I would need to learn more about what Frank means about ‘norm entrepreneurship’ to opine as to whether or not it’s a viable strategy for addressing capabilities poverty and inequality, but in principle I see no reason why it can’t be part of a fight against same.

Smith and especially Sen are not talking about ‘status poverty’ but rather how ‘social capabilities may depend on a person’s relative income vis-a-vis those of other with whom he or she interacts.’ Thus the poverty referred to here is very real: ‘a relative deprivation in terms of income can…lead to *absolute deprivation in terms of capabiliites,* and in this sense, poverty and inequality are closely interlinked.’ (See Sen’s essay, ‘Conceptualizing and Measuring Poverty,’ in Dabvid B. Grusky and Ravi Kanbur, eds., Poverty and Inequality. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006).

I’m not at all qualified to address the IP questions raised by James, Frank, et al.

I guess what I’m wondering is:how peculiar is this question to fashion? You reference Smith’s shirts and Sen’s contextual version of poverty — is a focus on this type of socially constructed “status poverty,” in James’ words, a normative bad — esp. vis-a-vis sustenance poverty?

If you really wanted to, you could spin the intrinsic/extrinsic beauty/status question into a legal IP policy question as follows: “Does the low IP protection for fashion ‘force it’ to be a status good by fomenting the value of scarcity and fashion churn? If so, would heightened IP make fashion artifacts do less status churning and produce fewer but more stable and timeless (beautiful) artifacts. As a corollary, would reduced IP protection in other areas force more churn, greater status concerns, and less beauty?”

If you prefer the outcome of greater intrinsic beauty and less status gaming, and you also think there’s something to this Low IP=status goods, then buying into this might lead you to favor high IP protections generally.

My problem with that is that I don’t buy into that. I don’t see low IP as causing the status-based fashion industry (I think it would exist just as well with high IP) and I don’t see high IP, in fashion or elsewhere, as leading to significant systemic improvement in the production of beauty (because I think low-IP regimes can be equally, perhaps even more, productive of beauty).

Of course, what is beauty and how does it relate to our IP policies? At least, since Holmes wrote Bleinstein v. Donalding, the copyright law has professed itself to be aloof to questions of aesthetic value and cultural progress – De gustibus non est disputandum. Seems like a bit of a cop-out to me.

I don’t think James is saying that Postrel’s version of fashion (call it beauty) is a bad, but I think he’s saying that legally protecting the pursuit of status (via conspicuous waste a.k.a. Xenos fashion) is a bad.

Now, for a more interesting question: play that out against copyright more generally. Are blockbuster films and platinum records (conspicuously consumed for both status and beauty purposes) “a bad” vis-a-vis other possible “low protection” alternative orders where, e.g. where we have folklore, community theater performance, and private performances of music by amateurs?

As Frank notes, if your only tool kit to tackle the question of the fashion value is Chicago School economic theory with its traditional hands-off attitude toward culture and normative aspects of valuation, well… I guess a “paradox” often simply expresses the shortcomings of the observer’s theoretical model.

Xenos only mentions Mandeville in passing (he focuses on Hume, Smith, Rousseau, Malthus, etc.; I read Xenos when the book was first published in 1989 and still have it in my library) and if I recall correctly, I thought Mandeville did in fact make the point about markets stimulating avarice and vanity: first, they take advantage of such vices, and, in time and turn, such vices become part of feedback loops that stimulate frenzied commercial activity (of course I’m not implying that this is all that markets do).

Re: Postrel and Xenos

I think you’re right here that she is always vulnerable to his critique if only because any item of consumption, even if the product of human freedom and creativity, in widespread circulation owing to ‘societal openness,’ and christened an object of aesthetic beauty, is subject to the economizing logic of scarcity and the corresponding logic of consumption wherein social identity is fused with horizontal and vertical social norms of status emulation in which, as Marx realized, wants and desires become transformed into ‘needs’ (and one reason why poverty and deprivation are relative: Adam Smith noted that English day-labourers of his time ‘would be ashamed to appear in public without a linen shirt, the want of which would be supposed to denote that disgraceful degree of poverty which, it is presumed, nobody can well fall into without extreme bad conduct.’ Similarly, Amartya Sen notes that ‘today, a person in New York may well suffer from poverty despite having a level of income that would make him or her immune from poverty in Bangladesh or Ethiopia.’).

James: YEs, there is a certain appeal to a Nietzschean story of the arts, an idea that some aesthetic cream will rise to the top in the midst of a harsh Darwinian struggle. On the other hand, perhaps history is written by the winners! [Perhaps the congeries of mixed metaphors in this response suggests the deeper roots of my suspicion of style!]

as for mandeville—yes–he’s a nice early example of James’s point, but I have to think once one recognizes how causation can be reversed (i.e., the market system may not merely benefit from avarice and vanity, but create it), he’s on the Xenos side. Xenos does explore the philosophical origins of economic thought with discussions of Mandeville, Smith, Ricardo, etc.

as for KEats: You’ve reminded me that I need to do a post about online communities organized around text (like LiveJournal) and images/avatars (like Second Life).

Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe

Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,

‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’

There are hints of it everywhere. Medieval cities diverted a remarkable portion of their food and effort to putting up cathedrals. It took a certain ruthless oppression for the Renaissance princes to accumulate the wealth they used to finance art with which to assuage their guilt. The soulless music industry chewed up Kurt Cobain and drew hin into fatal self-loathing, but man, he wrote kickass songs. How is a messed-up system of fashion IP any different? The future will love us for our clothes!

As I said, I’m not sure whether I believe it, but isn’t the story beautiful?

I can’t wait to read full versions of both Postrel and Xenos based upon your description — but in the meantime (and with much less than full information) is it possible that Postrel and Xenos are in a sense talking past each other? If Xenos is referring specifically to “fashionable” items, then the reference is to items that will cease to have value once they are no longer favored by those deemed fasionable — the taste makers as it were. Even though she is referring to “fashion”, Postrel seems to be referring more broadly to beautiful, carefully made items that have appeal even if they are not in vogue at a given moment in time. I don’t think Postrel’s position (as you have articulated it) leads to a need to provide IP protection to fashion – but it does, in my view, rebut the claim that luxury items must be seen as a “bad” because they function only to confer (or deny) status.