Sufficiency

In an era of multiple crisis’s, Jonathan Watts’s recent Guardian article on the Global Justice Report challenges the status quo by elevating sufficiency as a tangible political and economic reality. The report rejects both "endless consumption" and "austerity hair shirts," instead advocating for a world with shorter working hours, more public goods like healthcare and education, and a stable climate. Sufficiency is not about degrowth but about a different composition of consumption—less material throughput, but a higher quality of life.

This framework provides the perfect blueprint for what we are constructing at The living Experiment Society.  We treat communities as laboratories for testing post-consumerist ways of life, using protocols to reduce waste, share resources, or redesign local economies. A living experiment society actively and intentionally tests the hypothesis that "happiness is not just about GDP" in real-time.

Franciscan economics serves as the spiritual and operational engine for these experiments. Emerging from the radical poverty of St. Francis, this tradition explicitly prioritises material sufficiency over financial efficiency. Franciscan spirituality treats all goods as common goods, advocates for stewardship over ownership, and promotes a fraternal economy based on sharing and "usus pauper" (restricted use).

The synergy is clear: sufficiency provides the goal (a life of enough), the living experiment society provides the method (community-led testing of new economic forms), and Franciscan economics provides the ethics (voluntary simplicity, solidarity, and care for creation). In a climate-threatened world, this combination may be not just a utopian antidote, but our most pragmatic path to a thriving future.