If you could add it all up, I wonder how much value is lost to ego/status maintenance globally
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Thanks - have read that post a couoke times. is there nuance to prestige seeking that is best lobg term in your opinion? eg. Prestige seeking that cannot be bought, only accomplished? seems like conspicuous consumption is a win/lose game whereas the creation of knowledge is not.
Oh, right! The positive-sum vs. negative-sum axis. Really great question. I don’t know how to break prestige down into + sum vs. - sum components, but it seems extremely important.
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I agree that conspicuous consumption is negative-sum (first-order effects). But I don’t think accomplishments are necessarily positive-sum. The first-order effects of e.g. climbing Everest are spending time/energy/money that could have gone elsewhere.
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Also there are so many higher-order effects that I don’t know how to model, like inspiring others or pushing forward the field of mountaineering. (Those kinds of things can happen with conspicuous consumption too.) It gets too complex for me....
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