OT
AFAIK, the term was coined by Fred Hirsch, in his book (from sometime in the 1970s, I think) Social Limits to Economic Growth. Hirsch (sp?) drew a distinction between material goods, which are subject to familiar market forces like economies of scale and decreasing marginal cost of production, and positional goods, which are intrinsically limited. The classic example of a positional good is the house with a private beach. (Limited supply, value diminishes if everyone can picnic there.) For the reasons you mention, education is a problematic example; investment banks ensure that stocks never last long as positional goods. (And I would argue that the knowledge that demand will beget supply, at least in the US, means that investors never value stocks as positional goods.)
(Hirsch's argument, if you are interested and if I am remembering it right, was that in affluent societies people care about positional goods, so the increasing wealth generated by market economies doesn't improve people's lives. Instead, they have to generate more and more economic activity just to maintain access to the same level of positional goods, and this makes them unhappy. I'm not terribly sympathetic to the argument, though I think the distinction between material and positional goods can be useful in certain circumstances.) |
