The economy’s capacity as an innovation treadmill constantly ensures commodities filter across society, becoming feasibly implemented and eventual basic rights – applicable to any commodity, green tech is no exception

It turns out that jamming this mechanism completely is not only infeasible but undesirable.12 It is infeasible because of the blurriness of the line between inherent and external utility.13 Take the luxury watch mentioned above. Wearing it could be a consumerist act, entailing a status claim, but it could also be an act of love and respect, making use of an inheritance from a much-missed grandfather. In that case, it carries value that is inherent, producing satisfaction quite independent of other people. The difficulty lies in the fact that value is in the eye of the beholder (and, in aggregate, in the eyes of society), not inherent in the object. Drawing a line between inherent and external utility would force us to divine the purpose behind individuals’ purchases at each moment in time, and lead to very cumbersome, if not arbitrary, bans. Banning conspicuous consumption would, however, also be undesirable because it is an important part of how new and better products spread through society, with the process of innovation driving the diffusion.14 Typically, upper-class buyers favor expensive and scarce goods. But another class of products also serves their desire to signal status, and that is new and better solutions. The first automobiles, the first electric lightbulbs, the first phones, the first television sets, and the first smart devices were initially expensive to make and priced for the rich. As manufacturers attract enough early adopters among the wealthy—and the wider group attempting to emulate them—they can gain the scale advantages to make products faster and cheaper. This can set off a cycle by which production costs continue to drop, the innovative product continues to spread, and, progressively, it loses its nonfunctional, status-signaling value. At the end of the process, a new or better product is available to the wider society at an affordable cost. Meanwhile, the upper class has moved on to yet newer and better products, getting other cycles started.15 It is this “innovation treadmill” that powers the rapid spread of technology across capitalist economies. The key is the corrective mechanism: over the long run, democratization of consumption erases the external utility of the shiny, new object, leaving only its inherent utility and function. The power of this mechanism is that it harnesses and channels some deep human tendencies—starting with the desire to stand out, but also to fit in. Both relate to the process of identity-building, and while they are psychological rather than material needs they are very real ones.16 Regarding status-signaling, neurological studies of both animal and human subjects show that it produces serotonin, neuron firing, and blood oxygenation in the brain. The emulation of success and prestige is likewise deeply wired within our species. In The Secret of Our Success, evolutionary biologist and anthropologist Joseph Henrich combines a host of multidisciplinary evidence, from lab experiments to ethnographic studies across the world, to argue that imitation based on certain cues is a cultural evolutionary trait. Emulating the behavior of those most successful within the community accelerated the accumulation of human collective knowledge. This, in his view, is the secret behind human success vis-à-vis other species on the planet. The effect of the innovation treadmill is that yesterday’s crazy consumerism chasing “unnecessary things” yields today’s basic needs.17 This can be seen in the poverty indicators typically used by rich countries. In the European Union, for example, a household is classified as severely materially deprived if it lacks a color television, telephone, washing machine, or car, or if the family cannot afford a week-long holiday away from home. Seventy years ago, all of these would have been out of reach to all but the very upper class. More broadly, needs come and go: a television set to my grandparents was not a need but a want. It became a need to my parents’ generation— only to become, within two generations, something no longer important in an era of Internet access and large monitors. This logic could be extended to all sorts of goods. Is having a toilet in a house a need? What about running water? What about warm water? Or a shower or bathtub? Or an oven? For the majority of human history these were not available except to the extremely wealthy, but in any advanced economy today it would be impossible if not illegal to rent out an apartment without all these features. The skeptical reader might object that the items above are still desiderata, given that they are not matters of life or death. The innovation treadmill applies to medical treatment, too. In 1836, Nathan Mayer Rothschild, arguably the richest man in the world at the time, died at fifty-eight for want of an antibiotic to treat an infection. In 1928, Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin, which made it to the market following medical trials in 1942. In the entire United States, there was enough to treat fewer than a hundred patients. By September 1943, there was enough to satisfy the demand of the