At 10:58 AM -0500 2/26/98, Carl Feynman wrote:
>(3) The trait should not be a positional good.
I agree with you that it would be better if people don't select for
(purely) positional goods, but I am not sure I can think of any plausible
way of stopping it. One problem is that most positional goods are
(arguably) also of some use--and most useful goods, such as intelligence,
are also positional goods, given that relative status matters to people. It
is hard to think of a good bright line rule that wouldn't have a serious
risk of being used by (for example) people without genes for extraordinary
intelligence to keep people with such genes from making sure they got
expressed.
David Friedman
Received on Thu Feb 26 20:18:21 1998
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