positional goods Concepts

The Codebreakers: The Comprehensive History of Secret Communication From Ancient Times to the Internet

by David Kahn · 1 Feb 1963 · 1,799pp · 532,462 words

, if two messages of the same length are transposed in the same system with identical keys, their individual words will wind up in the same relative positions. To put it differently, if the first word of the plaintext becomes the 15th word of the cryptogram in the first message, the first word

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pattern of the other letter. So if the cryptanalyst can determine the displacements of the patterns with respect to one another, he can find the relative positions of those two ciphertext letters in the ciphertext alphabet. By determining the relative displacement of all the ciphertext letters in this fashion, the cryptanalyst can

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point of light from an illuminated image and transmitted it faithfully to the opposite end of the bundle. Here the fibers, which occupied the same relative position at both ends, reproduced the image in the form of hundreds of thousands of microscopic points of light and dark. Kapany realized that if the

The Transhumanist Reader

by Max More and Natasha Vita-More · 4 Mar 2013 · 798pp · 240,182 words

performance enhancement might even make people more diligent and move them to try harder – generally considered a good thing – if only to avoid loss of relative position. And it’s hard to see, if the same people keep on winning and losing, how you’re getting an inappropriate reinforcement of something for

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having the enhancement as well” (Buchanan 2008: 2). Buchanan points out that much of the ethical debate (cited above) about enhancements focuses on them as positional goods that primarily help an individual to outcompete his rivals. This characterization of enhancements leads quickly and ineluctably to pervasive zero sum thinking in which for

The Skeptical Economist: Revealing the Ethics Inside Economics

by Jonathan Aldred · 1 Jan 2009 · 339pp · 105,938 words

others earn on average $250,000. It may come as no surprise that most chose the first scenario, but less obvious is the fact that relative position matters more for some goods than others. The students were also asked to choose between another pair of alternatives (assumed to be entirely independent of

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. D You have 4 weeks’ vacation, and others have 8 weeks. With holiday entitlements, it seems that relative position mattered much less, since only 20 per cent chose the first scenario. Some early investigators of relative position assumed that only relative consumption levels matter for some goods while only absolute consumption matters for others

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dominant influence for some goods, and absolute consumption for others.27 But what makes relative position more important for some goods than others? Since concerns with relative position are a major factor in preventing growth bringing extra happiness, explaining why relative position matters brings us to the heart of understanding why growth does not buy happiness

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. And it raises the possibility of switching consumption towards goods where relative position matters less, so that growth can bring increases in happiness after all. There are

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several interrelated explanations of why relative position matters more for some goods. One explanation is status-seeking and conspicuous consumption. This idea

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has become so prominent that many seem to think that ‘concern with relative position or relative consumption’ is just a long-winded version of ‘status-seeking’. But despite its popularity among economists,28 this explanation does not take us

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able to afford them. A reduction in my relative income then implies a reduction in my opportunity to consume such goods. These are positional goods, since consumption is affected by relative position. Sir Roy Harrod, friend of Keynes and originator of the theory of economic growth, was the first to note the existence of

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positional goods. But Harrod did not attach much importance to his small contribution, a two-page article for a US conference, confessing later that he wrote

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heavily subsidized his air fare to the US...30 So it was not until years later that the significance of positional goods was first appreciated, by Fred Hirsch. The essential feature of positional goods is some kind of inherent scarcity, so someone cannot ensure access to these goods simply by becoming wealthier. Hirsch was

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scarcity comes in various guises, and suggested an explicit categorization of different scarcities (see Box on p60).31 Absolute physical scarcities generate the most obvious positional goods. There is no possibility of producing any more van Goghs, no matter how great the demand, so consumers must be willing to pay more than

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restrictions. Sometimes the supply restriction is not physical but socially induced, because some things are only desired if they are sufficiently scarce. Diverse scarcities: Diverse positional goods I Physical scarcity: e.g. natural landscape,‘Old Master' paintings. II Social scarcity: 1 Direct. Satisfaction derives from scarcity itself - ‘pure

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' positional goods, e.g. personalized car number plates,‘limited edition' products. 2 Indirect. Satisfaction derives from the combination of intrinsic characteristics and scarcity to reduce congestion: a

