David Sexton
Grand Old Snobbery of the Left
Titmuss Regained
By John Mortimer
Viking 281pp £13.99 order from our bookshop
Positional goods are goods in limited supply, goods to which access is determined not by wealth alone but by position.
If people want more washing machines and they have enough money, more washing machines can be made. But positional goods are the goods they’ve stopped making, such as time and space and Georgian houses.
Since money can’t create more of them, it doesn’t matter how much they cost, or that society as a whole should be rich or poor. All that matters is that a person should have better access to them than other people in that society.
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