What answering the Thorstein Veblen Question would require
Taking Veblen’s analysis seriously would require questioning the assumption that more consumption automatically improves well-being. At minimum, it would involve:
Distinguishing between need-based consumption and status competition.
Reducing inequality, which intensifies positional consumption pressures.
Reframing prosperity around wellbeing rather than material throughput.
Designing economic policy that discourages wasteful status races.
Promoting social recognition through contribution, creativity and care rather than material display.
Such changes would not suppress human aspiration. They would redirect it.
Status competition is how men get laid. What fun that Spud is to direct what is allowable as a mark of status, eh?
Different post but this is just brilliant:
From a Funding the Future perspective, modern economies are increasingly dominated by rent extraction rather than productive activity. Housing costs, financial fees, monopoly pricing and intellectual property charges all represent forms of rent that transfer income without expanding real output.
Reducing rent extraction is therefore central to building a fair and resilient economy. This can involve taxation of land and wealth, stronger competition policy, regulation of monopolies and access to finance, and public ownership of essential infrastructure so that access to key resources is determined by social need rather than private privilege.
Translated – endless grift and attempting to get a sinecure have failed therefore the state must punish people more successful than me because they are guilty of ‘rent extraction’ – what a deeply sad individual he is. Was he perhaps the future vision of the late Hannah Arendt when she postulated on the ‘banality of evil’? After all he could ‘see himself’ in Dachau – a vision shared by many denizens of this blog.
And he complacently assumes that his grift is somehow “productive activity” in his terms rather than status-seeking…
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“rent extraction” is another word for “having a pension”.
How *DARE* you want to be able to afford to eat when you are no longer capaple of working, or nobody is prepared to pay you to work any more, or you just plain no longer want to work. You should just fuck off and DIE!!!!! You’re probably Jewish as well!
Re “rent extraction” is another word for “having a pension”.
No, getting a return on investment isn’t ‘rent extraction’ in the econonomic sense. There’s a distinction between normal and supernormal profits.
The idea of economic rent as unearned income is explained by Smith in the Wealth of Nations:
“As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for its natural produce. The wood of the forest, the grass of the field, and all the natural fruits of the earth, which, when land was in common, cost the labourer only the trouble of gathering them, come, even to him, to have an additional price fixed upon them. He must then pay for the licence to gather them; and must give up to the landlord a portion of what his labour either collects or produces. This portion, or, what comes to the same thing, the price of this portion, constitutes the rent of land ….”
But in neoclassical economics, the accusation of ‘rent-seeking’ went well beyond land and natural resources, to all kinds of payment to the owner of a factor of production in excess of the costs needed to bring that factor into production generally due to some artificial contrivance. Professional bodies or guilds, labour unions, monopolies are all common targets. For example wages for a particular job may be kept artificially high by requiring a professional licence or permit, so the returns of owning such a licence or permit resemble the unearned income stream from owning land.
It’s rather unfortunate that when economists (or wannabe economists) say “rent” they mean this more abstract contract rather than, say, what a buy-to-let investor means by “rent” as a retirement income, but there we are.
Yes, ‘rent’ is a very unhelpful term, because people think they know what it means but in economics it means something else.
Is there a better term we could try to adopt?
‘Superprofits’ is better, but again people are going to include in that any profit that they don’t approve of.
’Monopoly profits’ is probably too restrictive.
This is complicated by the way some economists use “rent” only in the situation where the supply is fixed (eg land – but this still doesn’t coincide with the layman’s definition of the word), and when the supply can change over time there are also “quasi-rents”. https://economics.stackexchange.com/questions/53725/what-is-the-difference-between-economic-rent-and-economic-profit#53727
But I think I’ve only ever heard the phrase “rent-seeking” in connection with the kind of “rents” we are talking about here. This is definitely an area that would benefit from a cleanup of terminology.
How is ‘rent’ different from ‘tax’? There’s producing and there’s consuming. Anything which gets between them is pay-to-play no matter who does it.
Even on the technical definition of ‘rent’, you still have to provide something in return.
So your rent doesn’t go down, it’s just more of it goes to government.
Or so he thinks. In reality, this will just raise rents. At which point government can spend more to subsidize their favored people.
Hint: not anyone who actually does anything productive, because those people won’t vote for them, and won’t march for more pay for government workers.
