Ham-
marskjöld Centre in Sweden. One of the aims of
that project was to construct a needs theory for
development. Such a theory required at least a
provisional taxonomy of needs and Max-Neef
proposed a ‘matrix of needs’ as shown in Fig. 4.
There are clearly some resonances between
Max-Neef’s ‘axiological’ categories—subsistence,
protection, affection and so on—and Maslow’s
categorisation. In particular, the needs of subsis-
tence and protection correspond closely with
Maslow’s ‘material needs’, whilst participation
and affection, for example, are closely linked to
belongingness needs. Although some of Maslow’s
‘growth needs’ appear to be absent in Fig. 4,
Max-Neef has suggested a tenth need for tran-
scendence which bears some of these characteris-
tics.
The second dimension of the matrix reflects the
fact that different existential modes are required
in the satisfaction of needs. The ‘being’ category
represents the personal or collective attributes
which might be required in the satisfaction of a
given need; the ‘having’ category refers to the
mechanisms or tools (including institutions and
norms as well as material things) which might be
428 T. Jackson, N. Marks / Ecological Economics 28 (1999) 421–441
required; ‘doing’ registers personal or collective
actions necessary for the satisfaction of a need;
and the term ‘interacting’ was chosen to reflect
exigencies relating to milieu and location (Max-
Neef, 1991).
There are interesting — although not altogether
straightforward —parallels between Max-Neef’s
existential distinctions and Fromm’s earlier cri-
tique. Whereas Fromm has suggested that modern
society is characterised by a destructive transition
away from ‘being’ towards ‘having’, the Max-
Neef framework suggests that material consump-
tion is linked to existential needs for both ‘having’
(possessing material things) and ‘doing’ (con-
sumption as a social activity). Since human needs,
under this framework, are generally traded off
between different existential and axiological cate-
gories, conspicuous or excessive consumption
could indicate deficiencies in the existential needs
for ‘being’. However, it is beyond the scope of this
paper to delve into this question in detail.
Perhaps the most critical aspect of the needs
theory which the project attempted to develop
was the importance given to the distinction be-
tween needs and satisfiers. Needs are conceived
dualistically as deprivation on the one hand and
potential on the other. A need is a deprivation in
the sense of something being lacking; it is a
potential to the extent that it may also serve to
motivate or mobilise the subject. Satisfiers, by
contrast, represent different forms of being, hav-
ing, doing and interacting, which contribute to the
‘actualisation’ of these deprivations or potentials.
To take some concrete examples: food and the
system which provides for the distribution of
food, is not in itself a need; rather it is a satisfier
of the need for subsistence. Likewise, education is
a satisfier of the need for understanding. Breast
feeding is simultaneously a satisfier of the infant’s
need for subsistence, affection, participation and
identity—and the mother’s need for creation, par-
ticipation, identity and affection. Medicine is a
satisfier of the need for protection. Democracy is
a satisfier of the need for participation. Sport can
be a satisfier of the needs for idleness, participa-
tion, identity.
Whereas needs are ‘finite, few and classifiable’
as indicated in Fig. 4, satisfiers are (generally
speaking) culturally determined and numerous (if
not infinite) in variety. If we think of the matrix
shown in Fig. 4 as a means of identifying the way
in which needs can be satisfied, then the number
of needs is specified by the number of spaces in
the matrix. But the number of satisfiers is as
numerous as the number of things which could fill
the spaces of the matrix. So, for example, breast
feeding is not the only way of ensuring that the
subsistence needs of the infant are met. Formal
education is not the only way of attempting to
meet the need for understanding. There is a vari-
ety of different kinds of food which might con-
tribute to satisfaction of the need for subsistence.
Different kinds of health systems could aid the
protection need.
From the point of view of such a framework,
what varies over time and across cultures is not
the set of needs (i.e. the set of spaces in the
matrix), but the set of ways in which a particular
culture at a particular time chooses to satisfy—or
attempt to satisfy—those needs. Cultural change,
in this perspective, is therefore the process of
dropping one particular satisfier or set of satisfiers
in favour of another. The underlying needs have
not changed, but the particular forms of being,
having, doing and interacting in which the culture
engages in order to satisfy those needs may vary
extensively.
