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Maslow's theory suggests that the most basic level of needs must be met before the individual will strongly desire (or focus motivation upon) the secondary or higher level needs. Maslow also coined the term "metamotivation" to describe the motivation of people who go beyond the scope of the basic needs and strive for constant betterment.[8]

The results were startling, validating the housing first model and showing that the cost of housing the homeless was far less than the cost of the emergency services needed by the homeless while they were living on the street.“The reduction in days in jail alone pays for the program,” said Jaime Rogers, a Medicine Hat housing official. She cited studies that said the average homeless person costs taxpayers 120,000 Canadian dollars a year, or $91,600, in services, while it costs just 18,000 Canadian dollars a year, or $13,740, to house someone and provide the necessary retention support.That kind of evidence persuaded the conservative government of former Prime Minister Stephen Harper to pursue housing first as a national policy.

A human has only so many minutes in life. Time is the bedrock scarcity. If a person isn’t doing something meaningful in a given moment, he’s doing something less than meaningful. He’s wasting at least some of his potential. By meaningful, I don’t mean productive, in an economic sense. I mean important to the person, to her own wellbeing.

In short, “good” economic systems would produce economies of meaning that help us to help one another live meaningful lives—to meet real needs and solve problems that matter.

Cities, big and small, are the legs upon which all national systems rest. Already cities and their communities are hubs for innovation. With some further encouragement and support, and the right tools and programs, they could become more resilient and robust, and bigger heroes in the coming great transition.

There is scope, in better delivery of work support, to challenge the atomisation and isolation of workers and the loss of social capital and networks of new working models. The precarity of insecure work needs to be addressed, rather than exacerbated, by the systems set up to support people through their working lives. In roles where working hours are flexible or unpredictable, the division between private and public lives can be complex. The interaction between the individual and the state needs to understand that complexity and support people to navigate through their working lives rather than leaving them without a compass or adequate map.

This is the theory of ‘Fully Automated Luxury Communism’, an idea and ideology that in the (near) future, machines could provide for all our basic needs, and humans would be required to do very minimal work — perhaps as little as 10–12 hours a week — on quality control and similar oversight, to ensure luxury for everyone.

The trick, however, is subordinating the technology to global human needs rather than profits.

Putting modern technology to work for the people is an excellent goal, and democratizing the advantages of our advances is already happening.  It is a worthy cause to bring governments and nonprofit organizations onto the same technological footing as for-profit companies could result in huge strides towards improving living conditions, decreasing crime, ending poverty and other problems.

A commons is an asset over which a community has shared and equal rights. This could, in principle, include land, water, minerals, knowledge, scientific research and software. But at the moment most of these assets have been enclosed: seized by either the state or private interests and treated as any other form of capital. Through this enclosure, we have been deprived of our common wealth.

The restoration of the commons has great potential not only to distribute wealth but also to change society. As the writer David Bollier points out, a commons is not just a resource (land or trees or software) but also the community of people managing and protecting it. The members of the commons develop much deeper connections with each other and their assets than we do as passive consumers of corporate products.

Managing common resources means developing rules, values and traditions. It means, in some cases, re-embedding ourselves in the places in which we live. It means reshaping government to meet the needs of communities, not corporations. In other words, reviving the commons can act as a counterweight to the atomising, alienating forces now generating a thousand forms of toxic reaction.

We need to be humble and accept that our entire conception of the world may be wrong. We should seek silence and contemplate our place in the great expanse of the cosmos. We should take pleasure in the rich flavor of our daily bread, rather than search and search for the perfectly arranged food selfie. We should spend our time solving the hard problems of society like injustice and bigotry and ecological crisis, rather than waste our time moving numbers around on a screen to justify outdated modes of energy production. We should enjoy the everyday fraternity of our communities, rather than constantly hunting for a new enemy.

The only thing that still holds us equal as humans is our available time to spend in this world — money can’t really buy that. There is a day / night cycle, we all need 8 hours of sleep etc, there cannot be a dramatic contrast between how much one person engages with certain products over the next person. Surely then, our economy should be based precisely on that.

In this model, statistics of usage would be recorded, money owed for electricity gets calculated in proportion as to what gadgets were used and therefore how much of it goes to the maker. Within certain devices there could be fractional sub-charges for the software used in them that would go straight to the developers and so on.For any individual, this allows them to find the perfect equilibrium in their working vs. leisure/care time as the more they work the less time/capital they have to spend for certain items and the other way around.