This is not a discussion list but I greatly welcome -- and value -- comments from listees. I doubly welcome the feedback I received from Arthur Cordell because it also enables me to postpone a formidable job I had set myself to do this morning and woke earlier than usual to do so. Or start to do so. This is to write a summary of a scholarly 25-page paper, "Josiah Wedgewood An Eighteenth-Century Entrepreneur in Salesmanship and Marketing Techniques", by N. McKendrick, which another listee, Stephen Straker, has been kind enough to send me. In the late decades of the eighteenth century, during what was probably the most vigorous phase of the Industrial Revolution, Josiah Wedgewood set about marketing and pricing his high-grade pottery from royalty downwards in a way which shows that he knew precisely what the purpose of a Status Good is.

(Incidentally, the life and times of Josiah Wedgewood illustrates another fact of history which has frequently intrigued me but have not investigated further. This is that at highly creative junctures of history there is nearly always to be found a small nucleus of friends at the very heart of it, each of them brilliant, who meet together so frequently that they are able to amplify their individual gifts in synergistic fashion even though, as in Josiah Wedgewood's circle, they might be engaged in different occupations. In this case, his friends were the toymaker and engineer, Matthew Boulton, the steam-engine innovator James Watt, the polymath Erasmus Darwin and the chemist who identified oxygen for the first time, Joseph Priestly.)

But after that diversion I'll return to Arthur's comment on my previous posting, "14. A Luxury Yacht is not a Status Good"

<<<<

Sometimes it is a mark of status to have access to a status good, or to be of such high status that you don't need to have something.

In the early days of cell phones only important high-status people had them. The first pager and cell phone I saw was on an intelligence/security type who was shopping at a store near Washington, DC. He seemed to be so important that he needed one. Now, only if you are unimportant and are living a 24/7 life are you chained to one.

So, now it is just about everybody. The high finance people will not walk down the street shouting on their cells. If you are high enough up on the food chain you don't even carry a brief case, your PA does that and monitors your every cell phone message.

>>>>

(Incidentally, we call them mobile phones, or simply mobiles, over this side of the pond, but in deference to the majority on this list, I will call them cell phones here.) Yes, when I wrote previously about the Satus Goods of the past century, such as cars, TV, etc, I wondered whether to include cell phones on the list. I didn't do so because although cell phones started life at a high price and obviously stimulated a huge amount of investment (so huge, in fact, that it helped to cripple the stock exchanges of the developed world), it also 'gravitated' towards being a widespread consumer good very rapidly -- far more rapidly than most have ever done.

But yes, the cell phone is most certainly a Status Good. In this case it has the curious paradoxical quality of being even more a Status Good by virtue of not being used personally, as Arthur describes. This is rather like the rich individual who never drives a car but is chauffered everywhere, or the person who never has to carry money in his pocket because someone in his retinue will always have small change. I think I must have very high status because I've never owned a cell phone and, moreoever, have no intention of ever buying, or using, one because I am in the privileged state of being able to control my own use of time. Mind you, I must confess that my better-half has one and, from time to time, whether she's at the croquet club, or shopping, or visiting friends in deepest Wales, she will ring me here and tell me when to put the oven on, and at what temperature, and when to put the meat in, and when to put the potatoes on and so forth so that all can be set before her when she returns home cold and hungry.

But the cell phone is a Status Good which is very small. This therefore escapes one of the constraints that I usually apply to potential candidates -- that of needing too much space to be practical. For example, it is totally unlike the family helicopter, which is dished as a Status Good before it is ever produced for lack of airspace in which to use it. So I must be more careful in not being too sweeping when describing what I think will be a paucity of Status Goods in the future.

And, of course, the cell phone is likely to become even smaller until it is wristwatch size, even microscopic. One can imagine one's body being festooned with all manner of future Status Goods which will be portable and well nigh invisible. Ah, but then one of the prime -- indeed fundamental -- attributes of a Status Good is being able to flaunt it socially! Subtlely maybe, but certainly so it's noticed. This is one of the reasons why the motor car (apart from the face powder of early man!) has been one of the most successful Status Goods of all time. You can display it by parking it in front of the house, or in the drive where all the neighbours can see it -- just like Yap currency. And you can buy one of hundreds of different marques and prices, to show exactly what status you are -- or more frequently, particularly if you are a male of a certain age, at the level you aspire to be.