The second important aspect of the Max-Neef
framework is the critical recognition that not all
the ways in which a particular culture or social
group attempts to satisfy the spectrum of needs
are equally successful. Thus the so-called ‘satisfi-
ers’ which would occupy the spaces in the needs-
satisfaction matrix of a particular group may in
reality be more or less successful at actually satis-
fying the related needs. In fact, Max-Neef distin-
guished five different kinds of satisfiers as follows:
“ destroyers or violators occupy the paradoxical
position of failing completely to satisfy the
need towards which they are directed;
“ pseudo-satisfiers generate a false sense of satis-
faction of the need;
“ inhibiting satisfiers satisfy one need to which
they are directed but tend to inhibit the satis-
faction of other needs;
 T. Jackson, N. Marks / Ecological Economics 28 (1999) 421–441
“ singular satisfiers manage to satisfy a single
category of need without affecting satisfaction
elsewhere; and
“ synergistic satisfiers manage simultaneously to
satisfy several different kinds of needs.
The fact that some of these ‘satisfiers’ do not
actually satisfy any needs at all is a potentially
confusing use of language and it would perhaps
be better to refer to ‘intended satisfiers’ rather
than satisfiers. The important point is, however,
that the classification of satisfiers in terms of
varying degrees of success allows us to take a
more critical, and indeed more constructive, ap-
proach to the cultural specificity of attempted
needs-satisfaction. This approach also allows for a
much more complex and multifaceted model of
development than is provided by the unidimen-
sional concept of economic growth. Using the
characterisation outlined above, the provision of
welfare can be represented as the process of satis-
fying underlying needs. Poverty, by contrast, can
be seen as the failure to satisfy needs. Interest-
ingly, this implies that there is no single concept
of poverty, defined simply in terms of low per
capita income. Instead, we open the possibility of
defining a multiplicity of poverties corresponding
to failures to satisfy different kinds of needs. The
converse of this is that we can no longer expect
economic growth necessarily to alleviate poverty,
since poverty is no longer defined in purely mone-
tary terms.
6. Economic goods and needs-satisfaction
What then is the relationship of economic
goods to this complex matrix of needs and satisfi-
ers? In a sense, this question underlies our entire
investigation in this paper. It is perhaps the most
complex question raised by the needs-based cri-
tique of conventional development and in our
opinion it is far from being answered. What we
present in the rest of this paper should therefore
be seen as a limited contribution towards an
understanding of the issues involved in answering
it. In this section, we attempt to demonstrate two
crucial points about this relationship: firstly that
consuming economic goods and satisfying human
429
needs cannot generally be seen as congruent; and
secondly that the relationship between the con-
sumption of an economic good and the satisfac-
tion of an underlying need may be highly complex
and is often non-linear.
Let us take first a relatively straightforward
example. Foodstuffs are economic goods which
can serve, in part, as a satisfiers of the needs for
subsistence (by ensuring survival) and protection
(by maintaining good health). However, the satis-
faction of the need for subsistence also requires
(at least) the ‘doing’ of certain actions such as
cooking, food preparation and so on and the
‘having’ of appropriate institutions for distribu-
tion, management, food hygiene and so forth.
Some of these additional requirements are also
provided by economic services. For instance, in a
developed economy, distribution is provided by
the transport and retail sectors. However, there
are also aspects of the subsistence need which
require input from outside the formal economy—
for instance the domestic labour required in the
preparation of meals, or the regulatory frame-
works required to ensure food hygiene.
So the first point to note is that the set of
economic goods and services is smaller than the
set of satisfiers. ‘Satisfiers’, according to Max-
Neef (1991), ‘may include, among other things,
forms of organisation, political structures, social
practices, subjective conditions, values and norms,
spaces, contexts, modes, types of behaviour and
attitudes…’. These satisfiers can give rise to differ-
ent economic goods depending on the cultural
and temporal context. But satisfiers and economic
goods are not congruent sets.
The next thing to point out is that, even in this
relatively straightforward example, there are a
number of complexities. Not all foodstuffs are
equally effective in the satisfaction of the need for
subsistence and protection. Nutritional value is
not equally distributed across the economic goods
of the food sector; and economic value does not
always accord closely with nutritional value.
Some foods fall into the category of being inhibit-
ing satisfiers and pseudosatisfiers of certain needs.
For example, excessive consumption of refined
sugars and carbohydrates can lead to chronic
hypoglycaemia (periodic bouts of low blood
sugar), tooth decay and heart disease.
