Recently, I read about Chronic Stress, and the effects it has on human psychology and physiology.  CSHS says there is a simple recipe for stress (NUTS, being Novelty, Unexpected, Threat to Ego/Self, and loss of Sense of control), and the stress response is generally good.  It’s the long term exposure to stress that is the problem, because it changes you.  I wonder, and I’m investigating, if Chronic Stress is a good indicator that needs aren’t being met, and thus it should be possible to detect if people are stressed, and then identify what the stressors in the community are.  This is sounding suspiciously like Human Development (exploring the Capabilities, Freedoms, and choices of the population), but I am seeing this a little more truncated that that.  I’m trying to see what impact alternative designs will have on a community based on what is currently preventing their needs from being met.  No sense making time available if it will only be used to feed addictions (for example, like workaholism, or Starbucks, or promiscuity) that won’t ultimately raise the actualize quality of life within the community.

Perhaps there is a way to use stress as a means to identify the obstructions within a society that prevent needs from being met.  Perhaps it can be quantified by measuring the fraction of time that people use to meet each of their needs, and the time weighted fraction of needs that aren’t met.

For example, lets imagine…

• PTSD obstructs around 10% of the population from being able to meet their needs effectively.
• Imagine that these people are express the symptoms of ‘trouble sleeping’, ‘distant from people’, ‘unable to relax’, and ‘not feeling physically safe’, and this relates to the needs of ‘Rest’, ‘Child-care’, and ‘Security’.
• Imagine that these activities would normally take 550 min/d/ca, while total needs take 880 min/d/ca. Imagine also that the symptoms are observed 25% of the time, and there are no other obstructions.
• Thus, the Effectiveness would be [(880-550)*100% + 550 * (100%-25%)]/880 = 84%
• Obstructed time use would be 880/0.84 = 1042 min/d/ca.
• Across the population, this would be (880×90% + 1042*10%)=896 min/d/ca., or the equivalent of an additional 16 min/d/ca.
• 16 min/d/ca is 1.1% of a day.
• The slope of the time/resource curve at capacity is 9.5 min/d/ca/gHa.
• To get the same improvement in the Actualized Quality of Life, the Community Managed Ecological Footprint would have to be increased from 7.6 gHa to (7.6+ 16/9.5=) 9.3 gHa, an increase of 22.5%.

In this example, activities affecting the Effectiveness of a community will have 20x the impact of activities affecting the resource availability of the community.

The US is vastly over capacity – I don’t have the numbers precisely, but they have a footprint that is about twice their biocapacity.  If we tried to address this through ‘efficiency’ alone, we’d have to increase the time it take people to meet their needs by roughly 80 minutes per day – that’s more than all the time spent in paid employment that meets needs in Canada, and that would be politically impossible to achieve (either wages would have to drop significantly, or age of retirement would have to rise significantly, or both).  By combining efficiency with effectiveness, though, a fraction of the time that isn’t being used effectively to meet needs (say 400+ minutes per day) could be reduced by that 80 minutes per day, and there would be no need to eliminate retirement, or accept 3rd world wages.  People would have fewer unmet needs, and the total wealth in the community would increase.