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How much money is enough? | Vicki Robin | Big Think

Big Think | July 31, 2025



How much money is enough?
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There is a point when you have enough of what you need, says author, speaker, and social innovator Vicki Robin. And anything past that is just overindulgence and doesn’t take into account your environmental impact. Once you become aware of your financial sweet spot and how much you really need to consume, you will naturally spend less and be happier.
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VICKI ROBIN:

Vicki Robin is a prolific social innovator, writer, and speaker. She is coauthor with Joe Dominguez of the international best-seller, Your Money or Your Life: Transforming Your Relationship With Money and Achieving Financial Independence (Viking Penguin, 1992, 1998, 2008, 2018).
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TRANSCRIPT:

Vicki Robin: We talk about the old roadmap for money, and the old roadmap was born really out of the industrial revolution.

It was born out of the sense of the “wild west,” of “anything is possible,” of manifest destiny, of American exceptionalism, whatever you want to say.

Or you can go back even further to capitalism itself. But the roadmap is: “growth is good, more is better, whoever dies with the most toys wins.”

It’s a materialist roadmap, and the part of the roadmap is not only that; it’s an empty world.

“Uh oh, there were people here before the white people came. And, you know animals. There was already a living mature society—“ “No, no, no. It was empty.”

And then the other part of it is that one of the essential ingredients of it that still people, even if intellectually they understand it they do not get it, is that in that roadmap the economy can grow forever and the Earth is like just sort of a toy chest. You just keep reaching in there and pulling out resources, reaching in and pulling out resources. So the economy can grow infinitely because the Earth is an infinite cornucopia of resources.

The fact of the matter is that the economy is a fabrication, our economy is a fabrication, a set of rules inside a finite planet.

There’s a way to measure. There’s a way to measure the human impact, the impact of human consumption on the Earth. It’s called the ecological footprint, and they can measure every little scintilla of, you know, my watch and my eyeglass. Everything I have, everything we sit in, everything we walk around on, they can measure that in terms of the amount of the planet it took to develop that.

So we have measured the amount of planet we have and humans are consuming more than the amount of planet we have every year (that can be regenerated) ever since 1986.

That, to me, that data about overshoot has been a central feature of my life. When I learned that, it was just sort of one of those things that’s obvious, like, “certainly we want to change.”

So the old roadmap this idea that the Earth is a set of infinite resources, and the economy can harvest those resources every which way from Sunday in order to produce economic growth.

That’s fundamental and then it trickles down to the human as: “More is better.”

And part of that is as the economy grew, as industrialization permitted more products to be produced with less human labor there was a sort of a peaking out of consumption around the 1920s and it became a problem, like what are we going to do?

So there’s several ways to expand markets.

One is you export and another is to educate your citizens to want more than they need.

And then you’ve got an infinite market called the endless willingness of people to buy into the story of ‘more is better’ and ‘keep buying stuff.’

So that is the old roadmap: Growth is good, more is better, game over. Not talking about the context of our lives, the social context where fairness is sort of like built into us.

Babies all come with that stamp on them, you know. Fairness is important and so you cannot stretch fairness and believe that there’s no breaking point. So injustice aside, environmental integrity aside, more is better, growth is good, party on.

The new roadmap says that there is something called “enough” and “enough” is not sort of like this oppressive ceiling that, you know, “Okay, I’ve got enough and I can’t have any more.”

No, enough is this sort of vibrant vital place. What we teach is an awareness about the flow of money and stuff in your life in light of your true happiness and your sense of purpose and values. And that your “enough point,” having Enough, is having everything you want and need to have a life…

For the full transcript, check out https://bigthink.com/videos/vicki-robin-conditioned-to-consume-how-the-economy-grew-past-its-natural-boundaries

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Comments

This post currently has 49 comments.

  2. @CharlesVaughn-bm9gq

    July 31, 2025 at 7:28 am

    America has reduced carbon emissions five percent last ten years. China and India has raised their carbon emissions substantially, far more than could offset our red. They could care less about emissions. Developing countries never do. Fortunately forecasts of a climate catastrophe is overblown.

  3. @GariSullivan

    July 31, 2025 at 7:28 am

    04:00 is when she answers the question. Forty seconds later the answer is over. Spoiler: The answer is not that enlightening. You already know it. She says nothing you haven't already worked out.

  5. @dramairamm4157

    July 31, 2025 at 7:28 am

    The woman is a genius, best seller author… and the only thing you can comment is her necklace? Best to focus on your own neck… the one she is trying to save here…

  6. @caliber718

    July 31, 2025 at 7:28 am

    At a party given by a billionaire on Shelter Island, Kurt Vonnegut informs his pal, Joseph Heller, that their host, a hedge fund manager, had made more money in a single day than Heller had earned from his wildly popular novel Catch-22 over its whole history.
    Heller responds,“Yes, but I have something he will never have — ENOUGH.”

  15. @billygnosis6976

    July 31, 2025 at 7:28 am

    couldn't get through the BS of the first few minutes……life isn't fair and its because of the white man. We wouldn't even being having this discussion via the internet, websites, YouTube ect if the white man didn't create it……period.

