The Olympics, but for Everything

A welder lays a bead so clean the inspector stops to look at it. A bakers’ guild argues for an hour about the crumb of one loaf.

A nursing crew goes a whole winter without a patient fall. Four coders find the bug at 2 a.m. A town’s maintenance crew catches the leak before the street floods.

Today, all of that gets scored in one currency: profit. And the stakes are brutal. If the welder’s employer loses the contract, she can lose her paycheck, her health insurance, and eventually her home.

I think that’s the wrong game. Companies shouldn’t compete for profit. Crews should compete for the title.

Every trade should have a league table, promotion and relegation, and a world championship. Most people would play in the home tier, for their own town. Anyone who wanted to could climb.

The Olympics, but for everything.

The venues I promised

In Part 14: You Won’t Have a Career. You’ll Have a Skill Tree., I promised a pyramid of leagues above every guild’s ladder. The idea is simple: survive first, then choose the venues where you want to compete, or contribute.

This is what the venues look like.

The whole series fits in one line: universal basic goods and services, powered by universal machine labor on demand, distributed by universal basic capital. The floor takes survival off the table. Your essentials, from food and water to housing and healthcare, stop depending on whether you win.

Fair question, though: markets give us better products, invention, and the pride of beating the shop down the street. If nobody can go under, why would anyone try hard?

My answer: competition stays. The stakes change.

In a market, losing can cost you your livelihood. In a league, losing costs you a division. You regroup and try to come back up next season.

You can lose a league. You can never lose your floor.

How a pyramid works

The best model for the structure is English football.

The Premier League has 20 clubs. Every season, the bottom three are relegated and three clubs come up from the division below.

Under it sit 72 more professional clubs in the English Football League, then the FA’s National League System, which for 2026–27 placed 996 clubs across 48 divisions, then county leagues all the way down.

In 2023–24, the FA counted over 1.4 million registered players, against 92 professional clubs.

Almost everyone plays in the lower tiers. And they aren’t failures. A Sunday league midfielder isn’t a failed Premier League midfielder.

She’s a midfielder. Her division has its own table, its own champion and its own promotion race.

That’s the shape I want for every trade:

• Every tier is a real competition, with a public table and the same rules for everyone.
• The path up is open. Win your division and you move up.
• The path down is survivable. Lose and you drop a division, not out of society.

In Part 4: Quests Should Replace Corporations, I wrote that “you form a party when you want to take on a quest, and you join a guild when you want to learn a skill or practice a craft.”

In the world we want, every trade and craft is organized through guilds, and each guild runs a pyramid:

1. The home tier. Local work for your own community, like the bakery on your street or the crew that keeps your town’s water clean. It’s honored, it has its own champions, and it’s where most people will choose to be.
2. Regional leagues, for crews that want harder competition.
3. National leagues.
4. A world summit for every craft.

And rank is per skill, not per person. You might be a national-league welder and a home-tier baker.

Think of an Elo rating, the chess system Arpad Elo designed and FIDE adopted in 1970, which moves with every game you play. You’d have one for each skill you practice.

The trade pyramids already exist

This sounds far-fetched until you notice that most of it is already running.

Welders, plumbers and nurses

SkillsUSA already runs this ladder for American career and technical students: local chapters, then district or regional contests, then state, then a national championship where more than 7,000 state champions compete in 113 events, judged by nearly 2,000 industry volunteers.

The summit is WorldSkills, often called the skills Olympics, which grew out of Spanish national contests and held its first international round in 1950.

Its list of skills reads like a town’s job board: welding, bakery, plumbing and heating, bricklaying, landscape gardening, water technology, health and social care, and software applications development. At WorldSkills Shanghai in September 2026, China topped the gold medal table for the fifth edition in a row, with 41 golds across 64 skills.

Europe even has a continental tier: EuroSkills Herning 2025 drew almost 600 young professionals from 32 countries. On WorldSkills’ site, the British visual merchandiser Kirsty Hoadley describes the climb.

She started out “nationally competing against a couple of hundred people,” came fifth in the final, got invited to EuroSkills anyway, and won gold there and then at WorldSkills in London.

A world championship in health and social care. Picture a nursing crew training for that the way a club trains for a cup final.

