&gt; If you manipulated consumption to be identical, you&#x27;d still have status - it&#x27;d just be based on good looks or other such things.<p>I feel like you didn&#x27;t really read my comment. Have you read Harrison Bergeron? The premise is that people receive body or mind alterations to suppress natural advantages or enhance natural flaws in order to make everyone equal.<p>I was already accounting for consumption being generalized to something like the advantages or good looks or a quick wit in my comment before.<p>&gt; I&#x27;m glad we&#x27;ve mutually rejected that theory.<p>This is a bit glib, almost antagonistic, of you. The Last Place Aversion literature I linked provides direct evidence that at least a mild form of the effect I described exists, so I certainly don&#x27;t reject it. All I&#x27;m saying is that, like all simple theories, it&#x27;s not perfect. There are situations where being high status among poor is better than being low status among rich. I am not saying anything more specific.<p>Regarding the signaling tax -- I mostly do agree. I think we should use the same governmentally forced redistributive procedures that we apply to income or wealth and also apply them to sex, good looks, loneliness&#x2F;social connection wealth, etc.<p>It&#x27;s just too ingrained in our primitive morality to view these as acceptable. And I think that stems from another hypothesis from Hanson, in his blog post &quot;Inequality talk is about grabbing&quot; -- basically that we focus on monetary redistribution instead of say sex experience redistribution because we believe it&#x27;s easier for us to use coalition politics to take what we want in terms of money, whereas we less believe it would work for sex, and for some other things, like, say, true love redistribution, we could not really even know if we were successfully grabbing what we wanted.