430 T. Jackson, N. Marks / Ecological Economics 28 (1999) 421–441
Actually, even food which is ‘good for you’, is
only good for you up to a certain point. The
nutritional value of almost any food shows dimin-
ishing returns to scale. Malnourishment is still
widespread in the less developed countries; but in
the developed world, obesity (arising from over-
nourishment) is a growing problem contributing
to a range of medical problems from reduced
muscular fitness to heart disease. There is there-
fore no simple linear relationship between the
consumption of a particular economic good (such
as food) and the satisfaction of the underlying
need(s).
Sweet foods present us with another kind of
problem. They are not consumed exclusively for
reasons of subsistence. Fine and Leopold (1993)
point out that ‘‘(human) food is not fodder; hu-
mans do not feed…it is apparent that what is
consumed is not obviously determined by physio-
logical or biological needs. Psychological needs
also play a role’’. Sweet foods, in particular, are
well-known to be associated with the attempted
satisfaction of psychological needs. So, for exam-
ple, chocolate may be chosen as a satisfier of the
need for affection. It may eventually turn out to
be a pseudosatisfier of that need; but the point is
that what seems, on the surface, to be an eco-
nomic good related to the satisfaction of clear cut
subsistence need turns out on close examination
to bear a rather complex relationship to a variety
of needs, some of them psychological rather than
material in nature.
Clothing provides a further example of the
complexity of the relationship between economic
goods and needs-satisfaction. It is clear that cloth-
ing operates in part at least in the satisfaction of
the need for protection. Other kinds of satisfiers
are also required and some of these lie outside the
range of economic goods and services altogether.
But equally it is clear that clothing is implicated in
the attempted satisfaction of a number of other
needs, in particular, the needs for identity and
participation. Fine and Leopold (1993) demon-
strate how extensively the demand for clothing
has been driven by fashion, rather than by the
demand for protection from the elements.
They also highlight the role which advertising
has played, not just in the development of a
fashion-driven clothing industry, but in the mar-
keting of consumption goods generally. This role
has been in part, to associate the economic good
being offered for sale with a variety of desirable
outcomes for the purchaser. In technical terms,
the role of this kind of advertising is to establish,
in the consumer’s mind, a ‘use value’ for the
commodity in question. Moreover, this use value
may be established with reference to any number
of different kinds of needs, depending (in part)
upon the discretion and the imagination of the
advertiser. Williams (1980) accuses the advertiser
of associating a wide range of economic goods
with ‘desires to which it has no real reference’.
Thus, when you buy a particular commodity, you
do not simply buy a material object, ‘you buy
respect, discrimination, health, beauty, success,
power to control your environment’ and so forth.
It is questionable whether advertisers have a
completely free rein in this commodity-association
exercise. Rather, it is increasingly recognised that
the role of the advertiser is a symbiotic one,
drawing on established social or cultural associa-
tions, as much as creating them. Nevertheless, the
fundamental point is this: that, by association,
material commodities and economic goods in gen-
eral may be adopted as attempted satisfiers for a
wide range of underlying needs. This is clearly
demonstrated in the case of automobiles. In their
most functional capacity, cars provide mobility.
But mobility itself is neither a satisfier nor a need.
Rather it is a structural element within the at-
tempted satisfaction of many needs. Mobility al-
lows us to travel to work where we can earn a
living (subsistence) and to shop so that we can
buy (for example) food and clothing (subsistence
and protection). But use values for cars are now
well-established in relation to a wide variety of
other needs. Cars are associated in the prevailing
western culture (and increasingly in other cul-
tures) with social status (participation and iden-
tity), with sexual success (affection), with personal
power (identity), with recreation and leisure (par-
ticipation, idleness), with freedom and creativity.
These examples highlight some of the complex-
ity of the relationships between specific economic
goods and the matrix of needs-satisfaction. There
are several elements to this complexity. In the first
 T. Jackson, N. Marks / Ecological Economics 28 (1999) 421–441
place, it is clear that there is no simple one-to-one
relationship between economic goods and the un-
derlying fundamental needs. The satisfaction of
individual needs may typically involve a range of
economic goods and services. It is also likely to
involve some factors which lie outside the scope
of economic activity. Equally, individual eco-
nomic goods may satisfy (or be intended to sat-
isfy) several different underlying needs. The
particular choice of economic goods associated
with the intended satisfaction of underlying needs
is determined not just by the success or failure of
those goods in satisfying that need, but also by a
complex variety of factors including personal psy-
chology, cultural influence, industrial interest and
marketing strategy. In any particular culture, at
any one point in time, a variety of economic
goods will be engaged with differing degrees of
success in attempted satisfaction of the range of
underlying needs. Some of these commodities and
services may be successful in meeting the underly-
ing needs. Others may fail altogether.
