>and if we dig deeper, it's not that you want to live with your fiancee, it's that you want human companionship and sex, No, actually. I want to live with my

>and if we dig deeper, it's not that you want to live with your fiancee, it's that you want human companionship and sex, No, actually. I want to live with my fiancee. I could perhaps come up with a supergoal for that if I tried, but it would still involve this specific fiancee. Some things are terminally good, others instrumentally. The chain of reduction stops at things I want for their own sake, long before it hits "Maslow". >Among the choices available to you, you are getting what you want. This is vacuous. Firstly, there might be some superior option nobody told me about, or that I didn't think of. Secondly, defining "what I want" as "what was available to me" amounts to rationalizing economics backwards into psychology while ignoring the available empirical evidence. You don't get to tell me what I want based on what I did, because there are in fact many, many filters between what I want and what I do. >but I would suggest that the blame for that lies with the fact that we do not live in a post-scarcity society rather than on the resource distribution model we use. These are effectively the same statement. We have more than enough resources to put everyone in the realm of diminishing returns to additional economic resources -- we just have capitalism instead of happiness. (This is another reason why revealed preferences theories are crap.)