in his book, Human Scale Development(3), that the goals of development must be better to fulfil our needs for subsistence, protection, affection, understanding, participation, idleness, creation, identity and freedom, and that our economy must be geared to meet these needs. He also suggests, but stops short of including, transcendence as one of these needs.

He posits the idea of destroyers that damage our ability to fulfil these needs, such as warfare, and satisfiers of four types - pseudo, inhibiting, singular and synergistic - that, to various degrees, help to meet them. He suggests that in contrast to Maslow�s hierarchy of needs, the needs he suggests are in fact interconnected. While Neef does agree that subsistence is primary, one�s ability to survive severe hardship is likely to be much greater with a close network of friendships and associations.

Max Neef has further shown how these identified needs can be met in different ways in different societies. His matrix of needs satisfaction shows how these needs can be met existentially through the categories of being, having, doing and interacting. Neef�s general conclusion is that the development process is at present one of being done to, rather than with, thus causing disillusion, disempowerment and disrespect. The scales of economies, he argues, are also usually too big, and hence the lack of personal involvement in structural systems mitigates against the fulfilment of needs such as participation, identity and understanding.

Criticisms of conventional economic theory

Taking these basic human needs as a starting point, various critics through the years have criticised conventional economic theory. In the early 1800s Simonde de Sismondi, who coined the term �proletarian�, thought wealth-maximisation wrong headed and said:

At least they (the Greeks) never lost sight of the fact that wealth had no other worth than what it contributed to the national happiness. (4, p11)

Ruskin, in the second half of the 1800s, cited Xenophon�s Economist:

Those economic possessions that aid man in living are true wealth, while those that contribute to the destruction of man�s nature are not true wealth. Ruskin labelled these �illth�. (5, p12)

Marx highlighted the destructive relations inherent in the employer/employee relationship as well as foreseeing the ecological problems to come:-

All progress in capitalist agriculture is progress in the art not only of robbing the labourer but of robbing the soil (6, p217)

Helm and Oswald in the 1880s were among the first scientists to enter the fray and offer that only an economics based on energy was sustainable. This was later stated in the 1920�s by Alfred Lokta as a rule of �biophysical foundations to economics�. (7, p19)

These biophysical critics of economics highlighted the problem of an economics saddled with the structural necessity for growth, the stable-state economy being traditionally thought of as a negative dynamic. Adam Smith said:-

Life is hard in a stationary state, which is dull and melancholy� and �When the real wealth of society becomes stationary, the labourer�s wares are soon reduced to what is barely sufficient to enable him to bring up his family.(8)

Riccardo followed suit by predicting that a stationary economic state would prove �injurious to the labour classes�(9) and predicted �a random collapse of society�.(10)

John Stuart Mill however saw it very differently:-

A stationary condition of capital and population implies no stationary state of human improvement. There would be all kinds of mental culture, moral and social progress; as much room for improving the ART of living� when minds ceased to be engrossed by the art of getting on.� (11)

In more recent times various shades of reformist or revolutionary opinions have existed in the new and alternative economics pantheon. At the most radical end of the spectrum are those such as Vandana Shiva, who in the awesome introduction to her book Staying Alive describes development and industrialisation as actually mal-development and inherently destructive:-

The age of enlightenment and the theory of progress to which it gave rise, was centred on the sacredness of two categories: modern scientific knowledge and economic development. Somewhere along the way, the unbridled pursuit of progress, guided by science and development, began to destroy life without any assessment of how fast and how much diversity of life on this planet is disappearing. The act of living and celebrating and conserving life in all its diversity - in people and in nature - seems to have been sacrificed to progress, and the sanctity of life substituted by the sanctity of science and development. (12, p.xiv)

Also in this category are those such as Helena-Norberg Hodge who has viewed the disastrous breakdown in tradition and environment in Ladakh over the last 30 years and those such as Ken Smith who in Free is Cheaper echoes Kropotkin as he outlines the ludicrousness of using money at all, contesting that:-

�The real answer lies all around us in the attitude of self-help, in the spontaneous groupings of mutual aid, in the inescapable urges of sociability that have always characterised the human race� (13, p250)