Chinmay's Notes

The Scarcity That Survives

29 min read

Why abundance solves production, not wanting

Draft

This essay is still being revised.

We have always overestimated how much a new thing will change our lives. That goes for one person with a raise or a new house, and for a society with electric light or the internet. We picture the difference it will make, and then we adapt to it. This essay looks at AGI the same way, through hedonic adaptation.

In 1930, in the depths of the Great Depression, John Maynard Keynes sat down to predict the world his grandchildren would inherit. Within a hundred years, he argued, productivity growth would all but solve the economic problem. His grandchildren would work fifteen-hour weeks, and their hard problem would not be scarcity but its opposite:

“For the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem — how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well.”

He got the first half exactly right. Output per person in the rich world has outrun even his guess. The second half never came. Nobody works fifteen hours. We took the productivity and spent it on more — more work, more wants, whole new races that didn’t exist when he wrote.

The easy way to tell this story is that Keynes misunderstood people. He didn’t. In the same essay he split human needs in two: needs that are “absolute in the sense that we feel them whatever the situation of our fellow human beings may be,” and needs that are “relative in the sense that we feel them only if their satisfaction lifts us above, makes us feel superior to, our fellows.” The relative needs, he wrote, “may indeed be insatiable; for the higher the general level, the higher still are they.” He saw the treadmill too: the purposive man who is always after “jam to-morrow and never jam to-day.” Nearly everything this essay argues, Keynes saw in 1930.

He bet on hope anyway, and the bet was narrow. He wagered that once the absolute needs were met, we would walk away from the relative race and turn to “the art of life itself.” We didn’t. We poured the surplus straight back into the race.

A century later, the utopian case for AGI-era universal basic income makes the same bet without his caution: production becomes effectively infinite, so work becomes optional, so we are finally free to consume and rest. Underneath it is a picture of desire as a checklist — a finite set of things we want and can’t yet afford — where the wanting stops once production ticks off the last item. Keynes knew the relative needs had no last item and hoped we’d stop chasing them. This essay is about why we won’t, and why AGI can’t make us.

Let me put the conclusion up front. With respect to the thing we actually chase — call it contentment, the sense of having arrived — AGI, the most hyped technology in history, is going to be a non-event. Not because it changes little; it changes almost everything outside the skull. But the set point inside the skull doesn’t move. This is the argument for why.

The treadmill

Everyone has felt this from the inside. You get the thing you wanted, and almost at once something better swims into view — sometimes not even better across the board, just a different trade whose downside looks survivable from a distance. Psychologists named the machinery: the hedonic treadmill. The famous demonstration compared people who had just won large lottery jackpots against people who had just been paralyzed in accidents. Within a year both groups had drifted back toward where they started, and the winners reported taking measurably less pleasure in ordinary daily life. You reach the thing, and the set point quietly resets beneath you.

Look at what “better” even means as it slides around, and the options sort along a single axis — ranked by how completely production can flood each. Nearest is utility: it works faster, lasts longer, the axis everyone assumes desire runs on. Then quantity: more of the same. Then novelty: it’s new, which is enough. Then aesthetics: it’s more beautiful. And at the far end, the one that never bottoms out — story: what the thing says about you, who it places you above. A machine given a century will drown utility, quantity, novelty, most of aesthetics. It never touches the last one.

Which tells you what desire is made of. The wanting comes first; the reason comes second. We live it the other way round — I want this one because it’s faster, because it’s rarer — but the reason is manufactured after the fact to fit a wanting already running. This isn’t borrowed metaphor; it’s how the machine is built. People have almost no direct access to why they choose what they choose: asked, they don’t introspect, they invent a plausible story and report it as fact. When the mute half of a surgically split brain is shown an instruction and acts on it, the speaking half instantly fabricates a confident reason for a decision it never saw. Swap the item someone picked a moment ago and hand it back as their choice, and most won’t notice — they’ll argue fluently for a preference they never had.

So be exact about what’s fake, because everything downstream depends on it. The drive is real. The restlessness is real, and it is prior to every object it fastens onto. What gets invented is the story about which object will finally quiet it — and that story is wrong every time, because the object was never the point. The restlessness is the constant. The thing is interchangeable.

