There are exceptions to the law of diminishing marginal utility. In most of these exceptions, an additional unit of material resource pushes someone over some important threshold. For example, consider the meal or pill or gulp of air that saves someone’s life, or the car whose acquisition pushes the competitive collector into first place. In such cases, the unit that puts the person over the threshold might well be as beneficial to that person as any prior unit was. Still, as a general rule, material resources do have diminishing marginal utility.