One big limit: for most skills, WorldSkills competitors must be 22 or younger. Ours would be open to everyone, for life.

Bakers and cooks

The Coupe du Monde de la Boulangerie, the bakery world cup, began in 1992. Its founder, Christian Vabret, started it to reverse what he considered a decline in bread quality.

Teams from 12 countries are invited to the final in Paris, based on their rankings in regional competitions. The US national selection for the 2028 edition was set for September 2026, in New Jersey.

Cooks have the Bocuse d’Or, held in Lyon since 1987, where national selections feed continental ones, and those feed a 24-country world final.

Coders

The ICPC, the International Collegiate Programming Contest, traces its roots to a 1970 competition at Texas A&M.

Teams of three students represent their universities “in multiple levels of regional competition,” and in 2025, eight continental-sized region championships sent teams to the World Finals. ICPC’s 2025 fact sheet counts 73,083 students at 3,424 universities in 103 countries.

A team of coders already has a pyramid. It’s just limited to students.

Town crews

Ireland’s TidyTowns launched in 1958 with 52 towns. In 2025, 929 towns entered, a record, and the minister thanked 30,000 volunteers.

Independent adjudicators judge anonymously, scoring each town out of 600 marks across eight categories, from community involvement to biodiversity.

Britain in Bloom has the whole pyramid. Together with its grassroots tier, It’s Your Neighbourhood, it involves 3,000 groups a year. Regional “in Bloom” contests send roughly 80 communities to the national finals, and finalists can go on to represent Britain in Entente Florale Europe, where each member country puts forward one town and one village.

Since 1970, Britain in Bloom has split entries into categories, “because of the difficulty of comparing settlements of different sizes fairly.”

That’s a division system, invented by gardeners.

Builders on a quest

Parties, which form around a quest, race a public finish line. The Department of Energy’s Solar Decathlon started in 2002 with 14 student teams building solar houses, scored across ten contests by measured performance and juries.

And on October 4, 2004, SpaceShipOne won the $10 million Ansari XPRIZE by reaching 100 km twice in two weeks, after competitor teams had invested $100 million chasing it.

Put together

With the full pyramid, a few trades would look like this:

• Welding: town build crews at home, regional and national guild leagues, WorldSkills at the top.
• Baking: street bakeries at home, regional and national selections, the bakery world cup.
• Care: a clinic’s nursing crew at home, regional and national tables on patient outcomes, a world summit.
• Coding: a town’s software crew at home, regional contests, a world final that doesn’t stop at graduation.
• Town crews: It’s Your Neighbourhood, regional Bloom, the national finals, then Europe.

Masterpieces and stars

Guilds have always judged their own. The original masterpiece was the piece a journeyman made to prove they were ready to become a master, and the guild kept it.

The modern version is a rating you can lose. Michelin has awarded stars since 1926, judged by anonymous inspectors, and a star can be lost as well as won. A rank you can lose keeps quality honest.

But here’s the warning. Sheilagh Ogilvie’s The European Guilds (2019) found, as one review summarizes, that guilds’ “quality controls served themselves, not consumers.” Peer judging can turn into a cartel with a trophy cabinet.

That’s why the guild league needs the charter from Part 4: “A guild could similarly have a charter obligation to pursue mastery of its craft and keep its doors open to anyone who wants to apprentice.” Open doors, outside judges, and a public table.

Climbing is optional

Paris hosted 10,500 Olympians. In 2025, the World Masters Games in Taipei drew 25,049 athletes in 35 sports, open to anyone over 30. More than twice as many people chose the open tier as reached the summit.

That’s what I mean by “the Olympics, but for everything.” A ladder with a summit, where climbing is optional.

It’s the human-will rule, applied to ambition. As I put it in Part 2: If a Human Wants to Do a Job, a Machine Shouldn’t Take It: “if a human wants to do it, a human gets to do it.”

When people move between interests, machine labor on demand covers whatever work they leave.

Or, in the line I keep coming back to: from each according to their will, to each according to their needs. The needs half is the floor.

The will half is the league. Want to make the best bread on Earth? Enter the world league.

Want to bake for your street? Bake for your street. Nobody’s floor depends on the choice.

The scoreboard is the second ledger

A league needs stats. In Part 17: Keep Money, Add a Second Ledger, I proposed resource accounts: a community’s live record of what it physically has, makes, uses and loses. That’s a ready-made scoreboard for a town crew, the way goal difference is for a team.

