I agree that these are valuable in themselves, but the astounding increases in college and real-estate costs are partly because they are dependent on relative wealth.

I think that people who don’t habituate to monetary differences may be using money to keep score, but using it to keep score for themselves, not “in relation to other people.” They’re playing an essentially solitary game, trying to exceed their previous personal best. That’s why they aren’t terribly affected by status changes—status is inherently social, and they aren’t interested in approval by others. Money at least appears to be an objective standard, and they can say, “If I’m making $100k now and was making $50k ten years ago, then that means I’m better at (whatever) now—I’ve progressed, go me.”

I don’t think it’s clear at all that there’s enough total wealth so that the kinds of things I listed could be provided to everyone via redistribution (leaving aside the likelihood that massive redistribution would shrink that wealth—which is a dynamic product not a fixed lump). For example, the long-term trend is toward more time out of the paid work force, both on the front end (more years of schooling) and back end (many more years of retirement). For that trend to continue, absolute levels of wealth will need to continue to grow.

And, again, this is the point of the discussion, but everyone doesn’t have the same preferences as I do. Some would rather have a sharp stick in the eye than work from a home office and supervise the kids. And some have absolutely no idea what to do with themselves when not gainfully employed, so early retirement would be a nightmare. And many, of course, do care very much about traditional forms of status, and derive satisfaction from being promoted to full-professor or becoming department chair or editor of a prestigious journal and dream of being elected a member of the NAS.

And then consider the recent rhapsodizing here over the iPhone. Is that all about a positional good that Kieran would wield to demonstrate his rank and humble his inferiors (and which opportunity for zero-sum one-upmanship a just society would deny him)? Or is it just possible that he would experience non-status derived aesthetic pleasure from a beautiful, functional object that might reasonably considered a work of art? And is it possible that a life with more of such gracefully designed objects is more satisfying than one without—regardless of what the Joneses have? Is Kieran’s attraction to the iPhone an indication that even CTers can’t escape the consumerist status competition? Or was he accidentally lending support to Virginia Postrel’s thesis?

The authors of the study measure occupational prestige and call it status.

This is a tricky area. Money is multi-functional. It CAN be used as merely another status measure, but it doesn’t have to. And even identifying money as someone’s ‘main status measure’ does not show that status measures are as important to that person as they are to others.

We all know people who seek desperately after status. We all know others that don’t care so much. There seems to be a continuum of status seeking. There isn’t any reason to believe that continuum is evenly distributed.

Certainly, but these are precisely the sorts of things that the redistribution is supposed to go towards.

You can of course make an argument that redistribution will hamper total growth, by reducing incentives and so on, and that would hardly be ridiculous. But for it to really validate your point you’d have to show (or show that it’s reasonable to expect) that it would reduce growth sufficiently that we couldn’t provide all of those above things to everyone. At this point I think it’s clear that there’s enough total wealth that the above can be provided at reasonable levels to everyone and that the redistribution that achieves it wouldn’t crash the economy below the point that we couldn’t provide enough for everyone. So inasmuch as the only barriers to these objective material goals are distributional…

It’s possible that your standards for these things are higher than I expected, but based on the happiness literature available and how absolute wealth for countries stops mattering around averages of $20K US or so, my guess is that you’re (in the aggregate) not.