Status Updates From Social Limits to Growth

“Individual expectations and hopes are built on the standards prevailing in the community. The general standard is a collective good in which all have an interest but none will affect perceptibly through their own actions. People looking individually to their own situations will therefore tend to neglect this collective interest.”

Trinkets (Adam Smith) cannot be turned into bread.

Pure social scarcity is implied when the satisfaction is derived from scarcity itself. It is not pure but a by-product of positional goods (in the sense that satisfaction is influenced by extensive use by others) the congestion of crowding reduces the quality perceived by the consumers.

Hirsch talks in terms of social scarcity - which is a general case of physical scarcity (since physical scarcity would often result in social scarcity). Studying of congestion in societies, then, becomes a legitimate way of understanding different social norms.

The distributional struggle is in fact higher because of growth. This is the result of the adding up problem. A proper indicator of social progress hasn't been found.

There is competition for every public good - for example the quality of schooling exists in two dimensions - there is one absolute dimension where quality is added by receptive students and good facilities but there is a relative dimension in which quality consists of differential with education levels against others.

As demands for private goods decreases the competition for public goods increases. The problem did socialism faced is that opportunities for economic advance as they present themselves serially to one person after another do not constitute equivalent opportunities for Economic advance by all. What each others can achieve all cannot

The differences between private and public consumption isn't always clear.

To a hungry man, satisfaction from meal is less sensitive to meals eaten by others.