You do not have reliable access to clean fresh water: You fall ill more often and die earlier.

Now, unless you want to go all po-mo on us and claim that harbouring serious reservations about illness and death is a cultural myth and/or personal economic decision, I see a pretty good basis for an objective value system there.

Until all the world is an affluent society. Then a subsistence-based value system breaks down. But come the happy day when we manage to give everyone reliable access to clean fresh water, sound food, health care, education and so on, then figuring out what to do with any consequent (or remaining) abundance is going to be a comparatively unimportant problem.

- Jake

If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.