These complexities obscure any straightforward
comparison of the two paradigms of develop-
ment —the one described in terms of economic
consumption and the other described in terms of
the satisfaction of needs. However, it is clear that
if one paradigm is to provide a critique for the
other, then it is precisely this relationship between
economic goods and needs-satisfaction which it is
necessary to address and ideally unravel. In the
following section, we have attempted to forge
some tentative links between changing patterns of
economic consumption over the last 40 years and
the satisfaction of particular categories of need.
7. Changes in personal consumer expenditure in
the UK: 1954–1994
The analysis presented in this paper attempts to
identify the trends in consumer expenditure over
the last 40 years. Ideally, the analysis should look
at both personal consumer expenditure and gov-
ernment expenditure. But for the moment we
restrict our attention to personal consumption as
represented by a dynamic consumption ‘vector’
with the following components:
431
“ food
“ housing
“ fuel
“ health
“ clothing
“ maintenance
“ household appliances (excl. TVs etc.)
“ communication
“ catering
“ books, newspapers and education
“ tobacco and alcohol
“ furniture and furnishings
“ recreation and entertainment
“ travel
“ other
As we have pointed out, there are no simple
one-to-one correspondences between economic
goods in this consumption vector and the underly-
ing fundamental needs. Nevertheless, we have or-
dered the consumption vector in such a way as to
reflect at least some of the order in which needs
are placed in the needs-vector of the previous
section. For instance, the first component (food)
relates most closely to the subsistence need. The
next five components (housing, fuel, health, cloth-
ing and maintenance) relate strongly to the pro-
tection need. Communication relates strongly to
affection and participation. Books, newspapers
and education relate to the understanding need.
Tobacco and alcohol relate to participation and
identity. Recreation and entertainment relate to
participation, idleness, creativity; perhaps also to
understanding; Travel—as we suggested in the
previous section—is related structurally to the
satisfaction of a very wide range of needs.
Changes in the consumption vector have been
mapped in 5-year intervals for the period from
1954 to 1994. The basis for this analysis is per
capita consumer expenditure—measured in real
1990 pounds sterling—identified from the UK
National Accounts (Table 4.8, various years) for
the period. The current expenditure figures have
been converted to 1990 pounds sterling using the
appropriate category price deflator. To the extent
that these deflators remove inflationary effects,
these expenditure figures can therefore be ex-
pected to relate directly to physical changes in
either quantity or quality in the goods consumed.
432 T. Jackson, N. Marks / Ecological Economics 28 (1999) 421–441

Fig. 5. Consumer expenditure by category: 1954 – 1994.

The results of this analysis are illustrated 1954 and the present day is therefore likely to be
graphically in Fig. 5. Percentage changes over the attributable partly to increased quality and vari-
period in each category are shown in Table 1. ety of the available foods and partly to an in-
The overall increase in consumer spending over crease in prepared foodstuffs, reducing the time
the 40-year period is just over 100%. In other
words, personal consumption has more than dou-
Table 1
bled in the 4 decades. But this increase is shared Changes in per capita Consumer Expenditure in the UK
rather unevenly across consumption categories. 1954–1994
The single biggest percentage increase (almost
400%) occurs in the category of recreation and Expenditure category % Increase
entertainment, closely followed by expenditures
Food 29
on domestic appliances (385%), communication Housing 78
(341%) and travel (293%). The smallest per capita Fuel 55
increases are those recorded for books, newspa- Health 162
pers and education (14%) and food (29%). The Clothing 224
Maintenance 140
largest absolute per capita increases have occurred Household Appliances 385
in travel, recreation and entertainment, housing Communication 341
costs and in clothing. Catering 75
The relatively low increase in expenditure on Books, newspapers and education 14
Tobacco and alcohol 33
food is to be expected. By 1954, the effects of
Furniture and furnishings 116
post-war rationing in Britain had more or less Recreation and entertainment 398
disappeared and the nation’s per capita food con- Travel 293
sumption had almost certainly reached a level at Other 78
which subsistence needs had been met. The rela- Total 103
tively small increase in food expenditure between
 T. Jackson, N. Marks / Ecological Economics 28 (1999) 421–441
Fig. 6. Consumer expenditure on clothing: 1954 – 1994.
spent in preparing foods in the home. Paradoxi-
cally, this trend may have increased available
leisure time (serving the need for idleness), but
reduced personal investment in culinary skills (with
potentially adverse effects on creativity needs).
