The Resource Question of “How Much” with Things-Nouns

Nouns are things.  They are static, fixed.  What happens when you look at the world as made of nouns?  I started out the description of resources by getting clear on what you need – what you need to do something.  This is resource as a means to do something else.  I want to eat, so I need food.  By focusing first on the ends, eating, I look reactively to see what I need to do that, food.  Then I go to see how much food I could get to satisfy the need.  Wealth from this perspective depends on my ability to access what I need.  This method is very direct, and one that people still use for many decisions today.

This is the gift of noun-thinking, as well as its downfall.  The focus on how much is actually early-level verb-thinking, which is a natural state for human beings.  The downfall is over-focusing only on how much there is and not on how to get more.  Another obvious question that arises is, “what we can do with what we have?”  To take advantage of the best that noun-thinking gives us without getting stuck in it, a little technology helps.

I will start with a very common noun that influences my daily life – the amount of money I have.  The technology we will use is that of a “stock” (see figure below).  A stock is how much I have.  At a store, you might hear someone ask, “do we have any more shoes in stock?”  I will use a box to depict the stock of money I have.

 

 

Now that I have a stock of money, as we said, the next obvious question is, “how much is in the stock?”  How much money do I have?  The reason I want to know how much is in the stock is straightforward.  I want to know what I can do (see figure below).  To know what I can do, I need to know how much resource I have.  This question heads me off down the following path of reason.  If I want to do something, I need the resource.  Doing more is better than doing less.  If I have more resource, I can do more.  Therefore, having more resource is better.  This is a very sensible way of looking at a stock of a noun.  Up until a point.

 

 

Do I really want a lot more bread, right now?  I actually only want as much bread right now as I can consume, otherwise it will go bad, and that is a waste of resource.  So the “I want more” logic works, until it does not work.  This logic also does not help me understand how to get more of the stock.  It only helps me see how much I have and leads me to wanting more.  These questions lead us to needing to understand the flow of the stock, what increases or decreases it, which is a verb question.

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