Can a 50-year-old university press economics book help explain why the price of those prime sporting and show seats you covet always seems to rise beyond reach? I argue that that study provides the best explanation, one so profound that in hindsight it is obvious.

Let’s start with a headline. The New York Times recently called attention to the contrast between European and U.S. sports ticket prices — especially those for soccer, and most especially for those of the World Cup final match set for the MetLife Stadium in New Jersey on July 19, which have reached a Rolex-level $8,680 per seat. And while the audience for soccer in the U.S. was for many decades largely confined to immigrants, it has gentrified, gaining an affluent audience in the suburbs (remember soccer moms?).

The Times noted another factor: the divergence between a free-spending upper middle class — the 10 percent of American households with a median income around $240,000 — and everyone else. This stratum, one economist noted, is increasingly willing to pay top dollar for live sports and entertainment events of all kinds. Look no further than the nosebleed seats for Super Bowl LX in Santa Clara, California, in February, 2026, which will set you back $4,000 to $6,000 on the NFL’s secondary exchange market.

While a cornucopia of sports is available on broadcast and cable television, and streaming online for free or for modest subscription rates, and while even the choicest stadium seats can’t match screen closeups for detail, many fans feel there is no substitute for being there. And whether at the World Cup or at the Metropolitan Opera, the number of seats with ideal and near-ideal views will always be limited.

Positional Play

About that book. The first FIFA World Cup in the United States in 32 years coincides with a far less famous event, the 50th anniversary of the publication of Social Limits to Growth. The author, Austrian-born British economist Fred Hirsch, died at age 46, two years after the book’s publication.

Hirsch, you see, added another dimension to the critiques of consumer-driven capitalism that gained attention during the turbulent 1970s. Already in 1958, John Kenneth Galbraith’s Affluent Society had linked the underproduction of public goods like mass transit and education with the rise of the advertising-driven consumer economy. By 1972, the NGO Club of Rome added warnings about a new Malthusian squeeze between rising global population, lagging agricultural output, resource limits and industrial pollution — modeling challenged in 1982 by the economist Julian Simon’s theory of the “ultimate resource,” and its evidence that human ingenuity had always triumphed over natural resource limits. 

Variations on those analyses have been with us ever since. Generating new supplies of rare earth elements (or substitutes for them), for example, have proved more challenging than Simon’s cornucopianism would suggest. But Hirsch’s indirect contribution to the growth debate, the idea of positional goods, never managed to excite the lay public. It deserves a spotlight, not only because Social Limits is an easy read (it contains nary a single equation), but also because it challenges the relevance of the economic growth debate.

Hirsch argued that Galbraith’s critique of capitalism is incomplete, neglecting the contradictions inherent within capitalist consumption. He built on the work of the economist Roy Harrod who as early as 1958 distinguished between “democratic wealth” (offering access to resources available to all, rising with productivity) and “oligarchic wealth,” in Hirsch’s paraphrase, “what is possible for the few, but never — whatever the level of average productivity — for all.”

World Cup seats (or Super Bowl seats or Taylor Swift concert seats) are part of what Hirsch calls the positional economy: “all aspects of goods, services, work positions and other social relationships that are either (1) scarce in some absolute or socially imposed sense, or (2) subject to congestion or crowding through more extensive use” — the latter evoking Yogi Berra’s supposed remark that “it’s so crowded nobody goes there anymore.”

The Beautiful Game

In the half century since publication of Social Limits, the positional economy has become more complex. Constrained supply has become one of the most powerful tools of luxury marketers. Ponder, for example, the phenomenon of the Hermès Birkin Bag, a woman’s handbag which costs about $800 to produce, but sells for $25,000 to $100,000.

Yet this form of position has ironic limits. Scarcity and price make such products more conspicuous, a major drawback for the ultra-rich who prefer consumer signals that are recognizable only to one another. Indeed, a year ago the fashion guru Katharine K. Zerrella proclaimed in a New York Times guest essay that “Luxury Is in a Death Spiral.”

Real estate, with its location mantra, has been a more reliable positional star. Certain iconic places — think New York’s Central Park South or the hillsides of Montecito, California — can’t be duplicated elsewhere. Countless New York Post predictions to the contrary, the super-rich seem more attracted to Manhattan apartments than ever, as prices continue to increase. After September 11, I tracked New York real estate prices as an index of fears of a new terrorism wave; they bounced back surprisingly fast.

In Silicon Valley, positional real estate has led to another dimension of class conflict, as mere upper-middle-class owners (median house listing price in Palo Alto: $3.5 million) protest the encroachment of tech billionaires like Larry Page combining multiple lots into new super-estates. The haves, it seems, are rebelling against the have-even-mores.

The Ronaldo Effect

Curiously, Hirsch devoted little space to an economist who had one of the greatest insights on positional goods. Princeton’s William J. Baumol, along with his colleague William Bowen, proposed what became known as Baumol’s cost disease. Over 40 years ago Baumol and his spouse Hilda noted in The New York Times the “spectacularly” rising prices of Broadway theatre tickets, which had shot up to a stratospheric $45 to $50 per seat! Unlike motion pictures and television, theatre producers could spread rising payments for talent, crafts and support only among live spectators who could fit in their venues. The rise of productivity elsewhere in the economy — or the reality that millions could watch theater on television simultaneously — was no help.

Thus, today’s equivalent, a premium ticket to Hamilton, can cost close to $400, suggesting that the price of hot Broadway tickets has risen at twice the pace of the consumer price index over the past four decades.

Returning to the World Cup, we see a synergy between Baumol’s cost disease and the superstar effect proposed by the economist Sherwin Rosen four years after publication of Social Limits: the increasing tendency toward winner-take-all in which a few top performers in fields ranging from baseball to law to movies are rewarded disproportionately. In soccer, the salaries of the top-10 best paid athletes run from $33 million to $280 million annually — a much higher ceiling than the one faced by top NBA and NFL players in the United States. Baumol and superstar effects surely contribute to ticket prices in all sports.

• • •

For decades, social psychologists studying happiness have found substantial advantages in the consumption of experiences as opposed to things. That sounds like a high-minded critique of materialism, but the pursuit of memories can bite back. Many sought-after memories offer severely limited capacity — visiting Machu Picchu, cruising to Antarctica and the like. At the other extreme, mass tourism in cities like Kyoto, Barcelona and Florence has devalued accessible experiences. 

Thus, in this the year of the U.S.-hosted World Cup, Fred Hirsch’s revelation of the frustrating side of economic growth has a paradoxical psychological bonus of its own: making us less miserable about the cost of what we really want by showing us how inevitable is their unaffordability.