Needs Make Power

Tue, 15 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0800

Needs Make Power

Imagine the first humans did not begin by asking, “Who should rule?”

They began with a more basic problem: “What can I not do alone?”

No single person can produce every necessity of life. One person may know where water is; another can hunt; another can make tools; another may have kinship ties, land, healing knowledge, protection, or food reserves. Dependence is not a moral failure. It is the basic condition of social life.

But the moment a need is both vital and controlled by someone else, dependence becomes a political relationship.

You need food. I control the granary.

You need water. A small group controls the well.

You need credit. A bank controls the money.

You need a job. An employer controls entry to income.

You need care. A family member controls time, attention, and everyday labor.

Now the central question of society changes. It is no longer merely: “Who has more?” It becomes:

Who controls the pathways through which other people solve the problems they cannot solve alone?

That is the resource-dependence view of power.

The core idea

Resource dependence theory (RDT) offers a powerful starting point: much social order is built around vital insufficiencies that no individual can reliably resolve alone.

Whoever controls access to the scarce, consequential means of resolving an insufficiency gains bargaining power—unless dependence is mutual, alternatives exist, or institutions deliberately redistribute control.

Power is relational, not a permanent personal trait.

From need to structure

Insufficiency -> External dependence -> Repeated exchange -> Power structure

The key question is:

When a person cannot secure a vital resource independently, where does that insufficiency go?

It becomes externalized into a relationship. When the relationship recurs, it becomes institutionalized.

The family, market, firm, state, profession, platform, and welfare system can all be understood as institutional arrangements for organizing recurring human interdependence.

The RDT mechanism

RDT element	Social-life translation	Teaching question
Need for a resource	A person or group lacks something necessary for survival, reproduction, security, status, or flourishing	What can this actor not provide for itself?
Resource importance	The resource is consequential; losing it carries high costs	How damaging is interruption?
Resource concentration	A small number of actors control access	How many credible alternatives exist?
Discretion over allocation	A supplier can decide who receives the resource, when, and on what terms	Who sets the rules of access?
Dependence	An actor needs another actor more than alternatives permit	Who has greater exit costs?
Power asymmetry	One side can impose terms because the other needs the relationship more	Who can say no and survive?
Institutional response	Rules, norms, contracts, organizations, or laws stabilize the exchange	What structure emerges to manage this dependency?

In compact form:

Power of A over B ∝ B’s dependence on A

B’s dependence becomes high when the resource is:

critical+scarce+concentrated+hard to substitute

Family as institution

The reproductive example is powerful, with an important qualification: sexual reproduction creates a species-level interdependence; it does not automatically create a simple or universal hierarchy between genders.

The analytical point is not that one gender inherently controls another. Rather, human societies must organize a complex bundle of interdependencies surrounding reproduction, pregnancy, childbirth, kinship, care, provisioning, inheritance, parentage, and child-rearing.

Consider reproduction as an extreme case of human insufficiency.

At the level of biological reproduction, no individual alone can reproduce the species through ordinary human sexual reproduction. The continuation of the population is therefore not fully internal to any one individual.

That insufficiency is externalized into relationships between people. But reproduction is not merely a biological event. It requires coordination around courtship, sexual access, pregnancy, childbirth, infant care, economic provisioning, inheritance, parentage recognition, and socialization.

Once these exchanges recur across generations, society creates institutions to organize them: marriage norms, kinship systems, households, inheritance rules, divorce law, schools, religious rules, welfare systems, reproductive medicine, labor markets, and childcare arrangements.

The family, then, can be understood as one institutional solution to a bundle of interdependencies—not only reproduction, but care, provisioning, protection, identity, and intergenerational transfer.

The family is therefore not the insufficiency itself. It is a social technology for organizing, stabilizing, and governing the insufficiency.

Where power enters

Family power arises when access to critical resources is unequally controlled. Relevant resources include:

Income and property
Legal recognition and inheritance rights
Control over contraception and reproductive healthcare
Time for caregiving and household labor
Social legitimacy and freedom from stigma
Custody, migration status, housing, and family-network support
Information, education, and employment opportunities

For example:

If one partner has independent income, legal rights, social support, and credible alternatives, their dependence on the relationship is lower.

If the other partner controls income, housing, legal status, childcare, or social recognition, exit becomes costly.

The issue is not simply who is “stronger.” It is who can withhold a critical resource, who has alternatives, and who can leave without catastrophic loss.

This is an RDT account of household bargaining power. It does not reduce family life to domination; families can involve love, commitment, altruism, identity, and norms. It makes visible the material and institutional conditions underneath apparently private relationships.