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relative scarcity. They are positional in the purest sense, since they would have little value if made available to all who desired them regardless of relative position. The football shirt may be affordable for most people, but it would lose its symbolic value if it were available to anyone who wanted it

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Hirsch puts it, ‘the first thing one wants to know … is how many others there are’.32 Education is perhaps the best example of a positional good caused by social congestion. There are by definition few elite occupations, conferring status, power and privilege, and relative educational attainment controls access to them. Now

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. A plain undergraduate degree may have intrinsic attractions, but its overall appeal would be greatly enhanced by its scarcity. Of course the appeal of many positional goods cuts across these motivations; again education is a good example. Tom values his economics degree course largely because of his intrinsic interest in the subject

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some extent, but some are more positional than others. This will come as a shock to the average economist, who may be dimly aware of positional goods, but only dimly, because economists have been taught that they are perverse exceptions, not the norm. (Although the boundary between positional and non

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-positional goods is not a sharp one, for the sake of simplicity I will continue to write as if it were.) It is time to sum up

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our money, we can affect the extent to which relative income matters. It would seem that, as individuals, we can sidestep the frustrating competition over relative position, which is bound to bring disappointment for most of us, by shifting consumption towards goods where rivalry is insignificant. So what is stopping us? The

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of rivalry as status-seeking or envy fits in well with the story of humanity as a crooked timber. Concern to maintain relative status or relative position shows the individual must be duped by advertising, or driven by envy or some other foolish or morally reprehensible motive. There are two distinct errors

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envy; second, even if this is not the case, attempts to improve relative position are irrational — a futile waste of time and effort. The first error arises from interpreting rivalry as motivated by pure status-seeking alone. Other categories of positional good are ignored. Even when someone does appear to be driven by envy

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seated, but individually rational. The problem is that we cannot coordinate our actions. Exactly this coordination problem applies to positional goods. Each of us tries to get ahead in the race for positional goods. I try to signal my superior ability by securing an additional educational qualification; you attempt to buy a peaceful house

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, ‘Consumers, taken together, get a product they did not order.’33 In this process of chasing positional goods, there is much waste of time, effort and other resources. In extreme cases we would prefer the positional good to be literally unobtainable (or have never existed) so that the wasteful chase is avoided. And yet

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do not reveal that people prefer the benefits of growth to its costs, because these choices are buffeted by external forces (the inherent scarcity of positional goods and the coordination problem) and involuntary internal psychological mechanisms (relative income as a rule of thumb, underestimating adaptation). So self-help is not enough: individuals

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green space, or better urban air quality. Strikingly, all these goods are also less prone to rivalry than conventional private material consumption. They are not positional goods, and the evidence — such as the relative holiday length survey reported above -confirms that people do not compete for status in terms of these goods

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, for now, we ignore these statistics. The empirical evidence on the costs of growth, our psychological understanding of adaptation and rivalry, and the phenomenon of positional goods, are together still very persuasive: growth does not buy happiness. And this conclusion fits with generations of philosophical reflection, literary tradition and ordinary experience. One

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, these are inevitably few in number, because ‘good’ is defined in relative terms, especially in education. As explained in Chapter 3, education is largely a positional good; no amount of expansion will increase the numbers who receive a relatively good education. Setting these problems aside, there remains the obvious cost in resources

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makes us no happier. To begin with, there is an obvious role for education to discourage futile status competition and explain how some truly valuable positional goods are, by their very positional nature, in intrinsically limited supply. Education can also be used positively to nurture a broader understanding of what it means

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that much of our concern with relative income is not mere envy but a rational response to a world where so many important things are positional goods. So there is an essential role for government to lead and encourage a coordinated switch away from pure status goods. Traditionally, economists worry that higher

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increases have little efficiency cost, because they counterbalance distortions already present, namely adaptation and rivalry. In economic terms, rivalry is like pollution (my gains in relative position have the side effect of harming yours) and adaptation is like addiction (I continue to chase higher income even though it does not make me

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economics, I have argued that Pareto improvements are not necessarily good things because inequality may increase. A standard objection to this argument is that, when relative position matters, then absolute gains for all do not imply everyone is better off, if inequality has increased. So there is no Pareto improvement after all

