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Essay

Status Is the Scarce Thing

June 24, 202611 min read

Picture the world the optimists promise. AI does most of the work. Production costs fall toward zero. A high income floor means no one is hungry, no one is cold, no one is one missed paycheck from ruin. The oldest enemy of the species — material scarcity — is finally beaten. Then comes the question almost no one asks next: with nothing left to want, what would people compete over?

The honest answer is unsettling. They would compete over each other. Over who is admired, who is sought out, whose name carries weight in the room. Because one thing abundance cannot manufacture is rank, and rank is the thing humans have always wanted most after bread. You can print food. You cannot print being above average — half of any group is below it, always. The economy of stuff can end. The economy of standing cannot, because standing is scarce the way the summit of a mountain is scarce: widen the path all you like, the top still holds one.

This is why “abundance will free us from the rat race” is a comforting half-truth. It frees us from the part of the race that was about survival. It does not touch the part that was about position. And if we do not choose what position tracks, something else will choose for us — it is already choosing. The point of this essay is narrow and, we think, urgent: there will be a yardstick beyond money. The only open question is what it measures. We want to make the case that it can measure contribution, and to be honest about what that bet costs.

The good that stays scarce no matter how rich we get

The economist Fred Hirsch gave this its sharpest name in 1976. Some goods, he argued, are positional: their value comes precisely from scarcity and social exclusiveness, so they cannot be multiplied by growth. A bigger economy gives everyone a warmer house. It cannot give everyone the best house in the neighborhood, the corner office, the front seat, the top job — because those are defined relationally. “Not everyone can be President of the Company,” as the standard summary of his argument puts it; not everyone can sit in the front row (Hirsch 1976, Social Limits to Growth; Oxford Reference, “positional good”). Material goods grow with the pie. Positional goods do not — they stay fixed in supply while the world keeps getting richer, so as material scarcity recedes, the relative weight of positional competition rises. The race doesn’t end. It concentrates onto the one prize that can’t be mass-produced.

Thorstein Veblen had seen the engine three-quarters of a century earlier, in 1899, and described it with a precision that still stings. Once wealth becomes the accepted badge of worth, he wrote, “the possession of wealth presently assumes the character of an independent and definitive basis of esteem” (Veblen 1899, The Theory of the Leisure Class, Ch. II). And here is the part that matters most for our question — the reason no amount of growth quiets the wanting. The goal, Veblen says, “is to rank high in comparison with the rest of the community.” So the moment you reach the normal standard, dissatisfaction simply “give[s] place to a restless straining to place a wider and ever-widening pecuniary interval between [yourself] and this average standard.” His conclusion is brutal and, we will argue, liberating once you see it the right way: “since the struggle is substantially a race for reputability on the basis of an invidious comparison, no approach to a definitive attainment is possible” (Veblen 1899). A race against an average you are also raising can never be finished. That is not a flaw in any one greedy person. It is the mathematics of relative standing.

Read Hirsch and Veblen together and the conclusion is hard to dodge. The drive for relative position is not a side effect of capitalism that withers when capitalism’s scarcity is solved. It is older than money and survives the death of want. Abundance removes the reason the competition was deadly — you no longer lose your home if you lose. It does not remove the competition. So there will be a measure. The question was never whether humanity keeps score. The question is what the scoreboard reads.

How much we actually care about being ahead

A reasonable skeptic pushes back: maybe positional hunger is a quirk of the status-obsessed few, and most people, given enough, would simply be content. The evidence says otherwise.

Sara Solnick and David Hemenway ran the cleanest test of it. They asked people to choose between two worlds: one where you earn more than everyone around you but less in absolute terms, and one where you earn more in absolute terms but less than those around you. For income, roughly half of respondents — about 48% — chose to be poorer in absolute terms in order to be richer than their neighbors. The pull of relative position was stronger still for things like attractiveness and a supervisor’s praise (Solnick & Hemenway 1998, J. Economic Behavior & Organization). Sit with that. A large share of people will trade away real, absolute well-being for the experience of being ahead. That is not a marginal taste; it is a load-bearing fact about the species we are designing for.

Robert Frank built a body of work on what this does at scale. In Choosing the Right Pond he showed that status is mostly local — we measure ourselves against the people immediately around us, which is why the agonizing choice is whether to be a big frog in a small pond or a small frog in a big one (Frank 1985, Choosing the Right Pond). In Luxury Fever and Falling Behind he traced the darker dynamic: because so much consumption is positional, spending becomes an arms race. When the top spends more, it resets what “normal” looks like for everyone below, who spend more to keep up, who reset it again — Frank’s “expenditure cascade,” a ladder where everyone climbs and no one rises (Frank 2007, Falling Behind; Wikipedia, “Expenditure cascades”). This is the toxic face of positional goods, and it is the strongest reason to fear what we are proposing. Hold onto it; we return to it.

Does being richer even make us happier?

There is a famous wrinkle worth pausing on, because it cuts both ways and we owe you the honest version. In 1974 Richard Easterlin noticed a paradox: at any given moment, richer people report being happier than poorer people — yet as a whole country grows richer over decades, its average happiness barely moves (Easterlin 1974). The natural explanation is exactly the positional story: what lifts your happiness is rising relative to others, and growth that lifts everyone leaves the rankings — and so the feeling — roughly where they were.

But we promised honesty, and the Easterlin Paradox is genuinely contested. Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers reassessed it in 2008 with far more data and found a clear, robust positive link between income and subjective well-being — both across countries and within them — and, pointedly, no satiation point at which more money stops helping. They read the evidence as “a clear role for absolute income and a more limited role for relative income comparisons” (Stevenson & Wolfers 2008, Brookings Papers). Easterlin and colleagues answered with their own data, maintaining that over the long run the time-series relationship between a nation’s growth and its happiness is essentially flat, even while richer individuals stay happier at a point in time (Easterlin et al. 2010, PNAS). The fight is partly about method and partly about which “happiness” you measure, and it is not settled.

