Fred Hirsch's Social Limits Growth is one of the sleeper hits of economics. Its brilliant and acute insights, informed by Hirsch’s experience as a journalist at The Economist before turning to academia, have become ever more relevant as liberal capitalism confronts challenges from austerity to the global race for scarce resources.
Hirsch makes the case for what he calls "positional goods", which derive their value from being scarce in ways that can’t be relieved by technological advancement, such as a Rembrandt painting, a priceless antique or even an elite, private education. Crucially, Hirsch says, their value lies in the social position their ownership allows one to occupy. He contrasts them with material goods, such as flushing toilets, opportunities to travel, and high-quality food. There is no such positional status afforded by their ownership because, despite a relatively high cost at their introduction, soon everyone has them. Once such material goods cease being luxuries, people begin to want other things, which Hirsch memorably and prophetically describes as "the needs of the mind and psyche". But these only serve to entangle us in an inescapable war between consumers, as each of us strive to be better than average, reflecting the very limits described by the title of Hirsch's book.
A devastating account of the way consumerism, conspicuous consumption and the expectation to be better off than the last generation undermine the delicate social capital that has previously bound individuals and communities together, Social Limits to Growth is a book whose message is more urgent now than on its first publication nearly fifty years ago.
This Routledge Classics edition includes a new Foreword by Daniel Halliday.
Foreword to the Routledge Classics Edition Daniel Halliday
Preface
1. Introduction: The Argument in Brief
Part 1: The Neglected Realm of Social Scarcity
2. A Duality in the Growth Potential
3. The Material Economy and the Positional Economy
4. The Ambiguity of Economic Output
Part 2: The Commercialization Bias
5. The Economics of Bad Neighbors
6. The New Commodity Fetishism
Appendix. The Commercialization Effect: The Sexual Illustration
7. A First Summary: The Hole in the Affluent Society
Part 3: The Depleting Moral Legacy
8. An Overload on the Mixed Economy
9. Political Keynesianism and the Managed Market
10. The Moral Re-entry
11. The Lost Legitimacy and the Distributional Compulsion
Part 4: Perspective and Conclusions
12. The Liberal Market as a Transition Case
13. Inferences for Policy.
Bibliography
Index
Biography
Fred Hirsch was an Austrian-born British economist and Professor of International Studies at the University of Warwick. Born in Vienna in 1934, after the Austrian Civil War, his family emigrated to Britain. Hirsch graduated at the London School of Economics in 1952 before working as a financial journalist on The Banker and The Economist, where he was financial editor from 1963–1966. He was a senior adviser to the International Monetary Fund from 1966 to 1972, before becoming a research fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford, from 1972 to 1974. Already the author of several books, it was here that he started work on his best-known work, Social Limits to Growth (RKP, 1977). In 1975 he joined the University of Warwick as Professor of International Studies, where he worked until his death in 1978 at the age of forty-four.
'Important books are rare. They are all the more welcome when they appear; and one need have no hesitation in naming as a classic Fred Hirsch’s new analysis of the inherent defects of the market economy as an instrument of human amelioration.' - Peter Jay, The Times
'An exceptionally interesting, original, and well-written book on one of the most important themes: what are the fruits of economic growth and why do they seem increasingly disappointing?' - The Economic Journal
'This highly original book makes a compelling argument that affluence, by creating a kind of congestion (much more than simple crowding), limits the welfare attainable by society as a whole.' - Foreign Affairs