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consumption; they often do not enquire into the reasons for this concern, but when they do so, refer to status, and rarely if ever to positional goods. And some recent interpretations - Brekke et al (2003) - of Hirsch’s seminal work mention only the pure status-seeking type of

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-231, 233 political forums 214, 215 politics democracy and CBA 172-173, 177, 215 and happiness economics 137-138, 141-143 poll taxes 93-94 positional goods 59-61, 63, 190, 236, 237 post-tax distribution 85—86, 87, 98 precautionary principle 173—174 preferences 13, 14, 135—136, 225 and advertising

The Winner-Take-All Society: Why the Few at the Top Get So Much More Than the Rest of Us

by Robert H. Frank, Philip J. Cook · 2 May 2011

. The winner-take-all 14 The Winner-Take-All Society perspective suggests a number of practical policy changes that might serve this goal. Contests for Relative Position in Everyday Life The winner-take-all markets we have mentioned so far are high-visibil ity arenas in which people, many with celebrity status

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goods, but we prefer the more neutral and general term "posi tional goods," coined by the late economist Fred Hirsch.29 Sometimes the demand for positional goods reflects pure status seeking. But positional demands are often important even when buy ers are not consciously aware of any desire to keep up with

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. Spending on other goods, such as fine jewelry, foreign travel, and vacation real estate, goes up more than in proportion to the rise in income. Positional goods are in the latter category. Again, these are goods whose value depends in large measure on how they compare with 58 The \Vinner-Take-All

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status. Status matters in both rich and poor societies, but people devote a larger share of their incomes to positional goods in rich societies. As we noted in the last chapter, demands for positional goods give rise to winner-take-all markets because only a limited number of producers can credibly claim to have

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the best offering in any category. So as in come grows and, with it, the demand for positional goods, the payoff to supplying these goods will also grow. Reinforcing this effect have been signjficant changes in the distribu tion of income. The pretax incomes

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more concentrated at the top than it was several decades ago. The effect of this distributional change is to bolster still further the demand for positional goods, and thus to concentrate de mand still further on the handful of producers who supply them. The Amplifying Effect of Social Context In later chapters

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a corresponding rise in the in comes of those who produce luxuries. It is difficult to track movements in the prices of luxuries and other positional goods because the goods that confer status in one period are often completely out of fashion in another. There are a handful of items, however, whose

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periods of stasis. Over the long run, however, prices not only have Runaway Incomes at the Top 83 TABLE 4-2 The Rising Prices of Positional Goods Average Annual Percentage Increase Item Price (year) Pn·ce (1 992) (in 1 992 Dollars) Russian caviar (2 oz.) 2 0.37 (19 12) 129

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moment, we ob serve only that the growth in income and the increased income in equality of recent years-both of which foster demands for positional goods-increase private incentives to work longer hours. In her recent book, Schor has estimated that Americans do indeed work many more hours than they did

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pattern. Each worker attempts to produce more in the hope of gaining ground rela tive to the others, yet when all workers double their efforts, relative position remains largely the same. From a collective vantage point, the extra output summoned by unregulated piece rates is not suffi cient to compensate for the

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hours to work. They may be tempted to work longer hours in order to move forward in relative terms, yet when all work longer hours, relative position remains un changed. Workers might thus find it attractive to limit their working hours, which in effect is what the Fair Labor Standards Act does

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served concentrations of demand. Berlyne, 197 1 , p. 193. Notes 235 29. Hirsch, 1976. 30. For an extensive summary of the evidence for concerns about relative position, see Frank, 1985, chap. 2. 3 1 . Quoted by Prial, 1990, p. 54. 32. Faulkner, 1 983, p. 173. 33. Krugman, Fall 1992, p. 24

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, 172-177 in sports, 168- 1 7 1 Positional arms races, 1 1 , 13, 127- 1 3 1 , 134, 136, 137, 141, 1 42, 145 Positional goods, 4 1-42, 57-58, 82-84 Poussin, Nicolas, 83 Presidential Scholars Program, 153 Princess Daisy (Krantz), 64 Princeton University, 149, 152-154 Print media

