‘Do people still worry about higher things unless their bellies are full?’ Thus might any political economist working in an interdisciplinary institute face the prospect of yet another of those supersubtle seminar topics – that participants should discuss the nature of ‘longing’, for example, and consider its political and historical significances. The political significance of longing: the starving have no food, so they long for paradise.

Why do food riots happen? Because people get hungry, idiot! Then a distinction between needs and wants is the condition of the possibility of this kind of economics. Granted, it may be difficult to draw a precise border between these two. But when we get as far as the beauty of nature; when we are asked to consider what place the beauty of nature might have when we are distinguishing between needs and wants; should we be asked whether beauty need have any place in the calculation of that strict nécessaire without which the labour force must go under; then it will be clear what must be answered: that need comes first and beauty afterwards; that beauty is the extra, the more, the surplus that depends on the prior satisfaction of need and can be attended to only upon that condition; then it will be time to remind whatever fantasist has raised this question that only those with time on their hands have leisure for aesthetics, and that those who face real need are completely unsentimental.