Allied Armed Forces during the Second World War, at today’s equivalent of $300 per dose. By 1950, production had increased to a point that it was available to the American population at four cents a dose: one-sixteenth the price of a gallon of milk.18 By now, lacking access to antibiotics would constitute severe material deprivation, violating basic needs. Note that the mechanics of the innovation treadmill extend beyond the gizmos of modern technology. An interesting botanical example is the lemon, an iconic symbol of the Mediterranean landscape and its bounty. Recent research carried out at the University of Tel Aviv, based on a detailed analysis of ancient texts, art, artifacts, and archaeobotanical remains, shows that lemon fruits originated in Southeast Asia.19 Even during the Roman era, they were considered a luxury product due to their supposed healing qualities, symbolic use, pleasant odor, and rarity. But they were of scant culinary use due to their thick rind and dry, tasteless flesh. It was only after their spread was powered by their initial representation as a high-status, elite product of limited functional use that they started to be cultivated through ancient technology and know-how. Thanks to hybridization, varieties displaying fewer seeds, thinner skin, and more juice were produced. Now, a pound of them can be bought for less than two dollars in some US markets. Over two centuries ago, Adam Smith was already describing the dynamics of the process by which technologies and products democratize, desires of the upper classes become basic needs of society, and lack of access to them comes to imply poverty. In his words: A linen shirt, for example, is, strictly speaking, not a necessary of life. The Greeks and Romans lived, I suppose, very comfortably though they had no linen. But in the present times, through the greater part of Europe, a creditable day-laborer would be ashamed to appear in public without a linen shirt, the want of which would be supposed to denote that disgraceful degree of poverty which, it is presumed, nobody can well fall into without extreme bad conduct. Custom, in the same manner, had rendered leather shoes a necessary of life in England. The poorest creditable person of either sex would be ashamed to appear in public without them.20 Smith was much more sophisticated in his thinking than many know, given his frequent association with simplistic “wealth maximization.” He understood well the social nature of the relationships among commodities, affluence, and the achievement of basic living conditions. This view aligns with more recent work by Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, who in the 1980s revolutionized the field of economic development. In Development as Freedom, Sen argued for moving away from standard emphases on earnings, opulence, utility, and ownership of specific commodities, to focus instead on capabilities to do or be what you’d like (the concept of self-realization).21 This perspective turns the fight against poverty into a fight for (positive) freedoms, including freedom from hunger and short life, freedom to take part in the life of the community, and, building on Smith’s observation above, freedom from shame or disgrace. While this might sound very philosophical, note what it implies. The same capabilities require more expensive goods and services in a society that is richer, and in which most people have means of transport, affluent clothing, radios, and televisions. Sen notes that richer societies progressively revise upward the capabilities accepted as “minimum.”22 It becomes clear that there is no set of needs that can be called absolute or universal across time and geography—and thus there can be no quantitative threshold established beyond which further income or economic growth is no longer needed because it would only be funneled into unnecessary wants. Once we get rid of the artificial dichotomy between needs and wants, we see that need is, and always has been, relative and that it evolves as the benefits of growth and innovation spread through a society.23 It is true that citizens in rich countries have much that others lack, but to the extent that these represent new solutions to old problems they open space for new needs.24 We may live much longer and healthier lives than our ancestors, but we continue to have problems. Cancer and cardiovascular diseases are now the top causes of death in most advanced economies.25 The fact that we live longer means that more people are afflicted by dementia. There is plenty of suffering still, from eyesight that cannot be restored to injuries that put victims in wheelchairs for life. What is possible determines what is needed. The fact that needs are relative applies not only to health but to virtually every dimension of life, including leisure. Today, expressing a wish to visit another continent would not strike anyone as an eccentric or unreasonable desire. Five hundred years ago, it would have been received in the same way as someone today wishing to go to the moon. And even that is losing its capacity to surprise, given that 2021 saw the first “space tourists” in human history. It is not unimaginable that, across a few decades, space tourism will move from being impossible, to being unaffordable to nearly all, to becoming available to many.