Saturation Hypothesis

Description

Tim Parrique:

“Beyond a threshold, increased material consumption is not closely correlated with improvements in human progress.”

"This is called the saturation hypothesis (also the Easterlin Paradox or the wellbeing-consumption paradox), which is summarised elsewhere in Chapter 5: “vital dimensions of human well-being correlate with consumption, but only up to a threshold” (p.19). If you need to go somewhere and you suddenly get access to a bike, you’re happy. If you get a second bike, you’ll perhaps be happy still, but not as much as the first time. If you get a third bike, you won’t bother even using it because you already have two. If you get 10 more bikes, you’ll actually be annoyed because you won’t know where to put them. After a certain threshold (here of bikes), the wellbeing you derive from them will saturate. This individual commonsense we experience every day is also true for a country as a whole. Past a certain threshold of GDP per capita, further economic growth will not improve wellbeing.

This idea of a satiation threshold divides consumption in two kinds: one below the threshold that should then be increased, and one above that we can afford to decrease. If you’re malnourished, you’re under-consuming and you need to consume more to reach a sufficiency level; if you’re suffering from obesity, you’re likely to be over-consuming and your wellbeing strategy will consist in consuming less. Because meat has a high carbon footprint, eating less of it will reap a double dividend: emissions will go down while health improves. Now, imagine that the quantity of meat or the carbon budget associated with its consumption is limited, should we rather let the malnourished eat the meat or feed it to those above the satiation point? Thing is, every natural resource is fundamentally limited, which finally means this: in a finite world, the too-much of “people far above Decent Living Standards levels” (p.18) quickly becomes the not-enough of others."

(https://www.resilience.org/stories/2022-05-06/sufficiency-means-degrowth/)

Context

Tim Parrique's analysis of Chapter 5: Demand, services and social aspects of mitigation in the last IPCC report on Mitigation of climate change.