Were it not for the rise of the fashion industry,
on which we have already remarked, one might
expect to see little increase in expenditure on
clothing. By 1954, the nation was certainly ade-
quately clothed in so far as meeting a protection
need was concerned. In fact, higher levels of
thermal comfort in the home might even have led
us to expect a decrease in clothing — if it were the
case that this kind of consumption related only to
the satisfaction of the protection need. In reality,
however (Fig. 6), expenditure on clothing has
increased by over 200% in real terms, a fact which
is attributable far more to the increased role of
clothing in relation to identity and participation
needs than its role in terms of protection. In
particular, the fashion-dominated world of wom-
en’s clothing accounts for the lion’s share of this
increase.
The fastest rising category of expenditure be-
433
tween 1954 and 1994 was expenditure on recre-
ation and entertainment which rose by almost
400% during the period. This overall increase hides
a wide variation between different categories as
Fig. 7 illustrates. The increase in expenditure on
sports and recreational goods was higher than the
average at around 580%, while the increases in
expenditure on recreational services and gambling
were significantly lower at 114 and 80%, respec-
tively. The increase in expenditure on durable
entertainment goods such as television, radio,
video and sound systems was a staggering 3500%
over the period. The biggest absolute increases in
expenditure were in the goods and durable goods
categories.
What is the relationship between these massive
expenditure increases and an increased satisfac-
tion of human needs? This is not an easy question
to answer. We suggested above that recreation
and entertainment might contribute (in principle)
to the satisfaction of a number of needs, in partic-
ular the need for participation, idleness and cre-
ation. But is it fair to equate the large increase in
expenditure in recreation and entertainment, and
434 T. Jackson, N. Marks / Ecological Economics 28 (1999) 421–441
indeed the extraordinary increase in expenditures in
durable goods, with an equivalent increase in
needs-satisfaction? If the critics of modern con-
sumer society are correct, then it is not. Even as
early as the 1960s Lewis Herber believed that ‘‘we
have reached a degree of anonymity, social atom-
isation and spiritual isolation that is virtually
unprecedented in human history’’ (Herber, 1963).
Social atomisation does not immediately suggest
increasing participation. Fromm (1976) argues that
modern entertainment forms foster alienation and
‘passivity’. The same theme is echoed in more recent
writings. In The Po6erty of Affluence Wachtel (1989)
argues that ‘the consumer way of life is deeply
flawed, both psychologically and ecologically’ and
points to increasing deprivation in the area of
participation, understanding and identity — some
of the needs which we might expect to have seen
increasingly satisfied if the expenditure in recreation
and entertainment were actually contributing to
needs-satisfaction. Both Elgin (1993) and Fine and
Leopold (1993) associate the rise of commercial
television, for example, less with an increase in
needs-satisfaction than with an increase in the
importance of advertising in driving consumption.
Fig. 7. Consumer expenditure on recreation and entertainment.
Fig. 8 illustrates the substantial increase (ap-
proaching 300%) in travel expenditure over the
last 4 decades. Again, the average increase hides
considerable disparity between different expendi-
ture categories. By far the most significant per-
centage increase (about 950%) and absolute
increase (around £690 per annum) occurs in the
expenditures on car travel. In stark contrast, rail
and bus expenditures have fallen over the period.
Air travel has increased massively in percentage
terms, although the average absolute increase is
moderate by comparison with the increase in car
travel expenditure. Interestingly, it is possible in
this case to correlate these increased expenditures
at least partially with increased mobility, mea-
sured by passenger-kilometres. In these terms,
mobility has increased by around 400% during the
period: we travel roughly five times as far in
a year as we did 40 years ago (NTS, various
years).
It was pointed out above, however, that mobil-
ity in itself is not a need. Rather, it operates
structurally in the attempted satisfaction of a
range of needs, including the need for subsistence
and protection, the needs for participation, affec-
 T. Jackson, N. Marks / Ecological Economics 28 (1999) 421–441
Fig. 8. Consumer expenditure on travel.
tion and freedom. We also remarked on the role
of the car in conferring status (identity), a sugges-
tion reinforced by the fact that the increase in
mobility is less than half the increase in related
expenditure: people buy cars not solely for func-
tional reasons.