Murphy seems to be obsessed with status. His wangling for a peerage, then a dodgy professorship instead, and his insistence that people address him by his new title.
He mentions any of those ‘top 1,000 people in…’ lists that he gets on. He even got FCA status, before he left the ICAEW (ACA is the professional qualification, FCA, the Fellowship, is meaningless self-promotion).
And remember when he was “the man behind Corbynomics”, addressing big rallies and preening like a rockstar?
Here he is describing himself, in his own words – no way is this someone who is not obsessed by status:
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/dec/30/murphys-law-meet-the-man-behind-corbynomics
His objection therefore must be not to status, for he clearly desires it, but to other people having status when he doesn’t.
You’re dead right. I don’t think I’ve come across anybody more obsessed by money and status than he is. He scribbles down the same resentful crap every day and expects to be king of the world.
Such a genius should not have to work. He should be rewarded with a title and a seat at the opera.
Was the Spud and FCA? Wow. This side of the pond, they are generally for unarguable merit (I have a couple of self-made multi-millionaire buddies who were made fellows), or ‘service to the profession’ – often as an Institute apparatchik or teacher / professor type – but of accounting, not ‘political economics’ or whatever tripe the murphster served up. Long-serving politicos, maybe. I can’t see the Spud in any of those categories, I have to say.
It’s a lot easier in England. Basically keep your nose clean for ten years after qualifying , and fill in a form.
I bet he has wet dreams about being appointed Commissar of Needs-Based Consumption in some future
fascistcourageous state.It’s my money and I will spend it as I like. (Subject to veto by my trouble and strife, of course.)
No it isn’t!! It belongs to the Courageous State.
Candidly, there is a wall and a firing squad waiting for you.
Lol rhoda. ‘Er Indoors gets a lot of say with me too.
Trigger warning (to be all trendy) – do not read further without adequate supplies of mind bleach.
Back when Murphy was doing his “wanna be a tax rockstar” “inventor of Corbynomics” thing – fawning articles in the Guardian, appearing as Corbyn’s warm-up act at over-excitable political rallies, hearing the swirl of ermine, that sort of thing – was it to try to get (how shall I put it?) ‘undeclared benefits in kind’ from any of the madder Corbyn groupies?
Sorry, I did warn you.
And did that tie in, timewise, with him losing weight and his wife leaving him, often signs of a mid-life affair?
But I quickly realised that, for Murphy, it seems status is the end in itself, not a means of getting nookie, so the world is probably safe from that.
Standard commie, then.
Are Quaker girls goers?
They sometimes go.
Apparently so, as he did marry a bird he met at a meeting.
And apparently they don’t say too much. (Not that I’m suggesting… I’ve said too much myself)
From my very cursory investigations it was more the other way around. He went to Meetings to persue the bird. There’s Birthright Quakers, there’s Convincement Quakers, and then there’s.. ahem… Legover Quakers.
Or in Murphy’s case, those who quake with one hand only.
Where do train sets stand in all of this?
A signal question, well on track and making good points.
There is a serious revelation of all Socialists in Murphy’s article that goes beyond his narcissism. They all want, no need (geddit?) to show that the rational behaviour assumption is just dead wrong. For that assumption explains choices they don’t want people to make. And they must be the ones making the choices. People’s choices must be declared irrational.
And they do need to emphasise how anything that is a want and not a need is bad, bad, bad. Because, only by declaring that it is providing for need, need that it itself determines, can Socialism declare itself successful. The moment people point to the absence of the things that make their lives liveable is the moment Socialism dies.
Have you heard how amazing health provision is in Cuba? There you go, peoples’ needs provided for.
Status competition is how men get laid.
Which of course raises the question, impossible as it may seem, if when & how did Spud get laid? For there’s every indication it might have happened at least once..
By a junior partner of an accountancy firm of which he was senior partner
I’ve found being a reasonably nice guy, willing to treat but not overspend, and living up to your promise to come home from the pub on time works ok. I’m not sure how Spud managed it.
Well, he’s not going to be out late at the pub, if it’s true he’s been banned from them all.
Suspect he fails on all your other factors though.
