Why Do We Celebrate?
If the individual doesn’t exist, neither can achievement
There is a well-established tradition in golf that if you make a hole-in-one, you’re expected to buy drinks for everyone in the clubhouse.
Some have proposed that this tradition exists to keep golfers honest. A golfer is less likely to lie about having made a hole-in-one, the theory goes, if they know that upon returning to the clubhouse, they’ll owe everyone drinks.
This sort of dry cost-benefit analysis is common among economists, who see humans as rational utility maximizers, trying to get the most out of the least amount of effort. From their perspective, if guilt (as a result of lying) is the only cost associated with becoming known as someone who has made a hole-in-one — the crowning individual achievement in golf¹ — lots of particularly unscrupulous golfers will lie about having made one. An economist would thus look at the tradition as a tax on lying, meant to stop golfers from doing it.²
However, while taxes are used to decrease demand for certain goods,³ it’s not as clear that the tradition-as-tax mechanism would stop particularly unscrupulous golfers from lying about making a hole-in-one. Consider that one of the “features” of having to buy everyone drinks after making a hole-in-one is being able to tell everyone that you made…
