Yes — you can model this as a percentage, but not as a single “correct” number like physics. It’s more like a design target: “How much of human time should be locked into keeping the granary running, versus living/creating?”

A clean way to do it is to define what the granary actually needs to cover, then cap everything else as overhead.

A useful Earth 2.0 way to measure it

Think of society’s labour/time split into three buckets:

1. Core granary (non-negotiable life support)

• Food & water

• Shelter & basic energy

• Sanitation & waste

• Essential healthcare

• Basic logistics and maintenance

• Safety/repairs/infrastructure

2. Support granary (helpful, but must be kept lean)

• Administration, coordination, planning

• Basic education and training

• Governance and dispute resolution

• Standard-setting, quality, compliance (only where truly needed)

3. Life/creation (the point of being alive)

• Creating (design, invention, art, building new things)

• Care (relationships, children, elders beyond “minimum care”)

• Learning, play, exploration

• Community, meaning, rest

• Culture and spiritual life (whatever that means to someone)

The Earth 1.0 failure mode is: bucket 2 eats bucket 3, and then bucket 1 starts to fail too.

Rough percentage targets (as design ranges)

These aren’t “truth,” they’re useful targets for a healthy civilisation:

• Core granary: ~10–25%
  (Enough to keep everyone fed, housed, powered, clean, medically safe.)

• Support granary: ~5–15%
  (Coordination exists, but it doesn’t sprawl into a control industry.)

• Life/creation: ~60–85%
  (Most human time is living, creating, caring, learning, resting.)

That “life/creation majority” is the big inversion: the granary is servant, not sovereign.

Should the granary be “just food”?

Food is the original and symbolic core, but in modern terms the minimum granary is:

• Food + water

• Energy + shelter

• Sanitation

• Basic healthcare

• Maintenance/repair

• Minimal coordination

So: not just food — but only what prevents death and cascading collapse.

Everything else has to justify itself by one test:

Does this reduce real load and increase human freedom, or does it merely create more granary to manage more granary?

A simple “granary creep” indicator you can use

Ask of any job/industry/process:

• Is it making or maintaining essentials? (core granary)

• Is it coordinating essentials leanly? (support granary)

• Or is it managing the consequences of a system that harms people? (granary creep)

A lot of modern “consumer” volume is actually that third category: harm-management, complexity-management, and status churn.