How to Decide What to Produce

Somewhere right now, a farmer is choosing what to plant, a factory is choosing what to make next quarter, a family is choosing whether to build, buy or repair, and a government is choosing which industries to support. Together, these choices decide what the world makes, and so what it takes from the earth.

Most of them are made with one question: will it sell? That question is not foolish. A thing nobody buys is usually a thing nobody wanted. But it has a gap in it. Anything that can be sold passes, whether or not anyone needs it, and whatever it costs the land it came from.

This may sound like a call for central planning, with someone deciding what everyone may make. It isn’t. These questions are for whoever is producing: a family, a farmer, a workshop, a company. Nobody needs permission to ask them.

Why “will it sell?” isn’t enough

If production follows sales, and sales can be grown by persuasion, then production has no natural limit. A great deal of modern effort goes not into making things, but into making people want them: advertising, packaging, new models of things that still work. The economy can grow for years by producing what nobody would have missed.

Madhyasth Darshan describes production (उत्पादन) differently: applying human labour to the wealth of nature to create things that are useful and beautiful. It names what those things are for: food, homes, clothing, and the means to travel, to communicate and to see beyond where we stand. Production, on this view, starts from need, not from what can be sold.

That gives us a way to decide. Five questions, asked in order.

1. Which need does it serve?

Name the need. Food, home, clothing and care, travel, communication, seeing at a distance, health, the tools of work and learning: the same eight lines we use in How to Calculate Enough for a Family.

If a product fits none of them, look closely at what it is really for. Often it is aimed at a need of the self: to feel secure, admired or settled. No product can meet those needs, which is exactly why such products can be sold again and again. That doesn’t make them forbidden. It does mean they shouldn’t be mistaken for prosperity.

2. How much is needed?

Once the need is named, it has a size. A village needs so much grain. A town needs so many homes. A family needs so many shirts. Need is limited, because bodies are limited.

Madhyasth Darshan defines prosperity (समृद्धि) as producing more than is needed and consuming less, until there is no sense of lack. So the aim is to produce a little more than the need: enough to share, and a reserve against bad years. The aim is not to produce as much as possible and then find people to consume it. Surplus is for security and for others, not for pushing into more consumption.

“Production starts from need, not from what can be sold.”

3. Is it useful, and is it well made?

The darshan speaks of two kinds of value that labour places in a thing: its usefulness (उपयोगिता मूल्य), and its beauty, the care and skill in how it is made. Both matter for the same reason. A thing that works well and is made well is kept, repaired and passed on. A thing made to be replaced is made twice, and then again.

So ask: will this last as long as the need lasts? Can it be repaired? Is it made with enough care that someone will want to keep it?

4. Can it return to nature?

Madhyasth Darshan describes nature as cyclical (आवर्तनशील). Matter becomes living things, and living things return to matter. Each part of nature is useful in its own place and complements the next. Nothing is waste.

Human production can fit that cycle or break it. Food scraps return to soil. Timber, clay, cotton and stone return in time. Many plastics and chemicals don’t, and pile up where nature can’t use them. So ask of anything you produce: when its use is over, where does it go, and can nature take it back? If not, does the need justify that?

5. Does it use human effort well?

Labour (श्रम), in the darshan’s description, is skill and care applied through the body to create useful and beautiful things. That is a description of good work, and it is a measure too.

Ask: does making this develop the skill of the people who make it, or wear them out? Is most of the effort going into the thing itself, or into persuading people to buy it? A product that needs more effort spent on selling it than on making it is telling you something.

Where to use the five questions

At home. Before buying, ask whether you could grow, make, repair or share it instead. A household that produces some of its own food or repairs its own things is producing, not only consuming.

In a village or neighbourhood. Many needs, food above all, can be met close to where people live. Local production is easier to size to real need, and easier to return to the land.

In a business. Run each product through the five questions once a year. They fit beside the five measures in How Should a Business Measure Success?

In policy. Support for an industry could be tested the same way: which need, how much, how well made, can it return, and what does it do to the people who work in it?

And the planet?

Almost everything we take from the earth is taken in order to produce something. So the way we decide what to produce is, in practice, the way we decide what happens to forests, rivers, soil and air.

Production decided by sales has no limit, because persuasion has none. Production decided by need does have one, and that limit is the planet’s room to breathe. Add the fourth question, and what we make can begin to fit the cycle nature already runs. We think this is one of the most practical links between a happy life and a sustainable planet, and we set out how we intend to test it in One question, not two. For why the earth is more than a store of materials, see How to Live in a Relationship with Nature.

A protocol to try

Pick one thing you are about to buy, make or produce this month. Before you do, write a sentence answering each of five questions: Which need does it serve? How much is needed? Is it useful and well made? Can it return to nature? Does it use human effort well?

Treat them as a first check, not a final verdict. If it passes all five, that is a good sign. If it fails one, notice which, and whether there is a good reason for an exception. That single answer can tell you a good deal about your enough.

Some things don’t fit the questions neatly: a medicine, a service, a piece of music, a wheelchair. For these, compare the real alternatives, including their whole-life effects and whether people actually need them, rather than passing or failing them on five questions.

Limitations

• Markets carry a great deal of information about what people want, quickly and without anyone in charge. These questions don’t replace that, and we haven’t shown how the two fit together.
• Judgements of usefulness and beauty differ between people and cultures. One family’s waste is another’s treasure.
• Some genuinely useful things, such as medicines and electronics, can’t easily return to nature. The fourth question is harder for them, and we don’t yet have a good answer.
• These questions have not yet been tested across many producers. If you try them, tell us where they fail.

References

1. Madhyasth Darshan Paribhasha Sanhita, उत्पादन (production) and उत्पादन भेंट (the kinds of things produced), p. 46
2. Madhyasth Darshan Paribhasha Sanhita, उपयोगिता मूल्य (utility value), p. 49
3. Madhyasth Darshan Paribhasha Sanhita, आवर्तनशीलता (cyclicity), p. 38
4. Madhyasth Darshan Paribhasha Sanhita, समृद्धि (prosperity), p. 191
5. Madhyasth Darshan Paribhasha Sanhita, श्रम and श्रम नियोजन (labour, and applying it), pp. 222–223