Keith,
It is normal
for new things on the market to have a high price at first. Then as sales pick
up, the price drops. Then others get into the act and the price plummets.
As I wrote
earlier, I have often been a buyer of new things that interest me. However,
this is hardly for status (or stratum) reason. Who would I show my “status”
to?
I buy things
because they take my fancy, not for status. I suspect a number of others do the
same. However, I have been in many houses in which the residents take me around
the house showing me “what they’ve got”. I am supposed to
make sounds of awe at their collections of ________ .
But, the high
price of an initial something, dropping to a lower, then rock-bottom, price is
a normal economic event.
However, I
haven’t got a cell-phone (a mobile). Think of the utmost snobbery in this
day and age in NOT having a cell-phone.
Harry
********************************************
Henry George School of Social Science
of Los Angeles
Box 655 Tujunga CA 91042
Tel: 818 352-4141 -- Fax: 818 353-2242
http://haledward.home.comcast.net
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From:
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On
Behalf Of Keith Hudson
Sent: Tuesday, December 16, 2003
12:10 AM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: [Futurework]
>From status to stratum
213. From status to stratum
Two articles which Karen Watters Cole has sent to us recently -- the review of
Virginia Postrels' book, The Substance of
Style and the Washington Post article,
"Acquiring Minds" by April Witt, has caused me to think furiously
that my term, "status good" doesn't help my case. "Status
good" is too easily confused with what we normally term a "status
symbol" or what the economist Fred Hirsch calls a "positional
good". So I'm now going to call my term, "stratum good".
However, the definition of a "stratum good" is the same as before. It
is a consumer product which is initially expensive -- and therefore denotes a
fairly high degree of status -- but which is then capable of being
mass-produced and, in due course, becomes affordable by all the social strata
as it becomes cheaper. When it is affordable by almost everyone, then it
loses its former cachet and becomes an ordinary "consumer good".
(About ten miles from here there is a pub in which lived the man who invented
the first flushing lavatory. No, it was not the Victorian gentleman, Thomas
Crapper, but someone long before him whose name I have forgotten. At first, in
Tudor times, the flushing lavatory was installed only in stately castles and
palaces. Today the former stratum good has become a consumer good. It took a
long time but it finally made it!)
I follow with an excerpt from April Witt's article which is really all about
status symbols (positional goods). They are bought in an attempt to show that
the purchaser has high status and, usually these days, such goods are branded
goods, such as Rolex, Gucci or Louis Vuitton which are supposed to be very
exclusive. (Of course, because these particular positional goods are so
artificially marketed, then they are obviously targets for counterfeiters.
"Real" positional goods in the sense that Fred Hirsch meant in his
book, Social Limits to Growth,
are things like gracious manor houses in beautiful countryside and private
sheltered beaches which will always be rare and can't be imitated or
counterfeited.)
I'll end my introduction by quoting the historian Gary Cross who, in his book, An All-Consuming Century: Why Commercialism Won in
Modern America, writes the following (the brackets are mine):
"This society of goods [of status symbols] is not merely the inevitable consequence
of mass production [of ordinary consumer goods] or the manipulation of
merchandisers. It is a choice, never consciously made, to define self and
community through the ownership of goods."
He's correct, but he's only halfway there, and he hasn't derived the full
economic consequence of all this. Yes, the choice of status symbols (and also
of stratum goods) is certainly meant to define one's place in the community
(though I'm not so sure that it is "never consciously made"). But
it's not a modern phenomenon -- as Gary Cross implies in the title of his book
-- but something that has happened ever since early man started trading for
pigments and gold for personal adornments, and that was at least 75,000 years
ago. The use of such status symbols (and also of stratum goods) rests firmly on
deep genetic instincts of rank and status which are not only necessary for the
organised protection of a small social group against predators but also serve
as indicators to young females as to which males are more likely to give them
and their children economic security.
The whole of our economic system rests on the ability of our frontal lobes to
interpret almost anything that is rare and novel as able to impart status. If
it is rare and novel only then it
is likely to be a status symbol (positional good). If it is rare and novel and has a degree of usefulness and is able to be mass-produced, then it
is a stratum good, able to be afforded by everybody in successive periods of
production.
The high profits made from the supply of status symbols (positional goods) is a
relatively microscopic part of the total economy, with only a little benefit
trickling down to those who were involved in making and marketing them.
However, because maximum profits can be made from stratum goods as they
successively work their way downwards, then these are the items that produce
further investment both downwards and sideways (into other similar goods) that
stimulate economic growth. Once stratum goods have reached the lowest
socio-economic levels then the profit margin is so very small that they are
hardly able to invest in normal maintenance of their production. This is where
the car industry finds itself today -- at least in the developed countries --
who are staving off bankruptcy from year to year. (There'll still be vast
profits to be made in the "catch-up" countries such as China.)
