The Rise of Mass Consumption Societies

The Rise of Mass Consumption Societies

This paper develops a model to understand mechanisms behind the rise of mass consumption societies. The development process depicted in the model follows the Flying Geese pattern, in which a series of industries takes off one after another. As productivity improves in these industries, each consumer good becomes affordable to an increasingly large number of households, which constantly expand t...

On the Rise and Fall of Class Societies

This paper develops a theoretical framework to investigate potential forces behind the rise and fall of class societies. Due to the nonconvexity of investment and credit market imperfections, only those who inherited relatively large wealth can set up firms and become employers. The equilibrium dynamics is described by the joint evolution of the wage rate, the vertical division of labor between...

Consumption in Affluent Societies of Industrialized Nations

Rise and fall of competitiveness in individualistic and collectivistic societies.

Competitiveness pervades life: plants compete for sunlight and water, animals for territory and food, and humans for mates and income. Herein we investigate human competitiveness with a natural experiment and a set of behavioral experiments. We compare competitiveness in traditional fishing societies where local natural forces determine whether fishermen work in isolation or in collectives. We ...

Intellectuals and the Rise of Mass Politics