Positional Goods

The Young Foundation’s project on Positional Goods explores the emergence of new inequalities in modern Britain and the importance of relative position (“Keeping up with the Jones’s”).

Our Aims

• To understand modern trends in material consumption, celebrity lifestyles and ‘luxury fever’ as well as the slow decline in happiness levels, rising sustainability concerns, insecurity and household debt.
• To start a debate around practical policy suggestions that may shift the incentive to compete in the ‘positional economy’ – for example, the promotion of green fuels or congestion charges for sports utility vehicles.
  

Our Findings

In April and June we presented our findings at two Young Foundation seminars. Participants and discussants included James Cornford, Alice Rawsthorn, Prof. John Adams, Hetan Shah, David Goodhart, Donald/Tim/Phil Hirsch, Paul Barker, Jenni Russell, Prof. Danny Dorling and others.

In September the Young Foundation co-hosted a seminar on Positional Goods and Luxury Fever with the Smith Institute at Number 11 Downing Street – Professor Robert Frank from Cornell University and the psychologist Oliver James discussed the significance of relative position with an audience of policy makers and academics.

Our most recent presentation on Positional Goods is available here.

What are Positional Goods?

The economist Fred Hirsch’s theory of a “positional economy” suggests that two economies simultaneously exist:

• a material economy that fulfils peoples basic needs
• a more fluid and dynamic positional economy where people compete for relative status and position.
  

According to Hirsch, positional goods are those products or services which are inherently impossible to mass produce because their value is mostly, if not exclusively, a function of their relative desirability.

Research method

We looked at four different positional goods:

• SUVs
• Gated Communities
• Luxury Fashion
• Luxury Tourism
  

And asked “Is there a public problem?” and “Are there any plausible answers?”.

For more information, please contact Rushanara.Ali(AT)youngfoundation.org