When community is self-defeating: status competition in a communal economy

Critics of the market sometimes argue that market competition damages our relations with one another. We should care about this, on one telling, because of how this undermines community that undergirds equal social recognition and esteem. Rather than rebut this challenge to markets, this paper considers whether this problem is solved by an economy explicitly dedicated to community. I develop an informal model of when community can be self-defeating. Drawing on a neglected remark by Robert Nozick, I claim that the effort to contribute to the common good can become a metric of status. This creates a different kind of competition that can undermine the very social recognition and esteem some theorists of community hope to achieve. I support this theoretical claim with a brief foray into real-life cases of economies explicitly dedicated to a principle of community and how status competition emerges even in these settings. The competition complaint, in this light, may be less a condemnation of markets than a reflection of the human condition.