We will not lean our case on the strong form of Easterlin, because it wobbles when pushed. Here is what we can responsibly take from the debate, and it is enough. Even Stevenson and Wolfers find only a limited role for relative comparison — they do not find none. And our premise removes the part everyone agrees on anyway: in a world with a high income floor, the absolute-income channel is largely satisfied for everyone. What’s left, when survival and comfort are handled, is overwhelmingly the relative, positional layer — the layer the whole literature agrees exists, even where it argues about its size. Abundance doesn’t resolve the relative game. It strips away everything else and leaves us standing in it.

The yardstick is already being chosen — badly

So a measure is coming. Notice it is already here, in the one domain that has already gone post-scarcity: digital life. Online, the marginal cost of another post, another video, another voice is essentially zero. Material constraint is gone — and a yardstick rushed in to fill the vacuum. Not contribution, but attention. Followers, views, virality, clout. We have built, without deciding to, a status economy whose unit is the ability to be looked at.

We have argued elsewhere that the attention economy is the real adversary, not money, and we won’t re-litigate it here. The point for this essay is structural: the digital sphere is a preview of the post-scarcity world, and it shows the law holding. Remove material scarcity and the positional drive does not evaporate — it latches onto the nearest available signal. Left alone, that signal is attention, which rewards provocation over substance, volume over care, the loudest over the most useful. If the yardstick of what we honor defaults, it defaults to clout. That is the world we are sleepwalking into. The choice is not whether the positional good gets a new referent, but whether we choose it on purpose or let the algorithms choose it for us.

We say: choose contribution. Make the scarce, sought-after thing — the standing people actually compete for — track what a person has genuinely done for others. Not because contribution is the only good, but because it is the one positional referent whose pursuit, unlike attention or wealth, tends to leave the world better as a byproduct of the chase. If people must compete for rank, and Hirsch and Veblen say they must, then the entire game turns on what rank is pegged to. Peg it well.

The objection we take most seriously

Here is where an honest essay has to slow down, because the case against us is strong and we raised it on ourselves. Status hierarchies are not benign. They can be vicious, exclusionary, anxiety-soaked. The positional arms race Frank documented is zero-sum by design — your rise is someone’s fall — and a society organized around any single ladder breeds exactly the resentment, envy, and status-panic we should want to escape. If “make contribution the measure” means building one universal ranking of human worth, we would be replacing money’s tyranny with a subtler, more invasive one. That is a real danger, not a strawman. A social-credit dystopia is one bad design decision away from anything in this space.

So we do not propose one ladder. We propose the opposite, and the difference is the whole safeguard.

The pathology in positional competition comes from three things: a single scale everyone is forced onto, a permanent record you can bank and never lose, and a central authority that scores you. Remove those three and you remove most of the poison while keeping the motive. Frank himself pointed the way: status is local — we mostly care about our standing in the ponds we actually swim in. A flourishing status ecology is many ponds, not one ladder. The musician, the carer, the open-source maintainer, the teacher, the neighbor who shows up — each is recognized in the community whose work they understand, by the peers who can actually judge it. There is no master scoreboard summing them into a single number, because the moment there is, you have rebuilt the thing we fled.

And the standing must decay. The toxicity of status is sharpest when it is hoarded — when a win twenty years ago still buys deference today, position calcifies into caste. Recognition that fades unless renewed keeps the game open, keeps it about what you are contributing now, and denies anyone a permanent perch above the rest. It is the difference between honor and capital: capital compounds and entrenches; honor, rightly built, must be re-earned.

This is a mitigation, not a utopia, and we will say plainly what we cannot promise. We cannot promise that plural, decaying, peer-conferred standing eliminates envy — nothing does. We cannot promise that no pond grows toxic, or that prestige never leaks across ponds into something uglier. Positional competition will still sometimes be anxious and unkind, because it is run by people. What we can argue is a matter of degree that matters enormously: a hundred local, fading, peer-judged recognitions are a categorically safer thing to build a civilization on than one permanent, central, monetized score — whether that score is dollars or followers. We are not claiming to have removed the danger, only to have designed against its worst form — and we would rather show you the seams than sell you a paradise.

What this commits us to

The unit of standing we are after is therefore not a currency and never becomes one. It is conferred by peers, not issued by an authority. It is carried, not cashed — it buys you regard, not goods. It decays, so no one banks it into a dynasty. And it is plural, many measures across many communities, never collapsed into one global number. Conferred, carried, never cashed. Every one of those rules is a wall against a specific failure above: the single ladder, the permanent hoard, the central scorer, the slide back into money.

We are honest that this is a proposal, not a proven system. No society has run a deliberate, plural, decaying recognition economy at scale and shown it stays humane. That experiment hasn’t been run; we are arguing it is worth running, carefully, with the safeguards built in from the first day rather than bolted on after. What we believe we have established is narrower and firmer: the yardstick is not optional. Hirsch’s positional goods and Veblen’s invidious comparison guarantee that as long as there are humans, some scarce standing will be the prize — and abundance, far from dissolving that prize, strips away every distraction and leaves it shining alone. The attention economy is already claiming it. We can let it, or we can aim it.

We pegged status to capital, and got a world that is brilliant at producing and starving at meaning. We are proposing to re-peg what we honor — to make the scarce, hungered-for thing track what you give rather than what you take or how loudly you can be seen. Not a world without a measure. A world with a better one.

Make impact, not money, the measure of a life. Status is the scarce thing; let it be earned by what you contribute, conferred by those who’d know, and carried lightly — never owned, never cashed, never one number for us all.

Sources

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