There is a neoliberal argument for closing a lot of university courses, that the skills learned in the degrees are rarely relevant in the job markets and so the main benefit of going is positional. Many graduates with masters are doing jobs that could have been apprenticeships out of sixth form, and firms are using the degrees as a kind of filtering tool, but those publicly subsidised courses are essentially a waste of resources if viewed in their own terms. Since higher socio-economic groups are more likely to send their kids to yooni, the whole racket is also inegalitarian.
Personally I think there is something in the argument that society or government should find ways to divert consumption from “arms race” good whose benefit is mainly positional, and towards those with positive overspill effects (classic example – there’s a positive externality of people being interested in maintaining their house frontages and keeping a verdant front garden because it makes the area nicer for other people to live too). But I suspect people like Murphy would be horrified at the idea of this principle being used against those positional goods he himself finds status-worthy.
Rant incoming….
Almost every job I see that is described as “IT” demands applicants have a degree, most commonly demanding Computing Science or similar. Yet from experience I know that these jobs as just plain basic office admin. Resetting passwords, changing toner cartidges. The modern world equivalent of office boy. This is ABSOLUTELY no way a job that requires a degress, and certainly not a job that requires you to get 50 grand into debt to get into. This is the sort of stuff you leave school at 14 and go into. Employers demanding a degree for an IT job, and universities calling IT training “computing science” is one of the greatest frauds in history.
I have encountered youngsters who have accidently managed to do an actual proper actual engineering course blinking startled in the sunlight wondering why as a software engineer they’re in effect managing a stationery cupboard, why on earth the employer demanded a software engineer to manage a stationery cupboard, and have seen them leave and take up better paid work stacking supermarket shelves.
I had the same experience. After more than six years doing hardware and software design and development in my teens, and three summers of work experience doing specialised medical sensing and monitoring equipment hardware and software design and development, I spent three years in a “Computing Science” degree course wondering when we’d actually get around to doing some, y’know, actual computing stuff. Not realising until way too late that “Computing Science” is about *USING* the damn fuckers, not *MAKING* them. “Computing Science” is the science of *USING* computers to accomplish a task. In other words…… I.T.
The other day I happened to read somebody reminiscing about building a 6502-based single-board computer and designing the hardware I/O and writing the drivers for it….. in 1989. NINETEEN FUCKING EIGHTY NINE! That is *EXACTLY* what I thought I was going to university to do at the exactly same time. That’s exactly what I’d been doing myself for the previous eight years, and was expecting that’s what I would progress into through university. How the fuck was he doing that at university when at the same time I was essentuially being taught HOW TO FUCKING TYPE.
At least 75% of universities and university courses need to be exterminated.
“wondering why as a software engineer they’re in effect managing a stationery cupboard, why on earth the employer demanded a software engineer to manage a stationery cupboard”
Blame HR, and the laws introduced for HR to have stuff to do. You can’t fire incompetents, and it’s very difficult to tell (legally) if someone is incompetent unless you’ve seen them work.
The degree, plus rewriting the job description to require that degree, was intended as a method to have a floor on competence for hires.
Of course, it was never a perfect shield, and now the degrees have been watered down (via more HR “you have to pass these people” in the schools), so that part is failing.
I’m not sure what’s next.
If people want to get a degree in applied basket weaving for the status, or for three years of boozing and shagging, or whatever, that’s fine. It’s no different to them buying a barge to drink G&Ts on.
But there’s no way the rest of us should be forced to subsidise it.
Although possibly Grievance Studies degrees should be actively suppressed, due to their damage to society. Externalities do matter sometimes.
Make the universities responsible for the loans. With a limited claim if they are not paid back. Moral hazard, I think it’s called.
This would make universities more selective about the courses they teach and who they admit but it would also encourage them to provide better career guidance and support which would be a useful side effect. A lot of youngsters seek to get to the end of their degree with no firmer knowledge about their options than when they left school.
But keeping up with the neighbors is also somehing of an “arms race” No need to ‘divert consumption’, least of all if government involved. Chap called Smith, something about an invisible hand.
“But keeping up with the neighbors is also somehing of an arms race” – this is exactly my point, that a status arms race doesn’t have to be a bad thing. It depends what is the object of the race.
