Paper: markets may defuse zero-sum status contests in a post-scarcity society
paulnovosad · x · 2026-11-16
Economist Paul Novosad highlights Vlad Tarko's paper "Polycentric Status Contests" (33 pp., Aug 2025) as a lens for predicting behavior in a world of material abundance. Key points:
- As societies grow richer and basic needs are met, zero-sum positional contests gain prominence while positive-sum market benefits fade into the background.
- Institutions of capitalism, built for managing scarcity and spurring growth, may be ill-suited for positional goods' scarcity; rich societies' long-run equilibrium may be less peaceful than assumed.
Yet the rent-seeking model yields surprisingly optimistic predictions: markets tend to fragment the worst positional goods into competing status hierarchies, dissipate some positional goods, and convert the most damaging status competitions into beneficial prestige competitions — while government interventions often prop up monopolistic status hierarchies.
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