Valentin BRANDON
Author
On Monday, October 6, 2025, the inaugural Sufficiency PhD Days (external link) took place at Sciences Po Paris, held symbolically at Place Saint Thomas d'Aquin. The venue underlined a long intellectual lineage: St. Thomas Aquinas dedicated a full chapter of his "Summa Theologica" to sufficiency, placing it alongside temperance, a cardinal virtue within Aristotelian ethics that Plato characterized as "a certain form of harmonious order, [...] the ordering or controlling of certain pleasures and desires."
From the vibrant exchanges among early-career researchers, across ecological economics and the arts, one question emerged with striking clarity: What is the "good life"? How should we measure it and translate it into public policy?
Among the many frameworks discussed, two stood out: "Consumption Corridors" (CC) and "Decent Living Standards" (DLS). These models have gained attraction among the intelligentsia of Degrowth, Post Growth and Sufficiency, and for good reason. DLS offers a practical means to quantify the social foundations that CCs seek to protect.
Yet, we must pause and ask: What are the consequences of adoption of these frameworks as normative baselines? Anthropology and philosophy remind us that the "good life" is not a fixed concept, but is culturally embedded, historically contingent, and ontologically complex. Any policy built on a single standardized baseline risks erasing plural visions of wellbeing and reproducing power imbalances unless it explicitly accommodates diversity, contestation, and situated knowledge.
While theories of human needs provide a broad anthropological foundation for approaching the "good life", mainstream well-being research rooted in WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, and Democratic) contexts carries significant epistemic biases. Even when we carefully separate objective human needs from measures of subjective well-being, we risk reproducing those biases and failing short to achieve a genuinely decolonized perspective. Beyond establishing material thresholds, there is an urgent need for epistemic decolonization: methodologies, metrics and knowledge practices that foreground plural epistemologies, situate expertise, and make space for non‑WEIRD conceptions of flourishing.
Take the DLS framework: It draws on Doyal and Gough's theory of human need and even lists items such as the smartphone as an "essential material element" for well-being.
Following Max-Neef's distinction between needs, satisfiers and the goods and services that support them, one could argue that a smartphone strengthens the satisfier of communication. Yet, that assumption is rooted in the dominant technological imaginaries, deeply embedded in modern ideological software, overlooks the growing evidence on the mental distress linked to smartphones, especially among youth people. Social media attention-capturing and distraction algorithms, and surveillance capitalism challenges the claim that smartphones inherently enhance well-being; often they may actively undermine the very needs they purport to satisfy.
Thus, we must interrogate not just the goods themselves, but the ontological structures that shape their use. Treating smartphones merely as communication tools while ignoring their economic, political, social and psychological dimensions is analytically naïve.
A second concern emerges when DLS is mobilized to assess environmental sustainability. These ''minimum material elements" are defined within the parameters of today's world, a world that urgently requires radical transformation. By treating the smartphone as a universal necessity, DLS risks imposing Western norms on communities for whom such devices do not necessarily signify social progress or meaningful connection, and may instead reproduce dependency, extractive relations, or cultural erasure.
Is DLS therefore a dangerously normative framework? Not necessarily, its users are often critically aware of its limits. Every model deliberately simplifies reality to serve a purpose, and macroeconomic tools such as DLS can be analytically and politically useful.
Usefulness alone, however, is not enough. If a projected scenario is socially undesirable, it loses its transformative power. Desirability requires moving beyond material thresholds: models must resonate with plural ways of inhabiting the world and speak to what different communities actually value.
This critique is not a dismissal but an invitation to imagination and radical change. It calls for utopian narratives that reframe macroeconomic modelling around alternative modes of living rather than current consumption patterns. To achieve this, we must deepen transdisciplinary collaboration across the sciences and humanities.
At the Sufficiency PhD Days, participants called for co‑produced methodologies, plural metrics, and participatory modelling to build frameworks that honour sufficiency, justice, and the plurality of the "good life."