Smith’s use of the term “invisible hand” was about beneficial unintended consequences of someone’s self-interest, rather than what modern economists post-Samuelson use, or criticise, the phrase for – in terms of free-market transactions potentially producing some kind of social optimum. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_hand
But neoclassical economists analysed externalities and pointed out that self-interest alone can produce far from optimal results if the positive or negative impact on others is significant and is not reflected in the individual’s costs or benefits. The fact that other people may enjoy your front garden is not something people tend to factor in when deciding how much effort to put into gardening. (Not so much a British thing, but many middle-class areas of the US resolve this externality problem by having local rules on the minimum standard for front gardens – often unfortunately restrictive and biased towards lawns rather than other forms of gardening, but it’s an attempt to solve the issue. An economist might propose cash prizes for particularly attractive gardens visible to the public and which enhance the state of the neighbourhood.)
There are other ways to “keep up with the Joneses” that have a negative externality like the race to have the most gas-guzzling sports car or Chelsea tractor on the driveway, which doesn’t do much good for the local particulate levels. Most free-marketeer economists would favour Pigovian taxation to keep a lid on that kind of status race.
Or we could try Freedom.
“Reducing inequality, which intensifies positional consumption pressures.”
So Murphy advocates increasing “positional consumption” whatever that is (eating places would be one interpretation but Murphy is more likely to consume a series of political positions, adopting one when it seems likely to gain him preferment and dropping it as soon as an alternative position on the political spectrum seems more advantageous).
The core belief of commies like Murphy is that freedom is bad. Normal People can’t comprehend that, hence, are defenseless against it. Commies declare they are ‘fixing’ things, and Normal People think, “Oh, good.”
Like ‘reducing inequality.’ It is meaningless, but NP think, “M’kay. Inequality is bad.”
Murphy’s word salad of causes are meaningless, but the commie theme shines through:
Third party control. His goal is elimination of private choice. Choice – freedom – gives value to life. Murphy insists on a life of gray dystopia. For others.
But if choice is eliminated, how are the decision imposers chosen?
By what right do *YOU* direct *MY* aspirations?
Toil, duty and sacrifice. That’s what Lenin demanded, so it must be right.
He wasn’t wrong in that, but it should be for yourslf, not the courageous but ungrateful state.
Hahaha.
The ascetic former Prof(s) rails against consumerism frrom (one of his many) top of the line Apple products, videos it on one of his top of the line Sony cameras, all while supping one of his many daily cups of coffee in a cafe. Let them drink Nescafe Gold Blend!
What an utterly vile repellent cvnt the man is. A pestilence be upon him!
Indeed.
To every classroom of young professionals in front of whom I stand and who approvingly nod when I question “to each his needs?” I get them to hold up their phones and their laptops and ask them when, exactly, in which month and year, did they become a need.
Didn’t that other mad socialist ‘Irishman’ who used to have a blog seriously propose that? After a trip to Paris or Italy or somewhere where he found he couldn’t cope with actual proper coffee?
What happened to him? Hopefully he got a job and realised that he’d been spouting bollocks, but that’s probably wishful thinking.
BiND/ BF – That’s Dr Eoin Clarke of ‘The Green Benches’. I hoped someone sent him into ISIS territory during the Syrian Civil War but sadly probably not – seems to have disappeared.
He’s out there still. Saw something a couple of months back.
No, he and his views have not improved.
Oh dear. Fortunately his blog seems to have died, and been replaced by what seems to be a Hong Kong gambling site – which is probably less damaging to society than his attempts at economics.
We spent a couple of billion years of evolution and a few centuries of economic and technological development to achieve escape velocity on all our efforts being directed at fulfilling needs, and these fuckers want to drag us back to a needs-based society.
Yep. Commie dick Murphy sees the Industrial Revolution as a catastrophic mistake.
Oi Ritchie, you deluded cunt. Read this excellent comment under the DT’s obituary to that other massive grifter Paul Ehrlich (who did considerably better than you), and ponder its wisdom.
Sarah Dent
5 hrs ago
He ignored the ‘invisible hand’ of the price signal mechanism which enables the world to dance to a synchronous rhythm. It is the absence of that price signal mechanism in UK energy that is destroying the British economy.
Capitalism lifted over a billion people out of absolute poverty 2000-2020, enabling kids to cease toiling in fields and instead walk to school. Capitalism is progress, its antithesis is socialism. Socialism that led to hundreds of millions of deaths in just 48 years of the 20th century.