There’s a famous version of this idea, and it’s half right — the missing half is the one that matters. René Girard argued that beyond raw appetite we don’t know what to want, so we borrow our wants from other people: desire is imitation, and two people reaching for the same thing is the seed of every rivalry in history. He put copying at the root. But copying isn’t a root — it’s a strategy. The substrate ships with a short list of primary drives, and one of them is as old and as serious as hunger: the drive for rank. It isn’t learned. It shows up in infants before they can speak, who already expect the bigger, higher figure to prevail; it runs in every primate troop; and after decades of looking, the desire for standing turns out to be universal, present across every culture anyone has measured. We don’t copy other people’s desires because copying is what desire is. We copy them because wanting what a higher-ranked person has is itself a move in the status game — and of all the primary drives, rank is the one that never reports back satisfied. Girard saw the imitation and mistook it for the cause. What he was looking at was a species that keeps score.

And keeping score is the one axis still standing after the machine has flooded all the others.

There’s an obvious objection: the monk, the contemplative, the person who deliberately wants less. They’re real, and they prove the rule rather than breaking it. Every tradition that quiets the craving does it the same way — not by acquiring the last item on the list but by years of deliberate practice aimed at switching off the wanting itself, a lifetime of effort running against the grain of the machinery. That the exit exists, and that it costs that much to reach, tells you exactly how hard the default is wired in.

From utility to status

Watch any product category grow old. It arrives competing on what it does: a faster processor, a battery that lasts the day, a pigment that holds its color. While utility is scarce it maps straight onto lived experience — the thing does your labor, spares your body, hands back your time. But utility is the one dimension technology exists to demolish. Solve it and it can no longer tell anyone apart from anyone: once the fast processor sits in every pocket, no one earns a sliver of standing by owning one. The wanting doesn’t die. It migrates to whatever is still scarce — and what stays scarce is whatever is hardest to hand to everyone at once.

For most of recorded history, purple wasn’t a color you chose. It was a rank. Tyrian purple came from the crushed glands of sea snails — thousands of them for a gram of dye, barely enough to edge a single robe — and Rome eventually wrote the exclusivity into law: the deepest purple was the emperor’s alone, and to be caught wearing it uninvited could cost you your head. “To wear the purple” simply meant to take the throne. The dye never sold a color. It sold the fact that almost no one else was allowed to have it.

Aluminum tells the same story in reverse, and we got to watch the collapse in real time. In the 1850s it outpriced gold; when the Washington Monument was capped in 1884, the cap was a small aluminum pyramid, shown off in Tiffany’s window before it was hauled to the top. Napoleon III is said to have served his most honored guests on aluminum and left everyone else with gold. Then a new smelting process arrived, the price fell through the floor, and aluminum became the foil we wrap a sandwich in and throw away. Nothing about the metal changed. What changed is that everyone could have it — and the moment everyone could, no one wanted it.

The wristwatch is the mechanism caught in the act. In the 1970s, quartz movements made mechanical watches obsolete on every utilitarian axis — a 300,000 Patek Philippe. The Swiss industry nearly died, then discovered that the inferiority was the product. Mechanical watches are worth more now than ever, precisely because they are handmade, inefficient, and scarce. Utility didn’t just leave the category; its absence became the pitch.

Or run it forward. Take a smartphone five hundred years into the past and it becomes the most coveted object on Earth, something kings would go to war over. Today it’s nothing, because everyone has one. If everyone has a thing, it isn’t really a thing anyone wants; it becomes the baseline, and desire re-anchors just above it.

It’s tempting to read this as a ladder — function, then aesthetics, then meaning, then story, each rung finer than the last. It isn’t a ladder, and nothing makes the rungs arrive in that order. Aesthetics and novelty and story don’t wait their turn; they compete in parallel the instant utility stops being decisive. What actually sorts them is a single property: how much of a thing’s value depends on someone else not having it. Utility barely depends on that — a fast chip works just as well whether or not your neighbor owns one. Status depends on nothing else — it is the gap. So as production saturates the dimensions that need no loser, desire gets squeezed onto the ones that do, until all that’s left at the bottom of the funnel is the dimension made entirely of other people: rank. (Economists named the tail of this a century ago — conspicuous consumption, goods whose whole function is to be seen being owned.)

Why technology can’t touch it

Here is the structural reason, and it’s the heart of the argument. Divide the world’s goods in two. Material goods — food, energy, housing, compute — can in principle be made in greater quantity for everyone at once. Positional goods — status, exclusivity, being first, being best, the address everyone recognizes — are defined by their scarcity. They can’t be mass-produced even in principle, because their value is the ranking. If everyone stands on tiptoe to see better, no one sees better; the effort cancels and only the strain remains.

