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Should the Joneses be taxed when their neighbors fail to keep up with them?

The most recent issue of Policy magazine features an essay by Cato Policy analyst Will Wilkinson on the competition for higher status

among human beings.

Some scholars have made claims recently that status games impose a form of physical pollution

on the losers of the race and that this behavior is tantamount to a real negative

externality that should be taxed and regulated.

In his essay Out of Position against the Politics of Relative Standing, Will argues that a market society already

takes care of these negative spillover effects.

Will explains the concept of positional conflict further in today's podcast.

The subtitle of your essay reads

Zero-sum positional conflict is avoidable in a liberal market society.

What exactly is zero-sum positional conflict?

Well, imagine a race up a ladder.

If there can only be one person per wrong, then each step up the ladder for one person logically requires a step down for another.

A number of thinkers such as Cornell University economist Robert Frank

and London School of Economics economist Richard Laird,

who's also a member of the House of Lords in England,

argue that one person per rung race up a ladder

is exactly what the competition for social status is like.

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