Some goods only have value because not everyone can have them

A positional good — a Rembrandt, a house in the best school catchment area, an elite degree — is valued mainly for how it's distributed across a population, not for how useful it is on its own. Its worth to you falls as more other people get one too, so no amount of economic growth can make everyone equally well supplied. Technology can't fix scarcity that's social rather than physical.

— Fred Hirsch, Social Limits to Growth — 1977
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