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Essay

There Is Always a Yardstick

June 14, 20267 min read

Most plans for a better world share a quiet assumption. Make people rich enough, the thinking goes, and the scramble for standing will fade. Once nobody has to claw for the basics, the contest to outrank each other loses its point. Comfort dissolves the rivalry. It is a kind hope, and we want it to be true.

It isn’t. And the reason matters, because the same mistake keeps producing the same disappointment.

The wanting doesn’t switch off

Start with the thing the hope tries to wish away. The desire to matter in other people’s eyes is not a modern disease, not a Western quirk, and not something capitalism installed in us. It is one of the oldest things about us.

In 2015, three psychologists set out to test that claim against the evidence rather than assume it. Cameron Anderson, John Angus Hildreth and Laura Howland reviewed the research on status-seeking and checked it against the formal criteria for what counts as a “fundamental human motive.” The desire for status met them. It showed up, in their words, “across individuals who differed in culture, gender, age, and personality.” Not an American thing. Not a market thing. A human thing — and well-being, self-esteem, even physical health track the standing other people accord us (Anderson, Hildreth & Howland 2015).

So the wanting is built in. The interesting question is what happens to it when the basics are covered. The hope says it fades. The evidence says it moves.

Some things are scarce because scarcity is the point

In 1976 the economist Fred Hirsch named the trap. Some goods are scarce in a way no factory can fix. A bigger house can be built. A front-row seat cannot — because the whole worth of a front-row seat is that most people are behind you. Hirsch called these positional goods: things that work like positions in a race, where one person moving up means another moves down (Hirsch 1976).

This is why “just make everyone rich” never ends the contest. The scarcity of standing is social, not material. You can manufacture more cars, more houses, more food. You cannot manufacture more ahead-of-other-people, because being ahead is defined by others being behind. Abundance can flood the material goods and leave the positional ones exactly as scarce as they ever were. The race doesn’t stop. It relocates to whatever stays scarce.

Thorstein Veblen had sketched the same engine three-quarters of a century earlier, in 1899, when he described conspicuous consumption — spending whose real purpose is display, signaling rank through what you can afford to waste (Veblen 1899). Veblen was writing satire about a leisure class most of his readers would never join. Then a century of consumer culture arrived to prove him a documentarian. The point survives the satire: when material wants are met, the wanting climbs to the next rung, where standing itself is the prize.

Put the two findings together and the kind hope collapses. The motive doesn’t switch off (Anderson and colleagues). And the goods it chases can’t be mass-produced into irrelevance (Hirsch, Veblen). Abundance doesn’t end the contest for standing. It changes the currency the contest is fought in.

Money already pays out less than people think

Here someone reasonably objects: maybe people keep wanting more because more keeps helping. Doesn’t money just keep delivering?

Less than the meme suggests. Read the money-and-happiness research carefully — past the headlines about a magic number — and one finding survives every side of a long, genuine fight: well-being rises with the logarithm of income. Each doubling buys about the same increment of felt life. From $30,000 to $60,000 is one step up. To feel that same step again you need $120,000, then $240,000. The returns never quite reach zero, but they shrink relentlessly (Stevenson & Wolfers 2013).

We want to be precise about what that does and does not mean, because the honest version is more useful than the slogan. It is not a claim that money stops mattering above some threshold; that famous plateau did not replicate, and money causally helps across the range. It is the functional shape of an association, not a law of causation. But the shape itself is the point: a tool whose returns shrink with every doubling is not a tool you want defining a life. It does enormous work in a poor life and almost none in a rich one — which is exactly why, in a world growing more abundant, money’s grip on the scoreboard loosens at the top even as the contest for standing keeps burning underneath.

So abundance doesn’t satisfy the contest, and the thing we currently measure with — money — buys progressively less of what the contest is actually after. Both halves push the same way. The seat at the center of the scoreboard does not empty. It comes open.

Whatever fills the seat, fills it by default

Look at where money’s grip has already loosened, and you can watch the replacement arrive. Online, copying anything costs nothing, so material scarcity nearly vanishes. What stays scarce is the human capacity to notice. Herbert Simon saw it coming in 1971: “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention” (Simon 1971).

When attention became the scarce thing, a new score emerged on its own — followers, views, engagement — and it now organizes a sizable part of human ambition. We don’t argue here about how good or bad that score is; that case is made in detail on Foundations. We point only at the structure: nobody convened a meeting and chose attention as the successor to money. It filled the seat because the seat was open and nobody was guarding it. That is the lesson worth carrying. A yardstick left unchosen is not a yardstick avoided. It is a yardstick chosen by default — and defaults are rarely chosen well.

The only real question

So here is where the argument lands. You don’t get a vote on whether your society keeps score. Every society that has ever existed has had a measure of standing, because the motive is fundamental and the goods it chases are irreducibly scarce. Abundance doesn’t repeal that. “Just make everyone rich” doesn’t end the race — it relocates it to whatever stays scarce, and leaves the new scoreboard to be filled by whatever shows up first.

There is always a yardstick. The only question a society gets to answer is what it measures.

Today the answer is money — a brilliant tool, a biased judge. In our digital lives a new answer is already emerging on its own: attention, which rewards being noticed over being useful. We think there is a better candidate, the oldest measure there is, the one we already use for the dead at every funeral and have somehow never offered the living: impact — the difference your existence makes in other people’s lives.

We are not going to resolve that whole case here. We are only insisting on the choice itself, because most people don’t know they have one. The seat is opening. Something will fill it. We would rather it were chosen than inherited.

If the choice is real, the next move is to make it well. We lay out the full argument — money’s honest ledger, the rise of attention, why impact is the better unit, and the strongest objections we could find against ourselves — on Foundations. The mechanism, how a unit of impact could work like honor and never like a price, is on The Impact Standard. One line carries the whole of it: make impact, not money, the measure of a life.

Sources

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