For a stretch, the richest person on Earth was Bernard Arnault, whose company LVMH sells Louis Vuitton, Dior and Tiffany. That says a great deal about what our culture admires. Status is sold by the bag, and every year more than $300 billion flows into designer goods.

Humanity's Checklist does not ask people to stop wanting status. It asks what would happen if status pointed somewhere else.

Status is a signal

In 1899 the economist Thorstein Veblen coined the phrase conspicuous consumption in The Theory of the Leisure Class. He argued that people buy many luxury goods less for what they do than for what they say about the owner: I can afford this. Expensive things work as signals precisely because they are expensive.

Signals are cultural, and culture changes. What signals success in one decade looks absurd in the next.

Status has moved before

There are good examples of status attaching to doing good.

  • Conspicuous conservation. Economists Steven and Alison Sexton found that buyers were willing to pay a premium for the distinctive-looking Toyota Prius because it visibly signaled environmental concern. They called the effect conspicuous conservation.
  • Charity wristbands. In the mid-2000s, yellow Livestrong bracelets became a mass fashion item, worn in the tens of millions as a visible sign of support for cancer research.
  • Product (RED). Launched in 2006, (RED) partnered with major brands on products that sent a share of sales to the Global Fund to fight AIDS.

Each showed that people will happily display generosity when it looks good to do so. None went all the way: making the amount you gave the thing that is admired.

Charity designer goods

The checklist's beachhead for status is charity designer goods: desirable pieces where the coolest thing you can wear shows how much you gave. The giving is built into the design. The more someone gave, the rarer and more recognizable the piece.

This flips the logic of luxury. Today a logo signals what you spent on yourself. A charity designer piece would signal what you put into the world, and the status economy would start funding the cure.

The money involved

The scale is what makes this item matter. If just 1 percent of annual designer-goods spending were redirected to giving, that would be about $3 billion a year. That redirected flow alone would cover the entire $5 million question posed by Humanity's Checklist in less than a day.

The money is not the only effect. When giving becomes admired, it changes the story a culture tells about success, which sits at the top of the checklist.

The objection

Is it shallow to give for status? Perhaps. But status-seeking is not going away, and the alternative is letting it keep flowing into handbags. If a desire to be admired can fund clean water, new tools for coordination and a better story for humanity, that is a trade worth making.

Make generosity the flex, and the reward system of the superorganism starts working for everyone.