But a scoreboard can’t do it alone. In 1975, the economist Charles Goodhart observed that a statistical regularity tends to collapse once pressure is placed on it.

The anthropologist Marilyn Strathern later gave it the popular phrasing, in a 1997 paper: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”

Score a nursing crew only on how fast it discharges patients, and you’ll get patients sent home too early.

So mix three things, the way TidyTowns and the Solar Decathlon already do:

1. Measured stats from the resource accounts, which can’t be faked without the books failing to balance.
2. Human judges, anonymous and independent, scoring what a meter can’t see.
3. Rotating categories, so nobody can tune for one number forever. The Royal Agricultural Society of England set its prize categories on a strict rotation more than a century ago.

Medals beat money

So what do winners get? Mostly not money, which I think is a feature.

That same study of the Royal Agricultural Society’s prizes, by Liam Brunt, Josh Lerner and Tom Nicholas (2012), covered competitions from 1839 to 1939.

Prizes drew more entrants and better patents, and in the authors’ words, “medals were more important than monetary awards.” The IOC doesn’t pay medallists either.

Money can even make things worse. In a Swiss survey, Bruno Frey and Felix Oberholzer-Gee found that 50.8% of residents would accept a nuclear waste site in their town. Offered compensation, acceptance dropped to 24.6%.

And a 1999 meta-analysis of 128 studies by Edward Deci, Richard Koestner and Richard Ryan found that expected tangible rewards undermined people’s intrinsic motivation.

So nobody is paid to play. Promotion earns:

• Status. The title, the table, the medal.
• Harder problems and bigger quests.

It never earns a bigger floor. Never that. And fame doesn’t convert into power: the floor and universal basic capital are equal for everyone, and you can’t sell them.

Machine labor follows quests, not medals. Any quest can ask for what it needs, and requests are met by demand, with the essentials first.

A world-champion welder has the same home, the same healthcare and the same vote as the home-tier welder down the road.

We won’t stop wanting status. Will Storr’s The Status Game (2021) names one of its games success: being valued because you are competent.

In Part 10: A Floor for Everyone, a Frontier for Anyone, I wrote: “But you can channel it into status that doesn’t cost anyone else.” A league is the success game, with a referee.

Attention still buys players

Now the hardest problem. Donella Meadows called it success to the successful: winners get the means to win again.

In football, money drives that loop. Winning brings attention, attention brings broadcast and sponsorship revenue, and revenue buys better players. Stefan Szymanski has found that wage spending explains about 90% of the variation in league position over time.

Wrexham, the club I’ve been watching lately, shows the loop at full speed.

After Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney bought it in 2021 and a documentary made it world-famous, it became the first side to win three consecutive promotions in the top five leagues of English football.

You might think taking the money out fixes this. It doesn’t. Attention still buys players.

The best welders want to weld with the best crew. The best coders want to join the team everyone’s watching. Left alone, talent would pile onto a few famous teams, and every division would have one dynasty and a lot of spectators.

So competitive team leagues need an auto-draft.

American sports worked out part of this long ago. In 1935, NFL owners approved a plan by Bert Bell for a draft in which the weaker teams picked first and the champions picked last. But that created a new problem: if the worst team gets the best player, losing pays.

The NBA hit that wall in the 1980s. After accusations that teams were deliberately losing to get the first pick, it introduced a draft lottery in 1985. Every non-playoff team’s name went into an envelope, and each had an equal chance at the top pick.

The league has tuned the odds ever since, and in May 2026 it approved a “3-2-1 Lottery” for 2027 that flattens them further. The three worst teams lose a ball. The NBA’s own term for them: “draft relegated.”

Fantasy sports supply the last piece. In a snake draft, the order reverses every round, so whoever picks first in round one picks last in round two.

Put those together and you get the rule:

1. Rate everyone, per skill. Every player in a division’s pool has an Elo-style rating in the skill that league judges.
2. Stack-rank the pool. A sorting algorithm lines everyone up from highest rating to lowest.
3. Draft at random. Each season, the teams’ order is drawn by lot, then snakes back and forth down the ranked list. Every team in the division gets an equitable, if not identical, share of the best.

