There would seem to be a vital connection between human development, social development, need satisfaction, and accumulation. This can be represented by Diagram 1.

These relationships are more clearly seen in three dimensions as expressed by the tetrahedron in Diagram 2a. Note that this may be usefully skewed to indicate distorted relationships between the different processes, or limiting cases where one is identified with another.

The difficulty arising from this representation lies in the ambiguous status of accumulation as: a by-product of the process of need satisfaction, in that any effort to satisfy needs is always accompanied by an additional effort to accumulate the need satisfiers, possibly in anticipation of future needs a symbol or indicator of development achieved in the domain within which the satisfiers accumulated are considered significant a motivating or energising force for the development process due to the pattern of activities to which it gives rise in the effort to achieve need satisfaction a problem due to the distortions in the development process to which the consequences of that pattern of accumulation give rise in this sense accumulation may be viewed as a necessary waste product of the development process.

There is a further difficulty with accumulation in the context indicated by Diagram 1, namely that it "ties" or defines the processes of human development, social development and need satisfaction in terms of that which is being accumulated. As such the accumulation process restricts evolution of these other processes, limiting them to the level of whatever is being accumulated.