The necessity basket

The measure as written

The rule of THE EQUILIBRIUM OF DESIRE AND NECESSITY:

"An individual must respect the natural cause of an event to maintain the equilibrium between desire and necessity."

What it means to respect the natural cause is told as well:

To respect the natural cause of an event means to keep in view why nature has placed that event in us (e.g. hunger is there to keep the body alive), and to fulfil it for that very purpose, i.e. as far as the necessity goes, rather than turning it into a pursuit of desire.

For hunger, the first of the aspects that nature manages directly, it defines the necessity:

A threshold amount / calculated amount of components demanded to maintain the normal functioning of the body.

and gives the measure:

(In practice, the necessity can be fixed as the basket that meets a household’s real needs (e.g. food, shelter and clothing) at the least cost, while the endurance level shows in the performance curve, i.e. the point where an individual’s output starts falling as the load rises.)

This sub-section measures the first half of that sentence: the basket of a household's real needs at the least cost, and how much work it takes to meet it in each society.

What it measures, in plain words

Hunger is there "to keep the body alive", and it is fulfilled "as far as the necessity goes". The measure turns this into a basket: the least of food, shelter and clothing that a household needs, bought at the least cost, and the work it takes to buy it.

The basket is one and the same in every society: the same food for a healthy body, the same covered space to live in, the same clothes. It is not read from what the poorest of each society live on, because a society as a whole may be drawing on the work of others or drained of its Pads, and its poorest live on what is left to them; a basket read from them would carry the very drawing and draining that the measure has to show.

What is in the basket.

· Food: the least-cost diet that keeps a person healthy, priced from the food sold in each society's own markets.

· Shelter: 3.5 square metres of covered living space for each person, more where the climate is cold, in one plain brick house built to the same plan in every society. It is counted by what it takes to build, spread over the 50 years the house stands, not by what is paid to live in it.

· Clothing: two full sets for each person, each set covering the body: underwear, one upper and one lower garment, a pair of footwear, and a warm coat where the climate is cold. Each piece lasts as long as clothes are expected to last, and each is the cheapest the society's own price lists hold.

Read in hours of work. The basket is read in the hours that a worker in the simplest, lowest-paid work must give to buy it, at the society's own prices and that worker's own pay; no money is carried from one society to another. A worker buys not for one person only but for all those the worker feeds: the children, the old and the others not in work. So the basket is that of the people each worker feeds: the people of the society divided by those in work.

How to read the result. A result of 2 hours means that of each day's work, a worker in the simplest work gives 2 hours to meet the basket of the people the worker feeds; the rest of the day is for everything else. Four points keep the reading true to what was written:

· The basket is the floor, not the whole of life: it holds only what the body needs, "as far as the necessity goes"; everything beyond it is the room left for desire.

· As the basket is the same in every society, the differences come from how much an hour of the simplest work buys there and from how many people each worker feeds, not from different needs.

· Each piece is the cheapest that the society's own markets offer, so the result is the least work the basket can take there.

· The second half of the sentence, the endurance level shown in the performance curve, is not part of this measure.

How we measured it

The measures. Each is read from records published for every society, in the society's own money and year; no money is carried from one society to another.

· Pay: the average hourly earnings of employees in the simplest occupations (elementary occupations, group 9 of the international classification of occupations), International Labour Organization. For China, which does not publish these, the monthly earnings of urban private-sector employees in farming, divided by the weekly hours of enterprise employees of that year (National Bureau of Statistics of China).

· The people each worker feeds: the people of the society (World Bank) divided by those in work (labour force surveys, International Labour Organization; for China, the employed persons at the end of the year, National Bureau of Statistics of China), in the same year.

· Food: the cost of a healthy diet for one person for one day (World Bank and Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Food Prices for Nutrition), priced from each society's retail food prices of 2021 (International Comparison Program) and carried to other years by its own food price index.

· Shelter: 3.5 square metres of covered living space for each person, the minimum of the Sphere standards, and 1.5 square metres more for the share of the society's people who live in cold climates (classes D and E of the Köppen climate map, Beck and others 2023, read with the people of 2020 counted square kilometre by square kilometre, WorldPop). The house is the middle single-family brick and concrete house of the world (RASMI database, Fishman and others 2024), with its materials for each square metre of floor; the work of building it, 25.8 hours for each square metre of floor, is read from the official Brazilian building norms (SINAPI); its materials are priced from each society's own published price lists; and it stands 50 years (European standard EN 1990).

· Clothing: two full sets for each person (Sphere Handbook 2018), each set of underwear, one upper and one lower garment (a dress, where it costs less than the two, counts as both), a pair of footwear, and a warm coat for the share of the people in cold climates. Each piece lasts as long as the official wear periods of Russia's consumer basket law of 2006 allow, worn in turns: underwear and footwear about 1.1 years, the garments 2.1, the coat 5.1. The men's and women's sets are weighted by each society's share of women (World Bank), and children wear the same set.

· Clothing prices: each society's own list. For Russia and Egypt, the official average shop prices (Federal State Statistics Service; Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics, its urban table, with the pieces it lacks taken from its rural table). For Brazil, the public purchase records of every buyer on the federal purchasing system, at the middle price by pieces bought. For the United States, India and China, the customs records (value divided by pieces), the cheaper of the society's own imports or exports for each piece, brought to shop prices by that society's own measure of what is added between the border and the shop: the supply tables of the United States (Bureau of Economic Analysis) and of India (Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation), which hold the trade and transport margins and the taxes on products, and for China the margins of its clothing wholesalers and retailers (National Bureau of Statistics of China), its 13% value-added tax and the duty of its 2022 tariff.

Read in hours. For each part of the basket, the cost for one person for one day, divided by the hourly pay, and multiplied by the people each worker feeds, gives the hours of a worker's day; the three parts are added.

Measured years only. Each society is read in the latest year that has both its pay and its food cost: Brazil, India and the United States 2025, Egypt 2024, China 2022, Russia 2021; shelter and clothing are priced in the same year. Of Nigeria, the food is measured for 2024.

Checks. The order of the food result holds in every measured year, except that Egypt and India change places in 2022. Read with the least and the most building work that the norms give (23.4 and 28.7 hours for each square metre), the shelter result moves by less than a tenth of a minute of a worker's day in every society.

What the seven societies show

Hours of each day's work that a worker in the simplest work gives to meet the basket of the people the worker feeds:

The basket is the same in all seven, yet the work it takes is not. A worker in the simplest work gives 0.29 hours of each day to it in the United States and 5.95 hours in Egypt, about twenty times as much; in Nigeria, the food alone takes 6.75 hours, more than the whole basket anywhere else.

Food is the largest part in every society, from 69% of the basket in Russia to 94% in Brazil. A covered place to live takes the least, under 6 minutes of the day everywhere, as the house stands 50 years. Clothing lies between: 2 minutes of the day in the United States, 28 in Egypt.

Two things make the difference. The first is what an hour of the simplest work buys: for one person, the basket takes 8 minutes of that pay a day in the United States, 37 in Russia, 50 in China, 72 in Brazil and about 100 in Egypt and India, and the food alone takes 162 in Nigeria. The second is how many people each worker feeds: 3.57 in Egypt and 3.07 in India, against about 2 in the others.

The basket takes the least work in the United States and Russia, the two societies that draw the most NEP work from others, and the most in Egypt and Nigeria, the two drained of their Pads (Pads drained between societies). Where the basket takes a quarter of an hour, nearly all of the day's work is left beyond the necessity; where it takes six hours, little is left.