The Metric Society: On the Quantification of the Social

by Steffen Mau · 12 Jun 2017 · 254pp · 69,276 words

apart. In the case of periodic measurements, we can also observe movements up or down the table over time. Even though a ranking only describes relative positions, any change is generally assumed to signal an improvement or deterioration in performance. Who's up and who's down has news value. Rankings serve

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always relative, never absolute, as the example of the Berlin TV tower shows. From this point of view, rankings can be likened to so-called positional goods, in that they cannot be multiplied indefinitely. They are in a sense exclusive – i.e., the position I occupy cannot be occupied by anyone else

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hierarchies 41–2, 43, 44, 48 and image fetishization 47 and motivation 45 as objectivity generators 41 performance-enhancing role 46 popularity of 41 as positional goods 45 purpose of 45 and reputation 48, 49, 50, 52 as social ushers 42 and status anxiety 46–7 university 6, 7, 43, 47–53

The Cult of Smart: How Our Broken Education System Perpetuates Social Injustice

by Fredrik Deboer · 3 Aug 2020 · 236pp · 77,546 words

about what precisely we want our social systems to accomplish. Fundamentally, social mobility concerns the extent to which individuals within a society can change their relative position within that society, whether financially, socially, or in other ways. Kids born into the bottom quintile of family incomes regularly moving up to the top

The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less

by Barry Schwartz · 1 Jan 2004 · 241pp · 75,516 words

of 130 when the IQ of others is 150. In most cases, more than half of the respondents chose the options that gave them better relative position. Better to be a big fish, earning $50,000, in a small pond than a small fish, earning $100,000, in a big one. Status

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or belong to the best country club. Not everyone can be treated by the “best” doctor in the “best” hospital. Hirsch calls goods like these positional goods, because how likely anyone is to get them depends upon his position in society. No matter how many resources a person has, if everyone else

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has at least as much, his chances of enjoying these positional goods are slim. Sometimes these kinds of goods are positional simply because the supply can’t be increased. Not everyone can have a van Gogh hanging

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Fever (New York: Free Press, 1999), in which he argues that much of the modern American taste for excess is driven by social comparison. better relative position S.J. Solnick and D. Hemenway, “Is More Always Better? A Survey on Positional Concerns,” Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 1998, 37, 373–383

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pessimists Philadelphia, Pa. pickers, definition of “picture-in-picture” TVs “picture-in-picture” TVs Plato pleasure thermometer Poland polls. See surveys Porter, Roy positional competition positional goods positive liberty postdecision regret posters PPOs prescription drugs presumptions Prilosec Princeton University prison population product placement, in movies prospect theory comparisons and description of endowment

Creating Unequal Futures?: Rethinking Poverty, Inequality and Disadvantage

by Ruth Fincher and Peter Saunders · 1 Jul 2001 · 267pp · 79,905 words

business investors and the wealthy. (Even if it can be argued that the incomes of poorer groups are not actually reduced in such moves their relative position is worsened.) Of course, the underpinning by governments of commercial law continues to provide advantages like limited liability to corporations and businesses which have never

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week, while a 1996 survey found that 63.8 per cent of people read newspapers or magazines daily (McLennan 1999). However, over the years the relative position of newspapers in the media environment has declined markedly, with per capita circulation halving between 1950 and 1990 (Morris 1996). There is a strong line

Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class Is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That Is a Problem, and What to Do About It

by Richard V. Reeves · 22 May 2017 · 198pp · 52,089 words

caveat: America’s growing class division does not mean that categorical inequalities on the basis of race, ethnicity, and gender have disappeared. If anything, the relative position of black Americans has worsened in recent years, as I have argued elsewhere.6 There are also race gaps in access to some of the

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this bring them a higher income, and all the accompanying choice and security, it is also likely to bring them safer and more interesting work. Relative position matters; it is one reason, after all, that relative mobility is of such concern to policymakers. Although I think Brighouse and Swift go too far

The Right to Earn a Living: Economic Freedom and the Law

by Timothy Sandefur · 16 Aug 2010 · 399pp · 155,913 words

means getting the truth entirely backward. It is the future that needs freedom. Implementing constitutional protections for economic freedom will require a reevaluation of the relative positions of democracy and 286 The Future of Economic Liberty liberty in the American constitutional order. This will be difficult for some, but it is already