Letters to the Editor
View on The Economist website"You could have cited Fred Hirsch’s masterful 'Social Limits to Growth', first published in 1976. If more refined measures of GDP do only a better job of accounting for the consumption of material goods and services, they will not capture the paradoxical phenomenon so sharply articulated in the book by Hirsch, a former financial editor at The Economist. I refer to 'positional goods', which bestow social status. Their implication for enhanced social welfare is primarily through the change in relative status conferred by the consumption of such goods."
