> It seems rather vacuous to claim something as more necessary than something else.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs

Read that page a moment and I think you might realize degrees of need isn't such a vacuous idea.

That is not a measure of needs. In other words, needs are not being measured against an objective (numerical) metric.

That is a proposal for a dependency graph of needs. It is explicit in the name: hierarchy.

So no, that theory is not measuring a degree of needs.