What is need?

In calculating the relative costs of road and rail transport, we consider the £10 million or so annual loss made by British Rail as a cost, whereas the £500 million spent every year on highway construction is regarded as output and figures in our social balance sheet as 'production' and hence increases wealth.

Both expenditures are covered by the taxpayer, and both serve the same function - to permit mobility. Why then should one be regarded as something positive, a 'product', and the other as something negative, a cost?

Take a complicated process, like the manufacture of a car. One can regard it atomistically as a series of sub-processes, such as the manufacture of the battery and the carburettor. For the company that assembles the car, however, these figure as costs.

Now if, for the society of which the company is an integral part, the process as a whole is not to figure as a cost, an end product is required.

What then is the end product? Evidently not the car. Cars have no value per se, they are simply a means of moving people and things about. Is mobility then an end product? What, in fact, is the advantage of moving things and people from place to place?

At best we can regard mobility as satisfying a need. People need to move about for all sorts of reasons, and therefore, in a democratic society, one must enable them to do so. This principle, usually referred to as consumer sovereignty, is perhaps the basic tenet of our consumer society and can be held responsible for much of the social and ecological disruption at present going on.

Let us look at this notion of 'needs'. Clearly, in different environmental situations, people develop different needs. In our industrial society, people appear to need cars. There are already about 200 million in the world, and on current trends we should have 400 million by the end of the century.

Taking into account the immense damage the car gives rise to - damage to our health and disruption of terrestrial and marine ecosystems as a result of pollution, depletion of resources, destruction of agricultural land, deterioration of the quality of life in our cities - it would appear very undesirable to satisfy this particular need.

But what is the alternative? One cannot ask residents of Los Angeles to do without their car. The city is designed around it. There are drive-in shops, cinemas, banks and even drive-in churches. A pedestrian would be isolated from the city's social and economic activities, and could even be arrested as a vagrant! In such 'science fiction' conditions, there may be a genuine need for a car.

It might even be argued that in a situation where the church-going population is 100 percent mobilised and lives miles from any place of worship, and where rocketing land values make it difficult to provide both a car park and a church, the drive-in church is a reasonable compromise. In that case it could be said, without exaggeration, that there was a genuine need for this unlikely amenity.

One thing is certain: industrialisation creates needs faster than it satisfies them. As people are provided with cars and the roads to drive them on, the area within which a person's day-to-day activities are contained will gradually extend. As this expansion proceeds, those who do not yet have a car - at this stage, by far the majority - will feel that they genuinely need one.

Creating needs is in fact very easy. If I were to invent a machine that got people out of bed in the morning, took off their pyjamas, washed them, dried them and presented them, appropriately garbed, at the breakfast table, one could conceivably create a considerable need for this absurd device, especially after it had entered into current use in fashionable circles. Of course, to satisfy this need would be far more difficult, though not more so than to satisfy the world's increasing need for cars.

Unfortunately, a system can only remain stable within a given range of environmental conditions. Indeed it is the maintenance of these conditions that defines man's real needs. As we satisfy the needs created by industrialisation, however, we diverge ever further from tolerable conditions.

When they no longer obtain, there can be at best but an illusion of stability - pseudostability one might call it - maintained by the precarious application of external controls: pesticides to control insect plagues, dams to prevent floods, vaccines to prevent epidemics, policemen to prevent massacres. But these are only short-term expedients, and serve as a means, not of curing the disease, but merely of suppressing its symptoms.

Discontinuities whose size and growth provide a measure of social and ecological instability increase 'needs'. This can only give rise to further social and ecological instability. Today we find ourselves in the lunatic situation of maintaining an ever more precarious social and ecological pseudo-stability, while mistakenly regarding the costs of this process - ever more motor cars, motorways, drive-in churches and so on - which massively contribute to an everincreasing GDP, the end product of our misguided society.