Case 1: The village well

There are 100 households in a village. Everyone needs water. One family owns the only reliable well.

At first, the well-owning family simply sells water. Soon, it begins deciding who receives water during droughts. Then it charges more. Then it asks for labor in exchange. Then it influences local decisions, because households that oppose it fear losing access.

Did the well-owning family become powerful because its members were more charismatic?

Or did it become powerful because everyone else’s essential insufficiency—the lack of water—ran through a resource it controlled?

Now change one condition at a time:

A second well is drilled.
Rainwater collection becomes cheap.
The village creates a public water authority.
Households form a cooperative and collectively buy the well.
A state regulation prohibits discriminatory allocation.

Each intervention changes power by changing alternatives, concentration, ownership, or rules of allocation. Power does not disappear because people become nicer; it changes because dependency changes.

Case 2: The company town

A mining company owns the mine, housing, store, transport, clinic, and sometimes even the local credit system.

A worker does not merely depend on the company for a paycheck. The worker may depend on it for the entire infrastructure of everyday survival.

Leaving the job may mean losing housing, credit, healthcare, community, and geographic access to alternatives.

This is not merely a transaction. It is a dependency system.

A worker may technically be free to quit, but formal freedom does not equal practical independence when exit costs are high.

Ask students:

What would have to change before the worker’s “freedom to leave” became meaningful?

Potential answers:

Portable benefits
Alternative employers
Independent housing
Public transportation
Union representation
Public healthcare
Credit outside the employer
Labor mobility and legal protections

Each is a mechanism for reducing dependency asymmetry.

Case 3: The platform ecosystem

A small software developer needs customers. A dominant app platform controls access to customers, payment processing, distribution, rankings, data, technical standards, and sometimes the rules of monetization.

The developer is legally independent. But is it strategically autonomous?

The platform’s power is especially high when:

Customers are concentrated on the platform
Switching to another platform is expensive
The platform can change policies or algorithms unilaterally
The developer lacks direct access to user relationships and data
The platform controls payment, discoverability, and technical compatibility

The developer’s strategic responses are classic RDT moves:

Multi-home across platforms
Build direct customer relationships
Diversify revenue sources
Form alliances or industry associations
Influence regulation
Integrate vertically where feasible
Develop substitutes or alternative distribution channels

RDT is not a theory of passivity. It is a theory of strategic action under externally structured constraints.

Many domains

Domain	Central insufficiency	Institution that organizes it	Typical power mechanism
Family	Reproduction, care, child-rearing, economic security	Household, marriage, kinship, welfare system	Control of income, care, legal recognition, reproductive autonomy
Organization	Capital, labor, knowledge, legitimacy, inputs	Firm, alliance, board, supply chain	Control of critical resources and access
Market	Exchange, employment, credit, distribution	Contract, firm, platform, financial system	Ownership, concentration, switching costs
State	Security, collective goods, rule enforcement	Government, law, taxation, public services	Legitimate authority and control of collective resources
Digital platforms	Attention, data, discovery, infrastructure	Platform ecosystem, app store, cloud, social network	Gatekeeping, standards, algorithms, data access

The family is not simply private, the firm not simply economic, and the state not simply political. Each is an institutional arrangement for handling interdependence—and each can generate power when access to critical resources becomes contingent on another actor’s decisions.

Class Exercise

Put this prompt on a slide:

Choose an insufficiency that people or organizations cannot easily solve alone.

Examples: income, care, water, data, legitimacy, security, reproductive healthcare, access to customers, visas, electricity, credit, or specialized knowledge.

Ask groups to answer:

What is the critical resource?
Who controls access to it?
How many viable alternatives do dependents have?
What are the costs of exit or refusal?
What institutional change would reduce the dependency asymmetry?

Then ask them to complete this sentence:

“Actor A has power over Actor B not merely because A possesses resource X, but because B needs X, cannot easily replace X, and bears substantial costs if access to X is withdrawn.”

Conclude with the central provocation:

What looks like personal choice here—but is actually structured by dependence?

Conclusion

Power is not mainly a thing that people possess. It is a position in a structure of unresolved needs.

Power is created when another actor’s survival, performance, or valued outcomes depend on resources you control.

Individual choices are often made inside an architecture of externally controlled necessities.

OMTs on Ray Yang, Ph.D.

Needs Make Power

Needs Make Power

The core idea

From need to structure

The RDT mechanism

Family as institution

Where power enters

Case 1: The village well

Case 2: The company town

Case 3: The platform ecosystem

Many domains

Class Exercise

Conclusion