Paper: Markets Fragment Status Wars While Governments Prop Up Hierarchies
paulnovosad · x · 2026-11-16
Economist Paul Novosad shares a paper on positional goods as a lens for predicting behavior in a post-scarcity, AI-abundant world.
Key points from the abstract:
- As societies grow richer, zero-sum positional contests dominate while positive-sum market benefits fade into the background
- Capitalist institutions built for resource scarcity may be ill-suited for positional scarcity (citing Hirsch, Frank)
- Rich societies' long-run equilibrium may be less peaceful than assumed if overrun by status competition
- Surprisingly optimistic model predictions: markets fragment the worst positional goods into competing status hierarchies, dissipate some positional goods, and convert damaging status competitions into beneficial prestige competitions
- Government interventions, by contrast, often prop up monopolistic status hierarchies
More from AGI Musings
- RSI Has Become a Vacuous Buzzword — Talk Capability Index Instead — maksym_andr · 2026-11-16
- Why models stumble on hard tasks: what they lack can't be described, so no RL env exists — sebpaquet · 2026-11-16
- AI thought leaders' claims may reveal hidden financial stakes in companies — code_star · 2026-11-16
- Cal.com founder: always-on locally-run OS-native AI assistant feels close-ish — zeeg · 2026-11-16
- A Universe That Waited Billions of Years, and Apes Arguing About Machine Minds — VraserX · 2026-11-16
- ASI as a Black Box: we can deduce almost nothing about what superintelligence could do — zetalyrae · 2026-11-16