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Positional Goods1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2010

Extract

In days gone by, when we had something called Rapid Economic Growth, we used to worry about it. We worried especially about its social costs and its technical limits. If growth meant gearing people to efficient production, we would have to be geographically and socially mobile. That threatened our old ways of community life, with their neighbourhood values and extended families. There were more obvious costs too, like chemicals in the air and highways through the landscape. Furthermore, the cornucopia need not be bottomless. To sustain its effusions, nature might have to be pillaged until we ran out of trees or oil. Technology might hit bottlenecks so severe that costs began to outrun benefits. That would mean thwarting the new expectations which economic growth had aroused and which were its motivating force. But, for all that, our island race faced the horrors of affluence, abundance and goodies for all with a stiff upper lip.

Type
Papers
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 1984

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Footnotes

1

Warm thanks are owed to Derek Parfit for his unstinted and very helpful comments on the original draft and to Amartya Sen and others present when it was discussed in Oxford, where I was being partly supported by a grant from the British Academy, for which I give thanks also.

References

2 London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977.