AGI is a machine for growing the material side, maybe without limit. It has no purchase on the positional side, and the reason is arithmetic: rank is zero-sum. For someone to be above average, someone else has to be below it; there will only ever be one most-admired person in any given room. You can manufacture infinite goods, but you cannot manufacture a world where everyone is above the median, because the median rises to meet them.

You’d expect technology to at least widen the arena, and for broadcast fame it did — mass media and the internet built ranking systems with follower counts in the billions. But the status that actually presses on a life is the reciprocal kind, standing among the people whose regard you can feel, and that circle is capped by the same cognition it always was. The ceiling has a name: Dunbar’s number, the roughly 150 stable relationships a person can carry, read straight off brain anatomy — across primate species the size of the social group tracks the size of the neocortex, and the human brain plugs into that curve at about 150. A billion followers never raised it, because the bottleneck was never the tooling. It was the cortex doing the bookkeeping — the same cortex reading this sentence.

One caveat fences the whole essay. I’m assuming the substrate holds still. If AGI ends up reaching in and rewriting the human hardware itself — editing the machinery that manufactures wanting and rank-hunger and restlessness — then every prediction here is void, and honestly the question gets too fuzzy to reason about. So I’m not asking it. The question I am asking is narrower and answerable: what does it feel like to be a human — this human, the one doing the predicting — in a world where everything outside us has changed and we haven’t?

Solving material scarcity, then, doesn’t end the race. It relocates the entire race into the positional economy — the one place production can’t reach. The social axis of desire is the scarcity that survives. Not because people are shallow, but because it’s the only axis on which scarcity is mathematically conserved.

A world with only social scarcity

From here on, the specifics are guesses. The mechanism underneath them isn’t.

From any single person’s vantage, the world after material scarcity looks strangely familiar: the same rat race, different tokens. And this isn’t a new observation dressed up as a prediction — it’s the oldest pattern we have. Sorting into ranks is a human universal in the strict anthropological sense: of the traits catalogued as appearing in every society ever documented, prestige, status distinction, and the dance of dominance and deference are all on the list. There is no record of a human group that didn’t sort itself.

The tempting objection is the hunter-gatherer band — flat, sharing, no chiefs. Look closer and the band becomes the best evidence, not the counterexample. Foragers stay flat only through relentless work: they mock the boaster, shame the hoarder, ignore the man who tries to give orders, drive out the one who won’t stop. Anthropologists call it a reverse dominance hierarchy — a coalition of everyone, permanently pushing down on anyone who tries to rise. Egalitarianism isn’t the absence of the status drive; it’s a society spending its entire moral energy to suppress a drive that never switches off. The good hunter still has to bring the meat home — he just has to belittle his own kill while he hands it over. The tokens change; the game underneath is identical.

Which means we don’t have to speculate about what happens when you hand people an income floor and make work optional. We’ve been running that experiment for decades. The unhappiness of the long-term unemployed turns out to be mostly not about money: the non-pecuniary cost — the lost structure, purpose, and standing — dwarfs the lost income, and it barely moves when you replace the income. More generous benefits improve the material situation and leave the misery largely intact. Worse, the wound scars — track tens of thousands of people over fifteen years, and unemployment is one of the rare blows a person never fully adapts back from, the set point staying depressed even after they find work again.

Sit with that for a world of universal basic income. The stereotype of the man in his thirties in his parents’ basement is not a story about deprivation — the fridge is full. His suffering is positional: he’s at the bottom of a hierarchy with no visible way up, and no amount of food fixes what was never about food. The post-AGI citizen on a universal stipend is that same figure scaled to a civilization. The work will be nominally optional and not optional at all, because the need to matter among your peers is as real as the hunger in your stomach — and unlike hunger, no machine can fill it.

This is the place to be blunt about what the argument rests on. We treat physical pain — hunger, cold, injury — as real, and mental pain — being outranked, ignored, unneeded — as somehow lesser, a luxury ache for people whose real problems are already solved. That gap is mostly an illusion, and you can measure how small it is. Put someone through an unwanted breakup, show them a photograph of the person who left, slide them into a scanner: what lights up isn’t a dedicated sadness center, it’s the same machinery that fires when a hot probe is pressed to the forearm. Push further — give people ordinary acetaminophen every day for three weeks and they report fewer hurt feelings than people on a placebo. A drug for physical pain dulls social pain. (Not identical down to the neuron — the strict single-region version of that claim has rightly been contested. What survives is sturdier: the two pains share hardware, answer to the same drugs, and drive the same behavior.) So when the argument says positional scarcity produces suffering, it isn’t reaching for a metaphor.

