@ David Olsen

I hope you see this response, as responses don't seem to be forwarded by e-mail (and I can't find an e-mail address for you on internet). Do not hesitate to e-mail me (wim.nusselder@antenna.nl) for more explanation.

Thanks for alerting me to my too dense writing style.



"Reorganizing how people get what they want to increase their contentment" means "changing the economy for the better" (because of the way in which I defined "economics" at the beginning. The key is (changing) "involuntary patterns of behaviour" because (as I wrote) "Most of what we do is

involuntary".

Example: If consumer household income increases, spending increases mostly involuntarily (as described by the Keynesian consumption function). It does so for instance because we have a habit of checking date of the month and bank balance when deciding whether or not to give in to a temptation presented to us by some commercial advertisement. If the bank balance happens to by higher because we had more income for that month, we will give in to more spending temptations on the basis of that habit, without any difference in prior 'wants' and any premeditated conscious choice about how to spend the extra income when we first learned that it would increase.



"The tactical way to present these wants (that are less than optimally satisfied) as new wants" refers back to what I wrote in paragraph 5. In the example of consumer income expenditure I just gave, I assumed it to be organized (only) as tertiary economy: by dependence on enterpreneurs defining for us what we need and want (and communicating that for instance with advertisements). The next step (i.e. an improvement) would be to reduce that dependence by follwing a next (quaternary) type of economic leader who tells us for instance to select only fairtrade and sustainably produced things when spending our income. A step back would be for the government (secondary, political leadership) to enforce higher or lower savings than we would habitually 'choose' when our income changes. (But note: the government can also take a quaternary, ideological leadership role by convincing us to spend more on fairtrade and sustainably produced products rather than enforcing such behaviour.)