After abundance
Technologists increasingly promise a world of abundance. Peter Diamandis popularizes the idea in his writing and podcast conversations: exponential technologies are making the essentials of life cheaper and more accessible. “Technology is a resource-liberating mechanism,” he writes in Abundance. “It can make the once scarce the now abundant.”
The vision is seductive. Food, energy, computation, education, medicine—all becoming dramatically cheaper, perhaps approaching free. Humanity transitions from a civilization organized around scarcity to one constrained only by imagination.
But “a world of abundance” does not mean “everyone gets what they want all the time.” It means everyone gets stuff. And much of what people want is not stuff.
Positional goods
Economist Fred Hirsch made this point in 1976 in Social Limits to Growth. Many of the things people value are what he calls “positional goods”: inherently scarce goods and services whose access is mediated by relative standing. As Hirsch wrote: “An individual can improve his capacity to acquire scenic property by improving his position in the income and wealth distribution, that is, by getting richer vis-à-vis his fellows. The same result will not be achieved if he gets richer along with his fellows.”
Desirable real estate. Admission to elite universities. Prestigious careers. Mate selection. Social recognition. Political influence. These cannot be manufactured into abundance… the supply of “being above average” is fixed by definition.
The historical pattern
Peter Turchin’s work on structural-demographic cycles confirms this empirically. In Ages of Discord and End Times, he documents a recurring pattern: as societies grow richer and more educated, they produce more elite aspirants than elite positions. More people acquire credentials, ambition, and expectations of influence. But the positions they aspire to do not scale at the same rate.
The result is what Turchin calls elite overproduction: “the demand for power positions by elite aspirants massively exceeds their supply.” Historically this produces political polarization, institutional conflict, and social instability. Not because societies are poor, but the opposite: too many people have satisfied their material needs (positive-sum economic growth) and turned their attention to positional desires (zero-sum competition).
The error
The abundance thesis is not wrong about technology. Energy probably will get cheaper. AI probably will reduce the cost of many goods and services. Material scarcity probably will continue to decline.
The error is in the implication: the leap from “material abundance” to “human satisfaction.” Much of what people want is positional, and positional goods are zero-sum by construction. The rat race does not end when everyone gets richer. It just changes what the rats are racing for.
The zero-sum nature of positional competition has been masked by its embedding within the positive-sum growth of the material economy. Since the rise of capitalism, we have been in something of a golden era where to advance one’s relative position in society, the best option is to make something other people want – and in doing so, everyone gets a bit richer. But in a world where all material needs are satisfied, the mask comes off. Hirsch again:
The compelling attraction of economic growth in its institutionalized modern form has been as a superior substitute for redistribution. Whereas the masses today could never get close to what the well-to-do have today, even by expropriating all of it, they can, in the conventional view, get most if not all the way there with patience in a not too distant tomorrow, through the magic of compound growth. But as outlined above, once this growth brings mass consumption to the point where it causes problems of congestion in the widest sense – bluntly, where consumption or jobholding by others tends to crowd you out – then the key to personal welfare is again the ability to stay ahead of the crowd. Generalized growth then increases the crush.
The world the abundance technologists are building is precisely the condition Hirsch is describing. And to be clear: my view is that material abundance is better than material scarcity. The abundance thesis is correct that technology can and should reduce poverty, disease, and deprivation. The mistake is treating material abundance as the finish line rather than the starting point – as though once the material problem is solved, the human problem is too.
The ways out
If the problem is structural, the solutions must be too.
The first is to lean into the competition and lean out of empathy. For people who are naturally low-empathy and enjoy competitive games, this is already their default relationship to the world. There is nothing that needs to change. For better or worse, these people thrive in modern society. The rest of us can try to be more like them—treat positional competition as sport, stop losing sleep over the losers, and get on with winning. It works, for those who can stomach it.
The second is to multiply the scoreboards. Charles Murray makes this point in Coming Apart: positional competition is most destructive when an entire society funnels its aspirants toward a single hierarchy. South Korea, where status collapses almost entirely into academic performance and elite university admission, is the extreme case. The United States has historically maintained many parallel scoreboards—sports, entrepreneurship, arts, trades, local status hierarchies—so that losing on one does not mean losing entirely. This does not eliminate positional competition, but it diffuses it. The danger is the already ongoing consolidation: as credentialism spreads, the scoreboards merge, and the pressure concentrates.
The third is to stop valuing positional goods altogether, such that your pursuit of them is not a loss for anyone else. This is roughly what the Stoics proposed, what Buddhist non-attachment teaches, and what anyone means when they say someone is “at peace.” But it requires a shift in psychology, not technology, and it has never happened at civilizational scale, though future therapeutics might change that.
The fourth is simulation. If people can opt into virtual worlds rich enough to feel real, they can inhabit environments where positional constraints do not bind. Everyone gets the corner office, the beautiful view, the audience. The scarcity is artificial and therefore adjustable. This is less a solution to the problem of positional goods than a way of routing around it… manufacturing the experience of having them without requiring that they be scarce.
The fifth is the most radical: command of the physical world so complete that we can generate what is currently scarce by definition. Infinite desirable neighborhoods. Enough space, beauty, and even social counterparts that the positional constraint dissolves not through changed preferences but through changed reality. At that point the distinction between positional and material goods collapses, but so does much of what we currently recognize as the human condition.
The sixth is not really a solution at all. It is what happens when the other five fail. Turchin’s historical cycles suggest that when positional competition intensifies beyond what a society can absorb, the result is revolution – a violent reset that clears the hierarchy and starts the game over. This is not a way out. It is the way through, and it is the one history selects by default. An open question is whether it remains possible in a world with artificial intelligence enforcing the current social structure.