The Sufficiency Principle as the Ideas Quintessence of the Club of Rome

Abstract

The paper suggests an approach to solving some basic economic problems and corresponding to them mathematical tasks, taking into account the principle of sufficiency, which, in the authors' opinion, is the quintessence of the ideas of the Club of Rome. According to this principle humanity must rationally limit its needs, produce and consume just a sufficient number of goods and in sufficient quantity. The goal of this paper is to demonstrate opportunities of application the principle of sufficiency for dealing with some problems (tasks), namely the consumer task and the producer task, both aimed at the achievement of not maximal but sufficient utility. In addition, the problem of optimal linear production planning aimed at the search of an optimal plan which from all admitted plans provides a maximal profit is considered. Since nowadays there is no common method of solving all these problems, possibility of finding their private solutions is described.