  16. @roop5318

    July 31, 2025 at 7:28 am

    Really good points, but why are we limiting ourselves to this planet? There are several more, asteroids, empty space, etc. Saying the limit to human potential is the earth is like saying the limit to the American people is the land in America.

    We can go on expanding forever, we just have to expand our thinking beyond this planet.

  18. @brianmcg321

    July 31, 2025 at 7:28 am

    “Greed is Good” – Gordon Gekko.

    If it wasn’t for people that wanted more, YouTube and that iPad your watching this on wouldn’t exist.

  20. @cristinalacoste2062

    July 31, 2025 at 7:28 am

    This happened to me when I got the chance to join the company 401K plan. I remember thinking that I would contribute the maximum and scale back as needed. A year went by and I realized that I hadn't changed my spending habits. I also realized that had no idea what I used to do with that money. In the end that 401K made it possible to retire early.

  21. @arthurzetes

    July 31, 2025 at 7:28 am

    She says "we know how much planet we have" and that " the earth is infinite" is false. Well, maybe the earth isnt infinite, but we are not tapping into all the resources that are available to us.

    Maybe we are using more than we can regenerate… in the current model.

    But in the 1970s, before the green revolution, it was predicted that there would be mass starving based on the agricultural capacity of that time.

    You know what happened? We invented our ways out of that problem and hunger is at an all-time low.

  28. @winsettj

    July 31, 2025 at 7:28 am

    Incorrect framing of the actual problem. She doesnt understand the "roadmap" or history. She doesnt understand. Human ingenuity is unlimited. Automobiles, not a thing 150 years ago. Computers, 40 years ago… AI… space travel… with freedom and markets for ideas and resources… the possibilities are endless (I mean… cavemen would have thought what we have todaybis impossible… that we had broken the laws of the universe to generate the bounty we have today. There is so much more wrong here, but Ill cut to this: 1) Markets allow the most productive / efficient folks to gain and manage more resources (her concept of enough takes resources away from those that would be better able to manage it). 2) Generally speaking humans innately want more resources. It is an innate driver. Generally, speaking, Women want men with resources so their offspring are taken care of – men want more resources to attract better mating partners. 3) Nothing wrong with assessing your own spending etc (what YOU think is enough will be different than others)… that means youre managing your limited resources better.

  29. @mellissalarmond3605

    July 31, 2025 at 7:28 am

    You people need to stop dissing her necklace and actually listen to what she's saying, then you could use the brain you have and think, maybe the reason why she's wearing to necklace goes with what she's saying. That we as human consume too much, just looking at the necklace, it looks hand made from repurpose materials. Before you ridicule someone on appearance you may want to listen first, because you all sound like asses.

  30. @darbyohara

    July 31, 2025 at 7:28 am

    Great, spending advice with a green spin 🙄

    Humans can develop and improve resource production and utilization so that resources available become nearly unlimited.

    When whale oil was used for lighting we hunted whales to near extinction, then we discovered/developed an alternate resource to replace the whale oil.

  39. @elementalsigil

    July 31, 2025 at 7:28 am

    Babies have no idea what fairness is. All they know is to satisfy their desire. What is fair between 2 people can be anything based on what they need or desire. As long as a transaction is voluntary it is most likely fair or close to it for the involved parties.

  40. @brianhay4024

    July 31, 2025 at 7:28 am

    And I found the description of her epiphany and the ' of course we should do it' the least tolerant statement of the week. What if others consider the science of the matter and prefer a different s different course. Third stupid video from the Big Think

  41. @brianhay4024

    July 31, 2025 at 7:28 am

    Another nonsense video. Other than a few space vessels sent off world everything that has ever been on the Earth is still on the Earth just in a different form. Recycle, repurpose, conserve as is practical and enjoy life.

  42. @shadfurman

    July 31, 2025 at 7:28 am

    You don't need to consume more of the earth to keep expanding the value in an economy. The value in an economy doesn't come from matter, it comes from work efficiency. If I make an innovation where I can grow two apples with same same amount of inputs as one apple, I have decreased the cost of apples by half, for foe example, a person only has to work half as much time for one apple.

    People increased consumption for many reasons, one of them has been an ideology of materialism, true. An ideology that has born little fruit in happiness or wellbeing, more it was a symptom of trauma and fear. However, the gross consumption has mostly increased due to increases in population. Individual impact hasn't changed much. It seems like it, because we've changed so much, but we cut out a city and use that square footage for decades of different people.

    I agree there is a loss of meaning and fulfillment, I think largely due to the nihilism of not having to struggle to live. However, most people would agree that it's better their children are well fed and not dying of malaria, that is directly due to a large economy that made products and services cheap enough for the average person to afford with their labor.

    Maybe I'm misreading some sentiments here, but I feel compelled to insist that capitalism and materialism are not the same things, at all.

    Capitalism is the free exchange of value, that's it, full stop.

  46. @DinoRamzi

    July 31, 2025 at 7:28 am

    I find this video disturbing and dangerous. The narrative is one that seems to describe dangers we produce collectively. But the beauty of humanity is that we make these decisions individually and nothing has the right to legislate morality or spiritual growth.

Comments are closed.

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