Every morning, 733 million people wake up hungry. They have a need - urgent and real. But in the language of markets, most of them don't exist. Because markets don't respond to need. They respond to demand. And demand requires money.
Alfred Marshall defined it clearly in 1890: demand is not desire. It is desire backed by the power and willingness to pay. A starving person needs food whether they can afford it or not. But only the person who can pay creates a market signal.
This gap between need and demand is not a small detail. It is the central fact of modern economic life.
Abraham Maslow's hierarchy - validated across 123 countries and 60,000 respondents - confirms that human needs are universal. Food, safety, belonging, esteem, and purpose. Every person on earth experiences all five. But markets serve them in proportion to purchasing power, not urgency.
Research makes this painfully visible. Healthcare and food, the things people cannot live without, carry the most inelastic demand. People go into debt for insulin. They skip meals to keep the lights on. The market's harshest pressure falls on those with the least power to resist it.
And behavioral research by Kahneman and Tversky adds another layer: much of what we think we need has been constructed for us. Algorithms don't discover our preferences. They manufacture them.
Markets are not broken. They do exactly what they were designed to do - serve effective demand. The problem is that effective demand and genuine human need are rarely the same thing.
Every business decision, every investment, every policy built without understanding that gap is built on incomplete ground.
The distance between what people need and what economies provide is not a gap. It is a choice.
