CONTEXT 184 : JUNE 2025 37 cars, yachts or planes. But these baubles are not particularly good investments. Property is a much better proposition. The most high-status property is almost always in the parts of towns and cities with a great deal of heritage. What oligarchs call wealth Where does this value originate? In large part it arises because this sort of property is not an ordinary economic product. Status assets like Maserati or Porsche cars can in theory be manufactured in unlimited quantities. As robotics, automation and artificial intelligence take hold, the costs of manufacturing goods will continue to fall and their availability should increase, except where manufacturers constrain production to keep prices up. Even more significant is the fact that benefits from products we used to buy as tangible assets, like CDs and vinyl records, can now be delivered at virtually zero cost, with huge back catalogues available free of charge or at very low cost on Spotify or YouTube. These are useless as status or investment assets. There is one type of economic asset whose supply cannot be increased. Fred Hirsch identified it in the 1970s, inventing the concept of ‘positional goods’⁴. Hirsch argued that economists saw consumption as a ‘malleable aggregate’: there is a product, whose form can be fashioned by choice and more products can be made. But alongside these products are things which cannot be reshaped without losing their value and cannot be produced in greater numbers, other than as facsimiles. With contemporary technology, some facsimiles can look utterly convincing, with stone statues produced as perfect copies, using computer-controlled cutting machines. Art displayed on a giant video screen may be near perfect in definition and more easily viewed than on a gallery wall. Taking the digital format further, there are ‘non-fungible tokens’, electronic data files associated with a particular asset – digital or physical – such as an image, art or music. These can apparently be traded, but the extra-legal nature of trading usually results in informal exchange, which has no legal basis for enforcement. One way or another all these are copies, facsimiles or fakes. The examples of positional goods used by Hirsch include a Rembrandt painting or access to a natural landscape (and the status secured by occupying one of society’s top slots). Works of art, antiquities and, to some extent, top jobs are globally mobile, whereas buildings, places and landscapes are place-specific and contextual. They cannot be shifted around by buyers. The historic environment has evidential, historical, aesthetic, communal, cultural, social and environmental value, all of them distinct from one another. Shifting an entire building might just be possible, but a change of location loses the historic context, the relationship with other structures, community, topography and history – and thus its authenticity as a place. The economist Sir Roy Harrod first put his finger on the issues in the 1950s⁵. Harrod referred to the unbridgeable gulf between what he termed ‘oligarchic wealth’ and ‘democratic wealth’ (terms that seem peculiarly apposite to our current condition). Democratic wealth gives command over resources at a particular time to everyone. It is limited only by productivity. Oligarchic wealth is available only for a few, whatever the general level of productivity. Oligarchic wealth (or positional goods) comes first into the hands of the already rich, at a time when others need to spend their hard-earned cash on everyday material goods. The already rich can subsequently make capital gains on their positional assets. One example of this is the ownership of land in central London, which for the most part rests with great estates, some of which go back to the Norman conquest⁶. No status in virtual reality As wealth grows, there is increased demand for living in positional good environments that are socially or physically scarce – and the increased pressure can damage the experience originally available. The consequence is exclusion through planning controls, alongside exclusion by price. As a side effect, wealth is redistributed in favour of those who bought in first, at the expense of those attempting to move in later. This usually means wealth moving from the poor to the rich. Hirsch confines his examples mainly to landscapes, exclusive suburbs and old masters. But it is clear enough that heritage assets, whether buildings, parklands or, indeed, entire historic places are excellent examples of positional goods. The effect is not confined to the wealthiest places. It is no accident that Grosvenor’s hugely successful Liverpool One investment (purchased in 2024 by Land Securities) is surrounded by heritage assets, or that the urban designers went out of their way to carefully site buildings and reduce roof heights, to preserve views out to heritage landmarks and secure a sense of place. In the future (as noted), manufactured goods will be produced increasingly cheaply, thanks to robotics and automation. What is more, many products may have no physical dimension. For philosophers like David Chalmers, virtual reality is as valid as genuine reality⁷. Artificial intelligence and virtual reality raise the bizarre prospect of a totally private world, where a helmet can be donned and the user can live a life of virtual reality. You can live in a polluted slum but just don the helmet and AI ⁴ Fred Hirsch (1977) Social Limits to Growth, Routledge and Kegan Paul. ⁵ Roy Harrod (1958) The Possibility of Economic Satiety: use of economic growth for improving the quality of education and leisure in Problems of the United State Economic Development, Committee for Economic Development, New York. ⁶ See Ian Wray (2026) Great British Plans, Routledge, Chapter 2 on London’s roads and squares. ⁷ David Chalmers (2022) Reality+: virtual worlds and the problems of philosophy, Allen Lane.
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