What Is Enough?

How do we think about what is enough?

I am working on the next Strong Towns book, which is about economic development, and I recently found myself writing this: 

An economy built around the assumption that “more” is always the answer will eventually collide with something it cannot measure: enough. And when “enough” is not allowed, rest becomes a vice. 

I haven’t been able to shake that thought.

I’m at the New Zealand Planning Institute Conference in Wellington right now, where I gave the opening keynote address. The speaker who followed me, a Māori leader talking philosophically about planning, asked a simple question: what is enough? How do we know when we have enough, when we’ve reached enough, when we don’t need more?

When I came to New Zealand for the first time last June, I thought I would find a country very different from the United States. And, to many extents, I have, but not in the ways I expected. New Zealand is an earthquake-prone, tsunami-inundated, volcanic set of islands near the Antarctic. It’s the last place I expected to encounter the North American Suburban Experiment of strip malls, big box stores, drive-thrus, and cul-de-sacs. Yet, here it is.

I didn’t expect that because I assumed they would need to wrestle with physical constraints in a way that we have been largely spared in North America. The very landscape here imposes limits that we don’t face in my flat, sandy, and forgiving home state of Minnesota, let alone most of North America.

My initial visit here was to help launch the draft of their national infrastructure plan. This time, the plan has been adopted, and there seems to be general consensus around three central insights.

First, New Zealand is spending more relative to GDP on infrastructure than any other OECD country, by a healthy margin. That makes sense because it costs a lot to build and maintain infrastructure here. From a national perspective, there is little to no expectation that this level of spending will increase in any meaningful way, even if it could.

Second, the national priority of New Zealand has to be sustaining — renewing, as they say here — the infrastructure they have already built. Decades of putting pipes, roads, and rails into the ground has created billions in promises to residents who have shaped their lives around the assumption that those commitments will be met. There is broad consensus that keeping those promises must come before any expansion.

Third, once those obligations are taken into account, there is practically no money left for expansion. And if money is prudently allocated to disaster mitigation (which it needs to be here), there is practically no capacity left for expanding service. 

So, the planners I spoke to at this conference suddenly (for most) find themselves facing a hard constraint. They can’t pretend, as our American cities generally do, that they can make promises they are unable to keep and the federal government will eventually come to their assistance. The federal government here is telling everyone that the math doesn’t work that way, and that was before a war in the Middle East messed with oil prices and everyone’s price projections. 

Modern planners are in the business of more. Where is the next highway going to go? Where is the next expansion of utilities? Where is the next rail line? There are tens of millions (perhaps more) spent annually in New Zealand deciding where more is going to go.

But what if there is no more? What if this is all the infrastructure we get? What if we are forced to say: this is enough?

As I told the audience, confronting that reality means thinking about a different kind of planning, one organized around fundamentally different principles. This is as radical a shift for us as it was for planners in the 1930s when they abandoned traditional development patterns and began building the Suburban Experiment after World War II. It required entirely new approaches, protocols, and measures of success. We are going to have to rethink things in a similar way.

In his book "Collapse," Jared Diamond examined societies, including many Polynesian societies, that were forced to deal with hard constraints. He wrote similarly about what we can learn from traditional societies, particularly in the South Pacific, in "The World Until Yesterday." Reading these, one recognizes that the challenge is less physical — adapting to a world where you have enough, because we generally have plenty — and more cultural. It requires an entire layer of norms, expectations, and informal institutions built up to foster a shared understanding of what is enough.

That is what I heard in the Māori speaker who followed me. It’s what we’re missing.

The Czech economist Tomas Sedlacek describes something similar in "The Economics of Good and Evil." He writes about the Sabbath, not as the day when we rest up for our next day of work, but as the day when we rest because we have enough. A day to be thankful, to rest in gratitude, for what we have. This is a practice that has been with humans for millenia. 

I’ve not been able to spend time with Māori people, but I would like to. Much like the Ojibwe from back home, there seem to be important insights retained in their conversations, ancient wisdom earned over countless generations.

What we generally forget — although I’m guessing the Māori less so — is that this kind of wisdom doesn’t come from equations or algorithms. It comes from hardship and suffering. That is why it is typically accompanied by gratitude and humility.

I’ve described the North American development pattern as a Ponzi scheme. The thing about all Ponzi schemes is that they eventually end. They end painfully.

What comes after that is less clear.

If I’m being optimistic, ours will end with a renewed cultural sense of what it means to have enough. Not as an abstract idea, but as something we understand in practice. Something we can recognize and accept.

Here’s the thing: that’s not something we have to wait for.