I've been thinking about how to measure and quantify need. My intuition is that the economy produces a lot more in quantity than is needed even for our current population and supposed max of around 10 billion in 2100, based on population trends.
However, there's significant miscalculation with both production and consumption of unnecessary, but addictive things.
I'd like to know some good economic measures for these things.
Maslow's hierarchy of needs is a good place to start. On the bottom is our physical needs: food, water, sleep, air, shelter, clothing, the ability to reproduce. Next level is safety needs: personal safety, employment, health, property. They seem related to me, in that, for example, we need adequate food, water, and sleep to be healthy, and we need shelter for personal safety. The third level is love and belonging: friendship, family, intimacy, sense of connection.
For economic purposes, I would say what each of us needs includes the first two levels, and extends into the third as far as sense of connection. An economic system can't (or shouldn't at least) provide family, friends, and intimacy as a distributed good, but it can provide a basic sense of belonging, that one is part of a community or society and has rights and responsibilities within it. That is one hallmark of civilization.
Yes, quantifying all of this is a challenge, and unavoidably will include subjective considerations. One yardstick is to ask what is necessary for a person to be able to engage successfully with daily tasks of living: taking care of themselves and where they live, getting to a job and performing their job duties, engaging with civil society, responding to crises like illness, car trouble, family death, etc. We can examine each item from Maslow (e.g. food, shelter, etc.) and approximate what quality and quantity are necessary based on this yardstick, remembering to include the psychological factor.