IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ssb/dispap/239.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Are there Social Limits to Growth?

Author

Listed:

Abstract

Hirsch (1976) suggested that as consumption grows, an increasing proportion of the benefits people derive from consumption is due to a status effect. Status is a relative concept that cannot be increased on average; thus it may seem reasonable to expect that as consumption grows, the marginal benefits of consumption decrease more than the marginal benefits of status. In equilibrium, however, there will be price effects that may more than outweigh this effect. Thus, there is no a priori reason to expect more status-seeking behavior in richer societies.

Suggested Citation

  • Kjell Arne Brekke & Richard B. Howarth & Karine Nyborg, 1998. "Are there Social Limits to Growth?," Discussion Papers 239, Statistics Norway, Research Department.
    • Handle: RePEc:ssb:dispap:239
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.ssb.no/a/publikasjoner/pdf/DP/dp239.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Kjell Arne Brekke & Richard B. Howarth, 1998. "The Social Contingency of Wants Implications for Growth and the Environment," Discussion Papers 227, Statistics Norway, Research Department.
    2. João Bernardino & Tanya Araújo, 2010. "On Positional Consumption and Technological Innovation- an Agent-based Approach," Working Papers Department of Economics 2010/04, ISEG - Lisbon School of Economics and Management, Department of Economics, Universidade de Lisboa.
    3. Knut R. Wangen & Erik Biørn, 2001. "Prevalence and substitution effects in tobacco consumption: A discrete choice analysis of panel data," Discussion Papers 312, Statistics Norway, Research Department.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Status-seeking; relative consumption;

    JEL classification:

    • D11 - Microeconomics - - Household Behavior - - - Consumer Economics: Theory
    • D50 - Microeconomics - - General Equilibrium and Disequilibrium - - - General

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ssb:dispap:239. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: L Maasø (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/ssbgvno.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.