Jay Hanson com> wrote: > Our current crisis arises from our innate drive for social status. "Status" > is our most-powerful, culturally-determined (not physical like sex) innate > drive. People will even kill their own children for status (e.g., honor > killing). > > In our society, positional goods (and money itself) determine one's > neighborhood status. I don't see any way that enough people will voluntarily > give up the status treadmill unless the economy completely collapses. > Which, unless a miracle occurs, is precisely what's going to happen.
While there is a "keep up with Jones" mentality in consumer spending (made famous among economists by James Duesenberry),[*] it's a mistake to blame the crisis on some innate drive for status. First, the status competition can be ended if people cooperate (say, to enjoy non-commodity goods and services) rather than seeing each household as a totally independent entity. Second, even without cooperation of this sort, I don't think it's a status competition that caused the crisis. These days, most people -- even "middle class" ones -- are just trying to "get by," much more than they are trying to prove themselves better than their neighbors. In the face of declining real incomes, many people did "over-consume," but not in the sense of consuming for status competition but instead in the sense of borrowing too much money (to try to get by). Crucially, this "over-consumption" was fueled by a financial event, the housing bubble, not by excessive purchases by consumers. It's the bubble that allowed the excessive borrowing: without it, people wouldn't have had the (putative) collateral that allowed the borrowing. More fundamentally, status competition shows up in different ways in different types of societies. In a simple society with barter relations (where commodities are exchanged for commodities, C-C in Marx's language) or in the idealized market system of Adam Smith, where consumption is the main motive (commodities sold for money to buy other commodities, C-M-C) there is a much more limited role for status competition than in capitalism (M-C-M+extra M). This is because there is no natural limit to the accumulation of money (and other financial assets) and the power that goes along with them. But there is a natural limit to the accumulation of goods and services. -- Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante. [*] Our town (Torrance, CA) is a northern outpost of conservative Orange County within Los Angeles County. Here, one way that status competition shows up is in the "Christmas Tree Neighborhood" near our house, where the decorations seem to get more and more grandiose each year. Alas, it's creeping into our (more modest) neighborhood. Can King Canute order the tide to go out? _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