Again, it is worth asking the question: does the
increase in expenditure correspond to an increase
in needs-satisfaction in these various areas? As-
suming, as we did above, that basic subsistence
and protection needs were already satisfied in
1954, it seems unlikely that we can correlate an
increase in expenditure with an increase in the
satisfaction of these needs. Mobility has now be-
come a structural requirement in the modern soci-
ety. People travel further to work and to shop
even for essentials. But these requirements corre-
spond at best to a maintenance of subsistence and
protection levels. If there were one area in which
we might look for better protection, it might
perhaps be health. Has increased mobility allowed
for a general improvement in health? Perhaps
some correlation with increased access to
medicines or medical services might be revealed.
On the other hand, the number of fatalities and
435
injuries from car accidents has increased (Jackson
and Marks, 1994) and the car is associated with
air pollution problems which seem to have had a
substantial deleterious effect on human health,
particularly in cities. On these grounds, it seems
improbable that we could match the increase in
expenditure on cars to an increase in subsistence
and protection needs-satisfaction.
Could the increase be related to an increase in
other categories of needs-satisfaction? Again, in
addressing this question, we are drawn towards
the importance of structural aspects. Families
tend to be more dispersed, partly for economic
reasons; local community is emphasised less, the
‘global village’ is emphasised more in modern
society. Thus, people generally tend to travel
more in order to address needs of participation
and affection. Unfortunately, it cannot be inferred
from this that there is increased satisfaction of the
participation and affection needs. Rather, the in-
creased mobility is a structural cost of attempting
to maintain levels of participation and affection.
Equally, the attempt to satisfy needs of identity
through the status value of cars seems doomed to
failure if the literature on the psychopathology of
436 T. Jackson, N. Marks / Ecological Economics 28 (1999) 421–441
consumption is to be believed. In The Joyless
Economy, Skitovsky (1976) highlights the addic-
tive nature of consumer behaviour. Hobbes had
already noted the pervasive anxiety of a society
characterised by unlimited materialist values.
Marx had commented on the ‘fetishism of com-
modities’. But this obsessive behaviour — like
most psychopathological addiction — does not
generate increasing returns in terms of needs – sat-
isfaction. It simply means running ever harder
and faster in order to stay in the same place
(Douglas and Isherwood, 1980). As Elgin (1993)
remarks: ‘‘when we equate our identity with that
which we consume…we become consumed by our
possessions’’.
In summary then, the increases in consumer
expenditure detailed in this section are not easy to
identify with specific increases in needs-satisfac-
tion. Where subsistence and protection needs are
concerned, these were largely already met in the
UK in 1954, so that increases in expenditure in
relation to them are mainly attributable to the
structural costs of continuing to meet such needs
in modern society. Similar structural costs might
also account for some of the increases in expendi-
tures related to the other needs categories. There
is little evidence for substantial increase in needs-
satisfaction in these other categories and consider-
able literature suggesting modern society is
increasingly suffering from varying degrees of
poverty in relation to them. Increasingly, evolu-
tionary psychologists are invoking a ‘mismatch
theory’ to account for the symptoms of these
poverties: ‘‘rates of depression have been doubling
every decade, suicide is the third most common
cause of death among young adults in North
America, 15% of Americans have had a clinical
anxiety disorder’’ (Wright, 1995). What is this
mismatch? From our perspective, it is the mis-
match between economic consumption and the
nature of human-needs satisfaction.
8. Material vs. non-material needs
Both Maslow (1954) and Max-Neef (1991)
characterise certain needs within their respective
frameworks as material needs. The material needs
are essentially the subsistence and protection
needs. The nomenclature acknowledges the fact
that the satisfaction of these needs inherently
requires material throughput. We could not sub-
sist without (material) foods. We could not pro-
tect ourselves without (material) clothing fabrics
and building materials. Of course, there may be
more and less materially-intensive ways of provid-
ing foods, clothing and shelter; indeed, much of
the focus of emerging environmental management
strategies (Jackson, 1993, 1996) is to identify these
less polluting forms of providing services. Never-
theless, satisfying these needs will always involve
certain minimum requirements for materials.
By contrast, we might refer to the remaining
needs as non-material needs. This designation is
perhaps an abuse of language to the extent that it
is satisfiers rather than needs which actually em-
body materiality. Nevertheless, it is convenient to
attribute the distinction to the needs themselves,
in the following sense: material needs are needs
which could not possibly be satisfied without a
minimum level of material throughput, the nature
of the needs is a requirement for certain material
inputs; non-material needs could, at least in prin-
ciple, be satisfied without any requirements for
material throughput over and above those needed
to satisfy the material needs. Participation, affec-
tion, understanding, idleness, creation and free-
dom relate more—as we have already seen—to
individual and social psychology than they do to
material things. They are far more about processes
(personal, social and cultural) than they are about
objects. There is, moreover, an impressive body of
opinion suggesting that materialism inhibits the
satisfaction of these non-material needs. It is pos-
sible, at least in principle, to conceive of address-
ing these needs without—or at least with
vanishingly small—material intervention.