There is the distinct possibility that the middle class which usually initates
the purchase of stratum goods simply doesn't have the time or energy during their
normal working week to buy any more. So, therefore, the "consumer
society" of modern times may be coming to an end. At the present time, it
is quite obvious that politicians, central bankers (suchas Greenspan) and
economists are very worried indeed. Although economic growth is supposed to be
healthy (in America and the UK -- nowhere
else), interest rates are being kept absurdly low because the aforementioned
people are frightened what may happen if they are raised. Unconsciously I think
they are recognising that the end is nigh.
That is, the end to rampant consumerism. But if consumerism is really and
essentially about status then we don't need to keep on making more and more
consumer goods in order to find that magic bullet -- the next stratum good. If
we could re-arrange the ways in which we live and work so that we can re-create
community, then there'll be more than enough status -- and social inclusion --
for everybody.
Keith Hudson
<<<<
ACQUIRING MINDS
Inside America's
All-Consuming Passion
April Witt
A blonde with a perfect blow-dry flips through the pages of Us magazine on the
morning shuttle to New York.
She's not interested in reading about celebrities; she just wants to check out
what they're wearing. "I have this dress," she says, pointing to a
photograph of actress Jada Pinkett Smith wearing a $2,300 bronze-toned satin
Gucci cocktail dress with a wide belt shaped like a corset.
The fall shopping season is almost over, and Jamie Gavigan, a colorist at a Georgetown hair salon, is heading to New York City on one last fashion mission.
She wants to find a killer cocktail dress and satisfy her special footwear
urges at the Manolo Blahnik shoe salon.
Jamie shops in Washington,
too, at Neiman Marcus and Saks
Fifth Avenue and some pricey boutiques. But two or
three times a year, the 36-year-old single mother flies to New York to more fully indulge her fashion
passions. It's her reward for standing on her feet nine hours a day, mixing
chemicals and working straight through lunch to earn the six-figure income that
makes these shopping expeditions possible.
When the shuttle lands at La Guardia, Jamie hops into a cab and heads to her
favorite department store, Barneys, at 61st and Madison, one of the culture's
new cathedrals, where the affluent bring their soaring aspirations for better
living through luxury shopping. "It's all good here," she says.
"It's disturbing, isn't it? I like everything they have."
On her feet, she's wearing $750 Manolo Blahnik black suede boots with
four-inch-high stiletto heels. On her arm, she's carrying a blue Birkin tote
bag by Hermes de Paris. If you could buy one, which now you can't, prices for
the Birkin would start at $5,000 for plain leather and climb to more than
$70,000 for crocodile renditions with diamond-encrusted hardware. Swamped in
recent years by demand for the bag, Hermes had been asking would-be customers
to put their names on a waiting list. Jamie waited two years for her Birkin to
arrive. Last year, Hermes stopped adding names to the list.
In Barneys's airy, light-filled fine jewelry section, Jamie bends over a
display case and draws in her breath, the sound of sudden desire. Her long hair
spills forward, and her Hermes handbag thuds softly against the jewelry case as
she gazes upon a brilliant diamond brooch shaped like a starburst. At its
glinting center lies a round glass compartment filled with dozens of tiny,
loose diamonds. It looks like a profane rendition of a monstrance, the Roman
Catholic vessel in which the consecrated Host is displayed on the altar for the
adoration of the people.
Jamie wonders what the loose diamonds would sound like if she could shake them
like so many flakes in a snow globe. But at $30,000, this bauble is beyond her
reach.
"I bet it sounds good," Jamie says, smiling wistfully and adjusting
her pale blue pashmina shawl. "I have a feeling it sounds really
good."
Deny it, outraged, if you will. Rail against unchecked materialism like some
puritanical scold. Pray for the soul of a nation wandering lost in the malls,
more likely to shop than to vote, volunteer, join a civic organization or place
a weekly donation in the collection plate of a local house of worship.
Consumerism was the triumphant winner of the ideological wars of the 20th
century, beating out both religion and politics as the path millions of
Americans follow to find purpose, meaning, order and transcendent exaltation in
their lives. Liberty
in this market democracy has, for many, come to mean freedom to buy as much as
you can of whatever you wish, endlessly reinventing and telegraphing your sense
of self with each new purchase. Over the course of the century the culture of
consumption and American life became "so closely intertwined that it is
difficult for Americans to see consumerism as an ideology or to consider any
serious alternatives or modifications to it," historian Gary Cross writes
in An All-Consuming Century: Why
Commercialism Won in Modern America. "This society of goods is
not merely the inevitable consequence of mass production or the manipulation of
merchandisers. It is a choice, never consciously made, to define self and
community through the ownership of goods."
Washington
Post -- 14 December 2003
