I don't think your statements about subjective poverty are true. Subjective poverty is only a zero-sum game within a single social "game." If there are more gam

I don't think your statements about subjective poverty are true. Subjective poverty is only a zero-sum game within a single social "game." If there are more games, there are more winners. Lots of little ponds means you are more likely to find the few where you can be the big fish. It's true that these ponds can be loosely ordered and some of them are inarguably ranked higher than others (e.g., being a top-tier actor has more social status than being a top-tier chess player). But for the vast majority of people, we just don't care that we're at the bottom of the vast majority of these games. For example, I'm pretty low on the totem pole in my local gym, but I'm pretty high on the totem pole at work (small company, long-ish tenure). Paul Graham is pretty high on the totem pole in Silicon Valley, but he's probably pretty low on the totem pole at a film festival. Except for a few of these "big" games (film industry, politics, the extremely wealthy), most of us get to be pretty good at entirely avoiding situations where we are subjectively poor. For those we can't avoid, we're able "give more weight" to where we're more important, through our own, personal valuations. Hence my "sum" across the games I care about is greater than zero, which is true for most people.