The abstraction bites hardest exactly where you’d least expect it — in money, the most material thing there is. The Easterlin paradox: at any given moment the richer people in a country report more happiness than the poorer ones, yet as an entire country grows richer over decades its average happiness doesn’t budge. Both are true at once only if what registers isn’t how much you have but how much you have relative to the people around you. When everyone rises together, no one rises in the ranking. The cleanest proof came later: hold your own income fixed, and your neighbors earning more makes you report being less happy. Not their poverty dragging you down — their prosperity.

Some of this world we can already sketch. Not by utility — machines win on utility — but by the plain fact of being human, we keep granting each other a premium. You can measure it: show people a wall of paintings, all of them machine-made, and label some “human-created” and some “AI-created” at random. The human-labeled ones get rated more beautiful and more likable — identical pixels, worth more for the story attached. What drove the effect was exactly what a machine can’t supply: the sense of a person behind the work who meant it.

We’ve run the same experiment with our own legs. The car has beaten the fastest human for over a century, and the effect on running was not obsolescence but the opposite — more people ran marathons in 2024 than in any year in history. Nobody stages a marathon to find out whether a car is faster; everyone already knows, and it was never the question, because we never ran to cross the city. Play has always worked this way — irrational by the utilitarian yardstick, which is exactly why it’s universal: children play, young animals play, none of them optimizing anything. Chess makes the point a second time — more played today than at any moment before a computer could crush the world champion, while the strongest engines now play one another in tournaments almost no one watches. Strength was never the draw. The human was.

Follow that premium to the places it doesn’t want to go, because the argument obliges it. If, in a world where machines do everything better, having humans do things for you becomes the luxury, then human attention becomes a scarce good — and scarce goods get owned. So ask it plainly. If status lives on exclusion, and AGI drops the cost of access to zero, does someone re-introduce the exclusion on purpose — gating access to the best intelligence not because gating is necessary but precisely because a thing everyone has is worthless as a marker, and a thing withheld is valuable in exact proportion to the withholding? The technology erases the scarcity; the positional economy has every incentive to legislate it back. And the darker question: if human presence is the last scarce good, does a class of people emerge whose function is simply to be status objects for others — not to produce, since production is free, but to exist as someone else’s audience, ornament, or possession? Positional economies have commodified human beings every time the incentives lined up, and here they line up hard. I’ll leave the question where it is.

Consider the most intimate case. A gift between partners distills the whole logic down to two people: an ornament, beautiful and expensive and completely useless, whose entire value is the message I spent something scarce on you. AGI makes the object free to produce, and this does no more to kill the gift than quartz did to the mechanical watch. It just moves the signal to what stays scarce — that this particular human, out of all the finite hours in a life, chose to point their attention at you. So the dating and courtship economy doesn’t merely survive the arrival of perfect artificial companions; it’s a natural growth sector, because it trades directly in the one commodity that can’t be manufactured. There may be AI partners more attentive and available than any person, and human courtship will go on anyway, probably larger than before — for the same reason people still want a human to have cooked the meal. The point was never the service. It was that a human chose to give it.

Is this utopia? Clearly not — the suffering of rank is fully intact. Is it dystopia? Probably not that either. That’s how boring we are: we adapt, we forget, we re-anchor, and the new world feels normal inside a generation.

AGI isn’t arriving on a date; it’s a spectrum, and we’re somewhere along it. For anyone deciding what to get good at: the machines aren’t eating work at random. They eat in a direction.

The direction is this: where the value of your work lives in the output, the machine is coming for it; where it lives in the humans and context around the output, it isn’t. A verifiable output is a cost function with extra steps, and optimizing against a fixed target is the one thing these systems are built to do. Does the code run, does the theorem hold, does the invoice reconcile — anything with an external standard to check against is, sooner or later, checkable by a machine. What has no external standard, only a person on the other end deciding how they feel, gives the optimizer nothing to grip.

