Position competition

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Position competition is a concept from the field of economics or sociology . It was first made famous by the book Social Limits to Growth (dt. Social Limits to Growth ) of the British economist Fred Hirsch . It describes a phenomenon in which the benefit from consuming a good ( position good ) depends on whether other people also consume it.

Position goods and position competition

The concept of positional goods on which the position competition is based can already be found in the works of Thorstein Veblen (as status consumption ), James Duesenberry (so-called Duesenberry effect) and Roy F. Harrod . It was worked out systematically by Fred Hirsch after Tibor Scitovsky referred to Harrod's conference contribution, who outlined the problem there. The difference in particular to the contributions by Veblen and Duesenberry is that Hirsch shows that the position competition does not always have to be a consequence of status competition.

Hirsch considered material needs largely satisfied in advanced societies. As a result, according to Hirsch, items in position are becoming increasingly important. These are goods which, on the one hand, cannot be increased at will, ie are absolutely scarce, and which, on the other hand, lose value the more people consume them. Their value for the individual consumer thus depends on their relative position in the competition for these goods. This type of goods is differentiated from “material goods”, for which “mechanization or technical innovation” can lead to a larger production volume without the buyer seeing this changed production method as a loss of quality.

The position competition results from the "social scarcity" of the goods in question and at the same time fuels them. This scarcity, based on the relative position and consumption of the members of a society among themselves, cannot be removed by growth - hence the title of Hirsch's book, The Social Limits of Growth . Rather, the scarcity of item goods leads to a price increase, so that the share of household expenditure on item items increases. The promise that growth would lead to future needs being satisfied and increasing economic equality, and which justify today's renunciation of consumption and today's inequality, cannot be kept because of the scarcity of position goods and must lead to frustration and disappointment.

After a briefly intense discussion of Hirsch's approach, his book was largely forgotten. The concept of the position competition regained prominence when the American economist Robert H. Frank studied it extensively and popularized it. In his work, Frank emphasized the waste, growing inequality, and dissatisfaction associated with position competition.

Relevant types of scarcity

Hirsch distinguished between three types of scarcity that lead to position competition: physical scarcity, direct social scarcity, and indirect social scarcity. Physically scarce position goods are goods that only exist once, for example works by great painters such as van Gogh or characteristic natural landscapes. Direct social scarcity creates “pure” positional goods in which benefits are gained directly from the scarcity; Examples are limited editions or personalized (status) goods. Indirect social scarcity is used for goods whose intrinsic characteristics are beneficial (and not their scarcity per se), but which can be "degraded" by being "stowed". The "congestion" can be physical (e.g. sports cars, which are particularly useful on comparatively empty streets; land in suburbs) or social (e.g. higher education as a means of access to better paid jobs).

literature

  • Fred Hirsch: Social Limits to Growth . Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA 1976.
    • Fred Hirsch: Social Limits to Growth: An Economic Analysis of the Growth Crisis . Rowohlt, Reinbek 1980.
  • Robert H. Frank: Luxury Fever: Weighing the Cost of Excess . Princeton University Press, Princeton 2010, ISBN 978-0-691-14693-5 .
  • Robert H. Frank, Philip J. Cook: The Winner-Take-All Society: Why the Few at the Top Get So Much More Than the Rest of Us . Free Press, 1995.

See also

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Jonathan Aldred: The Skeptical Economist: Revealing the Ethics Inside Economics . Earthscan, London, Washington, DC 2010, ISBN 978-1-84971-209-5 , pp. 58-62 .
  2. ^ 2004 Leontief Prize awarded to Robert Frank and Nancy Folbre. Global Development and Environment Institute at Tufts University, accessed October 22, 2016 .