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The Relativity of Absolute Well-BeingA) How are people’s desires for and consumption of things dependent on what others have? We can best answer this question by considering how their desires for and consumption of things are not dependent on what others have. It is natural to think here in terms of basic needs or minimum requirements — conditions that must be met if a person is to lead a minimally decent life. A person’s need to consume some number of calories and nutrition, or to have clothing and shelter against the elements, exists independently of what other people have or do. Without food one dies; what other people do is unrelated.B) Even biological needs, however, are not wholly independent of context or circumstance; they may depend, in particular, in part on what other people do. In a society in which considerable physical effort is important — either because physical activity is socially valued or because scarcity requires strength or speed to acquire necessities — a greater caloric intake might be needed to function effectively or well.C) Whether all needs are partly relative to what others do, and thus in some cases to “ways of life”, is a question we need not answer here. Two points are worth noting, however. First, a great deal depends on how we specify or describe needs. Suppose, for example, we agree that people have a basic need for enough food to survive or thrive. Stated in this way, the need is absolute in the sense of remaining the same regardless of circumstances, including the behavior of others. But how much food is enough to survive or thrive will vary depending on the circumstances. Thus, although we can describe the need absolutely, its satisfaction may depend on relational facts. As Amartya Sen argues, the absolute satisfaction of some needs might depend on a person’s position relative to others.D) Second, some needs are much more relative than others. The need for air is quite nonrelative. Think, by contrast, of the ability to work, or, even more simply, to get around and do things (acquire food and the like) for oneself. In many contemporary communities, it is difficult to perform these tasks without private transportation. The need for a car is not “absolute” in the sense of existing no matter what context is. The economic system and the infrastructure (基础设施) could have evolved differently so that a car would not be an absolutely necessary item of modern life. A well-functioning system of public transportation creates and perpetuates demand: the larger and finer the net it casts (that is, the more places you can get to using it), the more people use it; the more people use it, the greater its economies of scale; the greater its economies of scale, the better and cheaper it gets. In such cases, people have purely economic and practical reasons for doing as others do.E) In many communities today, however, a car is a virtual necessity; indeed, for a suburban or rural family two cars are often required. A person’s desire for a car, then, although dependent on what other people have and do, need not be rooted in greed, envy, or the desire for status. Many items once thought of as high-tech luxuries — television, cable television, computers, online databases — become nearly essential in a technologically sophisticated society. Invention is the mother of necessity.F) Just how far the point illustrated by this example extends is a difficult question. The danger on one side is being led to say that the lack of a necessity relative to others in one’s society is the frustration of a basic or important need. On the other side, critics of contemporary Western culture — those who criticize “conspicuous consumption” and materialistic values — often pay insufficient attention to the significance of relative deprivation (缺失) for absolute well-being.G) Even when it would be an exaggeration to say that a particular item has moved from the status of luxury to necessity, new goods often become entrenched (牢固确立) in a society — become more like needs — in a subtle and interesting process. We can observe this transformation with many recent innovations: microwaves, answering machines, VCRs, electronic mail. When first introduced, such items may not appear valuable, at least to those not crazy about gadgets. Gradually — but really very quickly — even the skeptics start to notice the thing’s uses. For example, while the benefits to owners of answering machines were immediately apparent, some callers at first found the devices awkward or even insulting. Soon, however, even skeptical callers began to notice the advantages to themselves: not having to call back repeatedly when no one answered; avoiding unwanted and unnecessarily long conversations. Complaints about “talking to a machine” are rarely heard anymore.H) How is this phenomenon of the entrenchment of new products linked to the relational aspects of consumption? Acquisition of a product by many people can make it more necessary in an absolute sense, even if not always a “necessity”. In some cases — public versus private transportation — this is a question of infrastructure: where others take buses, there will be buses, available to all, and I will have less need for a car. In other cases, such as electronic mail and online databases, we have what economists call networking effects: one lacking the service is made worse off by being cut off from the flow of information. Even the answering machine can affect how people conduct business, so that those lacking them may both suffer disadvantages themselves and also inconvenience others. So, for example, where it is assumed that most people have answering machines, it might be reasonable to ask someone to make a dozen phone calls, on the assumption that messages can be left if no one answers. The person without an answering machine forces the messenger to work harder by calling repeatedly, and is more likely not to be reached at all. This may be more than an inconvenience: it may cost a businessperson his livelihood if the caller is a customer with alternative providers.1.The efficient operation of the public transportation system, for example, may make the need for a car not absolute.
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