Two familiar spectra are the same axis drawn on two maps. Across a company it runs Sales → Product → Tech: on the right the work is judged by whether the thing works — the part the machines take first; on the left by a person deciding whether to trust you, and trust has no unit test. Across a discipline it runs Art → Science: science is legible by construction — verifiable claims, reproducible methods, the native habitat of an optimizer — while art is a blend of components that each carry science and meaning but whose mixture dissolves into something that communicates beneath the logical layer, where feeling is the only referee. Same line both times. So the advice falls out clean: lean left. With one honest caveat — the machines don’t stop at a line, they advance, and the frontier moves left over time. Leaning left doesn’t buy a fortress. It buys the longest runway.

It’s tempting to say the machines will just make better art, the way engines make better chess, and it won’t matter because the audience isn’t buying optimality. That’s wrong twice. Chess has a scoreboard: checkmate is checkmate, the target sits still, an engine climbs past every human and stays there. Art has no scoreboard — there’s no technically superior painting, because there’s no external standard the painting is trying to satisfy. Duchamp settled this in 1917 by submitting a factory-made urinal, signing it with a fake name, and titling it Fountain; it became one of the most consequential objects of twentieth-century art, its craft zero and its novelty of form zero. Its entire value is context, story, and the gesture of a human choosing to call it art. And where chess’s target sits still, art’s runs away: the instant a machine masters a look, that look curdles into “AI slop” and the human eye recoils and relocates. You can’t summit a peak that turns to swamp the moment you plant the flag.

The usual “humans differentiate, machines chase” line is true but told too vaguely. The mechanism is attestation. In the old world a typo marked you as careless; in a world where flawless, frictionless text is the free default of every machine, the typo flips sign — it becomes costly proof that a human was here and meant it. Imperfection becomes signature. The machine can then learn to fake the wobble, so it’s a chase — but the chase is the oldest engine in culture, not something new to AI: a style starts at the top, the tiers below imitate it, and the instant the copy is complete the thing dies at the top and moves on, because everyone now has the old thing. It’s the whole physics of trends and of cool. AI just becomes the fastest imitator ever built and turns the crank faster. But faster isn’t infinitely fast: the floor speed is set not by how fast the machine can copy but by how fast humans can notice, tire, and re-differentiate — a cognitive clock that doesn’t scale with compute, the same way knowing more people stalled at 150 no matter how much network we built. Your differentiator is, by definition, whatever the crowd hasn’t reached yet. The gap doesn’t close. Differentiation is a positional good, and positional scarcity is conserved by construction.

The scarcity that can’t be printed

Hedonic adaptation alone doesn’t win this argument. “We always want more” has an obvious rebuttal: so make more, forever — which is exactly what abundance promises. The thing that defeats abundance is subtler. Abundance is a claim about production, about how much can be made. But satisfaction isn’t an event in the warehouse; it’s an event in a nervous system, and that system has fixed properties no volume of supply can touch. It habituates — whatever you give it becomes the new zero. It’s finite — one lifetime, one serial stream of attention, only so much taken in before you die. And it grades on a curve — it reads rank, rarity, provenance, stakes, never absolute quantity. Every scarcity that outlives AGI lives in there, on the consumption side, in the architecture of the consumer.

Social scarcity is the sharpest instance, because rank is defined as zero-sum — which is why this essay spent its length there. But it isn’t the only one, and here I’ll plant a flag for another day rather than pretend to resolve it. Attention is capped by cognition — a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention. Time is capped by mortality; infinite production of experiences buys no more life to spend on them. Meaning seems to need stakes, and stakes need the genuine possibility of loss that abundance is busy engineering away. Each is a scarcity production can’t reach; each could carry its own essay. This one only had to make the first case.

Which brings it back to UBI — where the thing I’ve been arguing against turns out not to be the actual idea. Trace universal basic income to the people who argued it seriously, and the utopia isn’t there. It was first proposed as justice — compensation for a common inheritance of land that private property had enclosed. It was revived as efficiency — cash as a cleaner way to relieve poverty than a sprawling welfare bureaucracy, tuned to keep the incentive to work intact. Its modern form is a displacement argument — the machines take the jobs, so people need a floor. Three proposals across three centuries, and not one promises freedom from wanting. They promise a floor. And the floor is real and it matters enormously: a person in pain from hunger or untreated illness is not running anyone’s status race, and AGI dragging billions out of poverty and disease would be among the largest goods a technology could ever do. Nothing here is an argument against it.