In case it should be difficult from the western
perspective to conceive of this possibility, it is
worth pointing out that there are numerous exam-
ples of cultures in which this has been the case.
Woodburn (1992) characterises hunter–gatherer
societies as ‘immediate-return’ societies, in which
capital consists primarily of knowledge rather
than things. Veblen (1907) notes of the Shoshoni
Indians that ‘what was of vital concern…was the
 T. Jackson, N. Marks / Ecological Economics 28 (1999) 421–441
accumulated wisdom of the squaws, the technol-
ogy of their economic situation. The loss of the
basket, digging stick and mortar, simply as physi-
cal objects, would have signified little’. Interest-
ingly, such societies are ‘aggressively egalitarian’
and generally impose sanctions on the accumula-
tion of possessions and their transmission between
people. Nevertheless, or perhaps precisely because
of this, they are characterised by ‘social solidarity,
cohesion and group effort’ (Gowdy, 1994).
Clearly, modern societies do not generally oper-
ate in this fashion. The pattern of consumption in
the UK appears increasingly to implicate material
artefacts in the attempted satisfaction of non-ma-
terial needs. Some of the reasons for this are
historical. The industrial economy evolved pri-
marily as a system of provision of satisfiers for
subsistence and protection needs. The growth of
the economy proceeded largely via the expansion
of this network of trade in vital commodities to a
Fig. 9. Direct Consumer Expenditure on Material Needs, Non-Material Needs and Travel: 1954 – 1994.
437
wide range of other material products. The eco-
nomic success of the prevailing system has derived
from its ability to expand and create new markets
for new material products. But the relationship
between these new, mass-produced material prod-
ucts and the satisfaction of underlying human
needs is no longer clear: for the very reason that
the remaining needs are not really material needs.
The extent of this ‘mismatch’ between the con-
sumption of economic goods and the satisfaction
of non-material human needs is evident from our
examination of UK expenditure patterns.
How important is this mismatch? To what ex-
tent are consumers attempting to satisfy nonmate-
rial as opposed to material needs through their
expenditures. In Figs. 9 and 10 we have attempted
to answer this question by dividing the UK con-
sumption vector into two major categories: expen-
diture related to the satisfaction of material needs
(subsistence and protection) and expenditure re-
438 T. Jackson, N. Marks / Ecological Economics 28 (1999) 421–441
Fig. 10. Allocated Consumer Expenditure on Material Needs vs. Non-Material Needs: 1954 – 1994.
lated to the satisfaction of the remaining non-
material needs (affection, understanding, partici-
pation, idleness, creativity, identity and freedom).
Generally speaking we have taken expenditures
in food, clothing, housing, fuel and maintenance
as relating to material needs. However, on the
basis of the discussion in the previous section, we
consider increases in expenditure in the cate-
gories of food and clothing to relate to the at-
tempted satisfaction of nonmaterial needs and
have included these increases in the category of
non-material needs expenditure. Travel expendi-
tures are problematic. We have indicated that
these are in part related to structural costs in
meeting the spectrum of needs. In Fig. 9, we
have therefore treated travel as a separate cate-
gory of expenditure. But in Fig. 10 we have
made an attempt to allocate these travel expendi-
tures between the category of material and non-
material needs. This has been done on the basis
of data on reasons for travel, taken from the UK
National Travel Surveys.
It should be emphasised strongly here that
these graphs are purely illustrative and aside
from the tentative allocation of travel expendi-
tures between material and non-material cate-
gories in Fig. 10, they are nothing more than a
visual representation of conclusions about the re-
lationship between consumer expenditure and
underlying needs already drawn in the previous
section of this paper. Nevertheless, this pictorial
representation serves to illustrate some of the
important points about consumption expendi-
tures in the UK over the last 40 years.
