I disapprove of your use of parables to smuggle in your economic hypotheses, rather than arguing for them competently and clearly.

Very well.

First, people prefer longer lives to shorter ones.

Second, just as it is difficult to think of goods that are only absolute, it is difficult to think of goods that are only positional. The used car provides $4,500 in transportation value; the Ferrari provides $50,000 in transportation value.

Third, many professions create durable value and large positive externalities. 25% more lawyering or 25% more derivative trading may not have obvious positive benefits, but 25% more programming or 25% more engineering or 25% more science obviously do. Crunch time may be 20 hours a day instead of 16, and so the programmers have just as little time to themselves, but the product will actually be superior, which seems like a Pareto gain.

Fourth, phase changes have effects that are difficult to anticipate. A world that moved at startup speed- where more people were massively productive and focused- could be far more glorious, delightful, and pleasant than our world. It is difficult to imagine just how miserable conditions were when society was liquid, rather than a gas; similarly, it is difficult for a gas to imagine the joys of being a plasma.

I disapprove of your commentary

I agree it was insufficiently clear. I meant that Yvain has seen societies that are both liquid and gas, and I do not see how someone who grasped the difference between those phases could write a post like his.