One of the core ideas in my book The World After Capital is that we have sufficient physical capital in the world to meet everyone’s needs. To help establish this I provide a fairly detailed analysis of what our needs are. Now today’s post is about clothing. Some people would say that clothing is a need, but that’s a conceptual mistake. Clothing is not a need, rather it is a solution for two actual needs: temperature regulation and bodily integrity. When it gets too cold we use clothing to wa...

One of the core ideas in my book The World After Capital is that we have sufficient physical capital in the world to meet everyone’s needs. To help establish this I provide a fairly detailed analysis of what our needs are. Now today’s post is about clothing. Some people would say that clothing is a need, but that’s a conceptual mistake. Clothing is not a need, rather it is a solution for two actual needs: temperature regulation and bodily integrity. When it gets too cold we use clothing to wa...

NOTE: Today’s excerpt from World After Capital is the first subsection in the chapter on psychological freedom. It deals with freeing ourselves from wanting as a crucial part of exiting the Job Loop.Freedom from WantingWith the extraordinary success of capitalism built on the Job Loop, we have become deeply confused about work and consumption, seeing them today as integral goals of our lives instead of as means to an end. Working harder and consuming more allows the economy to grow, so that w...

NOTE: Today’s excerpt from World After Capital is the first subsection in the chapter on psychological freedom. It deals with freeing ourselves from wanting as a crucial part of exiting the Job Loop.Freedom from WantingWith the extraordinary success of capitalism built on the Job Loop, we have become deeply confused about work and consumption, seeing them today as integral goals of our lives instead of as means to an end. Working harder and consuming more allows the economy to grow, so that w...

NOTE: This is the last post for the foundations section from my book World After Capital. In it I propose a catalog of basic human needs. As set out earlier much of today’s confusion around scarcity results from our willful conflagration of needs and wants.NeedsThe definition of scarcity that I just introduced is based on the notion of needs. To argue that there is a shift in scarcity from capital to attention thus requires an agreed upon set of needs to show that we indeed have sufficient ca...

NOTE: This is the last post for the foundations section from my book World After Capital. In it I propose a catalog of basic human needs. As set out earlier much of today’s confusion around scarcity results from our willful conflagration of needs and wants.NeedsThe definition of scarcity that I just introduced is based on the notion of needs. To argue that there is a shift in scarcity from capital to attention thus requires an agreed upon set of needs to show that we indeed have sufficient ca...