Book Reviews
| Date | 01 November 1977 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8543.1977.tb01145.x |
| Published date | 01 November 1977 |
British Journal
of
Industrial Relations
Vol.
XV
No.
3
BOOK
REVIEWS
Social Limits to Growth,
by Fred Hirsch. Routledge and Kegan Paul, London and Henley,
1977,
xii+
208
pp.,
f5.50.
THAT the earth’ssuppliesof raw materials and energy must set limits to growth is a familiar thought,
but the limits examined here are of a different kind. There are some goods of which everyone can
have more as productivity rises; but other goods that enter into the standard
of
living
of
the
well-to-do at any
one
time, and that their less affluent neighbours desire to possess as their real
incomes rise, cannot be
so
increased. It is
to
this second type that Professor Hirsch directs
our
attention. Some
of
them, such as the pleasantest locations
for
country cottages, are restricted
physically; others, such as ‘leadership jobs’, are restricted as a fact
of
social structure. Collectively
he terms them positional goods. As incomes generally rise in terms of the reproducible goods of the
first type, and people try to acquire more positional goods, the extended demand is adjusted to the
inexpansive supply by three processes: by congestion, as with the use of cars and the growth of
suburbs; by the bidding-up
of
prices, as with ‘leisure land’; and by another sort
of
bidding up-by
raising the level
of
the credentials required for access to ‘leadership jobs’.
The argument then stresses the costs generated by this process, and the disappointment of
individual expectations-when
I
choose to buy a car,
I
cannot tell how far my use of
it
will be
impeded by other people’s deciding
to
buy cars too. An especial point is made, that in
so
far as
positional goods are put up for auction, whether the price is paid in money
or
in ability
to
obtain
superior educational credentials, what matters
is
not the absolute level
of
my income but its relative
level: hence my disappointment when
I
am aware that my real income has risen, and yet in respect
of
positional goods
I
am no better off than before,
if
other people’s incomes have risen in the same
proportion.
What we need here is quantification, but Professor Hirsch’s argument tends always to move into
abstract terms. The three examples of positioned goods that he examines are leisure land, suburban
location, and leadership jobs. We must ask,
how
extensive in all are such goods? How big are the
costs associated with them, as standards
of
living rise, compared with the benefits brought by that
rise? The many people who have cars now and did not have them twenty years ago may have to wait
their turn at the lights, but ask them-they do like their cars. Professor Hirsch stresses the extent to
which certain amenities are inherently confined to a minority; but how much has television done to
give millions
of
people the best seats at all kinds of sport and the arts, of pageantry anctpomp! As an
initial question he asks why economic advance remains a compelling goal ‘even though it yields
disappointing fruits when most,
if
not all of
us,
achieve it’ (p.
1).
But whether most people in this
country have found the advance in their standard
of
living over the last quarter century
to
be a
disappointment is
to
be questioned.
So
is the ‘decline in sociability and specifically, friendliness’
which he says(p.
77)
has been observed in modem economies. He attributesit to
our
time being
too
much taken up with using all the gear
for
high living with which we are now provided, or with
earning the extra income needed to hold
our
own in the competition
for
positional goods; but
I
cannot recognise my fellow countrymen
in
this picture.
Readers of this joumal will be particularly interested in Professor Hirsch’s treatment of cre-
dentialism. Evidently he regards heightened competition for credentials admitting
to
top jobs as a
major cause of what has been taken
to
be educational advance in recent years, and thereby actually
as a cause
of
social waste, through the absorption of ‘excess real resources into the screening
process’ (p.
5
1).
Again the question is one
of
quantity. How many young people are there who are
completing a higher stage of education than they would choose and benefit from for its own sake,
solely in order to obtain credentials competitive with those that others are obtaining with equally
little educational benefit? Evidently Professor Hirsch thinks the number is great, for the one
specific measure he proposes in his concluding chapter on policy
is
to
cut down the relative salaries
of the top jobs,
so
as to discourage young people from seeking
to
acquire the credentials for entry to
them, and
so
leave higher education to those who will enter
it
for love not money. But surely the
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