A friend told me a story the other day. I don’t know whether it is correct or not. If it turns out to be apocryphal, I suspect it won’t affect the truth the story contains.

The story involves a Liberal Arts professor at a prestigious university. The professor tells his students that every student in the class will receive the same mark for their assignments. The mark being calculated by taking the average of each of the individual assignment scores.

In the first assignment everyone received an A. In the second, the average mark went down to a B. In the third assignment, everyone received a C-. The fourth assignment, everyone failed.

At first blush the story offers up what looks like an iconic example of how socialism quickly devolves to the lowest common denominator. When it comes to rewards, humans tend to care most about what they get relative to others, rather than absolutes. So, I’m okay with less provided that my neighbour is getting even less than me. Or, taking into account the fact that we all tend to be pain-avoiding before pleasure-seeking, I tend to be not okay if my neighbour is visibly doing better than me. Combine this relative-envy factor with the fact humans also tend to be lazy, and it doesn’t take long before everything combines into an exponential race to the bottom.

The only alternative, the political right and capitalists tell us, is competition. Competition, they say, creates a race to the top.

Or at least that’s what the theory predicts. Except, humans are still lazy, and so the road to the top quickly becomes hierarchy-shaped. Which means society makes a different kind of exponential shift, this time with 1% at the top of the pile and the other 99% scraping a living on zero-hours contracts and feeling they would have been better off in the socialist system. A system where, if nothing else, they wouldn’t have to stand outside the gates, looking at the rich coiffing champagne in their Mcmansions.

All this, of course, is just another example of weak, two-dimensional left-versus-right thinking. Those on the right might rub their hands with glee hearing the Liberal Arts professor story. And they might be right, but not for the reasons they think.

The archetypal socialist race-to-the-bottom doesn’t happen just because humans are lazy and envious. It also happens because the majority of tasks that modern life expects from us are essentially meaningless Mcjobs. And somewhere near the all-time top of the list of meaningless McJobs is the liberal arts assignment. Had the assignments been relevant to anything other than the professor’s blinkered ego, students might have ignored the fact that their best efforts would not score them a good grade and worked hard. Combine socialist measures and meaningless work, however, and students quickly work out there really is no point in trying at all.

The missing third-way dimension in the left-right spectrum is meaning. Or almost. Add meaning to socialism and, while we might slow the race to the bottom, we don’t get utopia either. Instead, we get great art and bad plumbing.

Which leaves the competition-and-meaning combination. While that inevitably won’t be perfect either, it would at least help cure the corrosive, post-truth, every-man-for-himself version of capitalism we now see in too many parts of the world. And it would, too, likely serve as the step-change to society’s next, right direction, s-curve.