The promise of freedom lives in the phrase, not the policy. “Universal basic income” sounds like the end of the struggle, and where the phrase is vague the imagination fills in the rest: free income plus infinite production equals rest. That equation is the thing I’m against — and we’ve already watched it fail. Give people money with no strings, as several large trials now have, and the one thing that reliably does not happen is that they stop. Employment holds or rises, people start businesses, the mental-health numbers improve while the striving does not. Hand a human being the floor and they start climbing again immediately, because the climbing was never about the floor.

So the honest picture is one scale, not two. Plot satisfaction against material resources: a steep climb on the left, then a long flat shelf — /‾‾‾‾. Down in the steep part, resources are everything; a person there is cold, sick, afraid of next month, and money changes their life in a way that is neither positional nor imaginary. But infinite production doesn’t build a second, higher curve to climb onto. It slides everyone rightward along the same one, and the right end is flat. And the most miserable person in any room is almost never standing in the steep part — they’re out on the flat shelf, suffering anyway, not from a scarcity of matter but from where they sit relative to everyone else. There is no “real pain” track that money fixes and a separate “luxury pain” track it can’t. One axis, one substrate — and past the steep part, adding resources just flattens the slope you’re already on. It can’t lift you onto higher ground, because there is no higher ground.

Keynes saw all of this in 1930. He got the productivity exactly right, he knew the relative needs would never be filled, and he bet against them anyway. His warning sits in the same essay as his bet:

“Yet there is no country and no people, I think, who can look forward to the age of leisure and of abundance without a dread. For we have been trained too long to strive and not to enjoy.”

Take the dread seriously. Not because abundance isn’t coming — it is, for everything that can be produced. But the thing we actually want was never on that list.

References

Kept out of the body deliberately — the arguments should stand on their own reasoning, not on names most readers don’t know. Listed here so the attribution is honest.

  • Keynes, J. M. (1930). Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren. — the leisure prediction, absolute vs. relative needs, and the “dread” passage.
  • Brickman, P., Coates, D., & Janoff-Bulman, R. (1978). Lottery winners and accident victims: Is happiness relative? JPSP, 36(8). — the hedonic-treadmill study.
  • Nisbett, R. E., & Wilson, T. D. (1977). Telling more than we can know. Psychological Review, 84(3). — no introspective access to our own reasons.
  • Gazzaniga, M. — the split-brain “interpreter” that confabulates reasons.
  • Johansson, P., Hall, L., et al. — choice-blindness experiments (people defend choices they never made).
  • Girard, R. (1961). Deceit, Desire and the Novel. — mimetic desire (used here as the foil, not the frame).
  • Anderson, C., Hildreth, J. A. D., & Howland, L. (2015). Is the desire for status a fundamental human motive? Psychological Bulletin, 141(3). — status as a universal primary drive.
  • Veblen, T. (1899). The Theory of the Leisure Class. — “conspicuous consumption.”
  • Hirsch, F. (1976). Social Limits to Growth. — the material/positional distinction.
  • Frank, R. (1985/1999). Choosing the Right Pond / Luxury Fever. — positional arms races.
  • Dunbar, R. (1992/1993). Neocortex size as a constraint on group size. J. Human Evolution / BBS.
  • Brown, D. (1991). Human Universals. — status/prestige as documented universals.
  • Boehm, C. (1999). Hierarchy in the Forest. — the “reverse dominance hierarchy” in egalitarian foragers.
  • Clark & Oswald (1994); Winkelmann & Winkelmann (1998); Lucas, Clark, Georgellis & Diener (2004). — unemployment’s non-pecuniary cost and permanent scarring.
  • Eisenberger, Lieberman & Williams (2003); DeWall et al. (2010). — social-pain / physical-pain overlap and acetaminophen. Strict single-region claims contested by Wager et al. (2016).
  • Easterlin, R. (1974); Luttmer, E. (2005), “Neighbors as Negatives,” QJE, 120(3). — relative income and the reference group.
  • Bellaiche, L., et al. (2023). Humans versus AI. Cognitive Research, 8(42). — identical art rated higher when labeled human-made.
  • Duchamp, M. (1917). Fountain.
  • Simmel, G. (1904). Fashion. — the imitation/differentiation trend cycle.
  • Simon, H. (1971). — “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”
  • UBI provenance: Paine, Agrarian Justice (1797); Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (1962); modern trials — Finland (2017–18), Stockton SEED (2019–21), GiveDirectly Kenya.

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