Enough: Sufficiency v. Efficiency

A lifestyle based on Efficiency focuses on process - getting more output out of less input, doing more with less. This approach seems appealing when one rejects consumerism and accepts real limits in materials. Moving from Abundant Resources to Constrained Resources would seem to demand more Efficiency. Maybe it does. Makes sense.

But there's another way to look at it. Sufficiency focuses on getting enough - thinking about what you really need and stopping before you are full. This approach to life looks at the rationale for consuming before you even get to making the process more efficient. It certainly doesn't assume growth. If I can restructure my demands, I can get by with less (no matter the level of resources).

Thomas Princen's The Logic of Sufficiency is all about living in harmony by keeping the concept of Enough front and center in all decisions.

What if modern society put a priority on the material security of its citizens and the ecological integrity of its resource base? What if it took ecological constraint as a given, not a hindrance but a source of long-term economic security? How would it organize itself, structure its industry, shape its consumption?

Across time and across cultures, people actually have adapted to ecological constraint. They have changed behavior; they have built institutions. And they have developed norms and principles for their time. Today's environmental challenges—at once global, technological, and commercial—require new behaviors, new institutions, and new principles.

In this highly original work, Thomas Princen builds one such principle: sufficiency. Sufficiency is not about denial, not about sacrifice or doing without. Rather, when resource depletion and overconsumption are real, sufficiency is about doing well. It is about good work and good governance; it is about goods that are good only to a point.

With examples ranging from timbering and fishing to automobility and meat production, Princen shows that sufficiency is perfectly sensible and yet absolutely contrary to modern society's dominant principle, efficiency. He argues that seeking enough when more is possible is both intuitive and rational—personally, organizationally, and ecologically rational. And under global ecological constraint, it is ethical. Over the long term, an economy—indeed a society—cannot operate as if there's never enough and never too much.