There is a good illustration of the relative nature of need and desire in the British household income statistics. In 1984 around 15 per cent of income was spent on food and 10 per cent on entertainment. Today those figures are reversed. Trying to work out what the difference was it seemed to me that you could put some of it down to cheaper food (ie increased agricultural productivity), but it might also be down to higher wages (in 1984 we were still in a big recession). As incomes increased the profile of people's consumption shifted to include a greater proportion of entertainment to food.
A good illustration of the way that, though relative, needs are given at any historical moment is illustrated by two TV programmes on the air here, Shipwrecked and Castaway 2000. Both involve dumping volunteers on an island to see if they can survive under their own resources, and filming them, one on the Scottish island of Taransay the other on the Pacific island of Aitutaki. In both cases, though the volunteers thought that they would like to live away from the creature comforts of civilisation, they had massive personal and emotional break-downs. The Channel 4 documentary got through, but the BBC one has been taken off the air because the volunteers all rebelled and left the island.
The definitive text on need and desire is of course 'Need and Desire in the Postmaterial Economy', by James Heartfield.
>> >JKSCHW at aol.com wrote:
>> >>Has it occurred to you that the only other bunch of academics other than the
>> >>pomists to talk about Desire are the neoclassical economists and rational
>> >>choice theorists?
>> To sum up, to think of Desire as a dialectical twin of Scarcity and to reject
>Desire as an abstraction is not the same as denying desireS. In fact, the
>emancipation of desireS depends upon the abolition of Desire, and this both Marx
>and Foucault understood very well.
>>
>> Yoshie
-- Jim heartfield