In the first place, it is clear from both graphs
that the lion’s share of the increase in consumer
spending is related either to increases in the
structural costs associated with meeting needs in
the industrial society, or else to the attempted
satisfaction of non-material needs. In Fig. 10, the
 T. Jackson, N. Marks / Ecological Economics 28 (1999) 421–441
increase in expenditures related to material needs
satisfaction was 50%, whilst the increase related to
non-material needs satisfaction was 160%. A part
of the increase in expenditure related to material
needs was the increase related to travel — a struc-
tural component. Another part of the increase in
material needs expenditure is attributable to the
housing component and it is not clear that this
increase translates directly into increased satisfac-
tion of the protection need. Some at least of the
increase may be due to economic factors such as
scarcity or the changing structure of the housing
market. Generally speaking then, the UK popula-
tion is increasingly spending its disposable income
on the attempted satisfaction of non-material
needs. This conclusion is not surprising in an
economy in which basic subsistence and protec-
tion needs have long since been met.
9. Discussion
Two things are notable about this uneven split
between expenditure on material needs and expen-
diture on non-material needs. Firstly, in spite of
the fact that much of the expenditure increase
relates to non-material needs, it is nevertheless
dominated by expenditure on material goods and
therefore remains a materially-intensive form of
consumption. Secondly, in spite of the fact that
the major increase is in attempted satisfaction of
non-material needs, we cannot assume that there
is a corresponding increase in needs-satisfaction in
these categories.
In relation to the first of these two points, we
have already noted how the categories showing
major increase were dominated by even larger
increases in goods and durable goods (rather than
services). A comprehensive analysis of the re-
source implications and environmental impact of
consumption in the various categories would re-
quire an input–output analysis to map the mate-
rial demands of the production sectors onto the
consumption vector. This work is beyond the
scope of the present paper, although it is the
subject of ongoing research by the authors. Pre-
liminary work confirms that some of the fastest
growing sectors relating to non-material needs are
439
nonetheless amongst the most materials-intensive.
This result is confirmed by input–output analyses
carried out for Germany by Behrensmeier and
Bringezu (1995) and by Femı́a (1996) which high-
light in particular the material intensity of the
growing leisure sector.
In passing, it is perhaps worth pointing out that
this result suggests some caution in interpreting
the work of people like Inglehart (1990) who
argue that a substantial culture shift has taken
place in advanced industrial societies. Post-mate-
rialist attitudes are not yet being translated into
post material consumption patterns.
In relation to the second point, we have high-
lighted considerable support for a somewhat
stronger assertion about the relationship between
expenditure and needs-satisfaction. It is not just
that we cannot infer increased needs-satisfaction
from increased expenditure. Material consump-
tion may offer at best a pseudo-satisfaction of
non-material needs and at worst may actually
inhibit or violate the satisfaction of those needs.
Increased expenditure may imply reduced needs-
satisfaction in these non-material categories.
Two conclusions follow from this analysis—
one stark and one hopeful. The stark conclusion
is that modern society is seriously adrift in its
pursuit of human well-being. For reasons well-
known to philosophers for millennia, well-being
does not consist in the accumulation of material
possessions. Fromm (1976) writes that ‘the atti-
tude inherent in consumerism is that of swallow-
ing the whole world. The consumer is the eternal
suckling crying out for the bottle’. Philosophers
from before the time of the Bible ask: what profit
is there in swallowing the whole world, if you lose
your soul?
The hopeful conclusion rests in the scope for
improvement which this perspective offers. Envi-
ronmental imperatives—the demands to reduce
the material impact of human activities—are of-
ten portrayed and often perceived as constraining
and threatening of human welfare. In contrast,
the message of the analysis in this paper is that
the existing patterns of consumption constrain
and threaten human welfare. Reducing the mate-
rial profligacy of our lives will help the environ-
ment. It will also help us. Revisioning the way we
satisfy our non-material needs is not the bitter pill
440 T. Jackson, N. Marks / Ecological Economics 28 (1999) 421–441
of eco-fascism; it is the most obvious avenue for
renewing human development. Durning (1992)
writes:
In the final analysis, accepting and living by
sufficiency rather than excess offers a return to
what is, culturally speaking, the human home:
to the ancient order of family, community,
good work; to a reverence for skill, creativity
and creation; to a daily cadence slow enough to
let us watch the sunset and stroll by the water’s
edge; to communities worth spending a lifetime
in; and to local places pregnant with the memo-
ries of generations.
Acknowledgements
We are grateful for constructive critical inputs
to this paper from a number of friends, colleagues
and referees and in particular to Steve Dodds,
Michael Jacobs, Manfred Max-Neef, Richard
Parker, Inge Røpke and the participants of a
workshop on consumption held at Lancaster Uni-
versity in April 1997.
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