{"id":28922,"date":"2015-12-14T01:00:53","date_gmt":"2015-12-14T06:00:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=28922"},"modified":"2019-11-21T11:35:29","modified_gmt":"2019-11-21T16:35:29","slug":"qotd-veblen-goods","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2015\/12\/14\/qotd-veblen-goods\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Veblen goods"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>&#8230; the point about a Veblen Good is <em>not<\/em> that sales rise when prices do. Rather, it\u2019s that a Veblen Good is desirable because it is expensive. It is a way of showing that you can afford to buy something expensive. That you can afford something expensive is a sign of social status (well, it is in our society, where having lots of money and thus being able to buy something expensive is a sign of social status. It\u2019s possible to imagine other societal forms which don\u2019t include this).<\/p>\n<p>The archetypal example was certain of the Vanderbilt women who would have diamonds implanted into their backs, where they would be visible to people at parties given the low cut backs of dresses at the time. The point of such implantations simply being to show that one had enough money (and perhaps little enough sense in a pre-antibiotic era) to have a diamond implanted over one\u2019s spine. There\u2019s a story that Mick Jagger had a diamond implanted into one of his teeth for the same sort of reason at one point (removed when it promoted caries).<\/p>\n<p>The point being that a Veblen Good does signal something, and as such the greater the price the more desirable the ability to transmit that signal. But it doesn\u2019t go as far as stating that the more the price rises then the higher sales go.<\/p>\n<p>Tim Worstall, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.forbes.com\/sites\/timworstall\/2014\/11\/23\/being-quoted-in-the-new-york-times-is-great-but\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">&#8220;Being Quoted In The New York Times Is Great But&#8230;&#8221;, <em>Forbes<\/em><\/a>, 2014-11-22.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8230; the point about a Veblen Good is not that sales rise when prices do. Rather, it\u2019s that a Veblen Good is desirable because it is expensive. It is a way of showing that you can afford to buy something expensive. That you can afford something expensive is a sign of social status (well, it [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,41],"tags":[377,1026,1321,315],"class_list":["post-28922","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-quotations","tag-conspicuousconsumption","tag-microeconomics","tag-veblengoods","tag-wealth"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-7wu","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28922","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28922"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28922\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":52924,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28922\/revisions\/52924"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28922"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28922"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28922"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}