Since the order is random, nobody gains by losing. Since it snakes, nobody gets all the stars.

You opt into a competitive league knowing the draft applies. Outside the main leagues, you work and play with whoever you like: friendlies, non-competitive games, your own parties and quests.

Free association stays the default. The draft only governs the tables.

The rest of the parity rules

The draft isn’t the only lever. An open pyramid isn’t automatically fair: when Luigi Buzzacchi, Stefan Szymanski and Tommaso Valletti compared open soccer leagues with closed North American ones in 2003, they found the open leagues less balanced over time.

Then there’s the soft landing. Relegated Premier League clubs get parachute payments, because without them, a University of Liverpool team estimates, their revenue would fall 73% in the first year.

The side effect: over ten years, Championship clubs with parachutes had a 30% chance of promotion, against 7% for everyone else, according to the Leonard Curtis Football Finance Report 2026.

The cushion became a head start.

So here’s the full set:

• An open pyramid, so anyone can climb.
• Equal access to machine labor in every division. Promotion earns harder opponents and bigger quests, not more machines.
• Auto-draft for team leagues. Guild crews and party teams in the competitive leagues form by draft each season. Towns still compete as places in the care league, made up of their residents, with the same access to machine labor in each division.
• Many leagues per person. Most people will play several skills in several leagues, which spreads talent instead of stacking it. More on that in Part 14.
• Shared training. The guild charter obliges guilds to teach anyone who wants to learn, so skills don’t pool at the top.
• Fixed rules. The Longitude Act of 1714 offered up to £20,000 for finding a ship’s longitude at sea. John Harrison, a self-taught clockmaker, solved it, then fought the Board of Longitude over the payout, feeling it had unfairly changed the rules. Referees don’t change the terms after the race.

Most important of all: the floor is the ultimate parachute, and it’s the same for everyone. A parachute only tilts a league when some teams get a bigger one. The floor can’t.

Rank the work, not the worker

The sociologist Michael Young coined the word “meritocracy” in his 1958 satire about a society that sorts people by merit until a new elite hardens at the top. In 2001, he called the book “a satire meant to be a warning”.

He was right to worry. So leagues rank work, not worth. A table measures this season’s welds, or this year’s river cleanup, in one skill.

It resets. It never touches your floor, your vote in your town’s trust, or your right to join any guild.

And the home tier isn’t the bottom of anything. It’s where most people will choose to play.

What’s left worth doing

The philosopher Bernard Suits wrote the best defense of this idea I know, in The Grasshopper (1978): “Playing a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.”

His case is that the only argument against a life of play is that, for now, you die if you don’t work.

The floor makes the obstacles unnecessary. Nobody has to bake the best loaf in the region or write the fastest code. When people still choose to, it’s a game, in the best sense of the word.

Objections

Isn’t this just capitalism with medals?

No. In capitalism, the loser can lose their home, and the winner can buy up the field. In a league, the loser drops a division, and the winner gets a harder schedule. The floor is outside the game, the machines that make it belong to the town’s trust, and there’s nothing to buy.

Doesn’t the draft break up crews that love working together?

In the competitive leagues, yes. That’s the point: the alternative is a few famous crews hoarding talent forever. But nobody has to enter a drafted league, and your crew can keep working together in friendlies and on its own quests.

Won’t the home tier become second-class?

Only if we let status flow one way. Most footballers already play in the lower tiers, and they don’t feel like failures. Give local leagues their own tables, champions and festivals, and they’ll be a culture, not a consolation prize.

Who referees?

Independent judges, appointed in public and scoring anonymously, like TidyTowns. Fixed rules for each season. And appeals to a body outside the league, because Harrison should never have had to fight his referees.

Lose a league, keep your floor

In a market, you can lose everything. In a league, you lose a season, and next season starts fresh.

That’s the trade I want. Keep the pride, the rivalry and the drive to be the best. Drop the fear.

If you want the summit, climb. If you want your street, stay.

Either way, you can lose a league. You can never lose your floor.

If rank is per skill and most people play in several leagues at once, the old idea of a career, one track for life, stops making sense.

That’s the case I made in Part 14. And for the years before the floor exists, read Part 19: Plan for the Bad Transition.

A league is a place to earn esteem: the title, the table, the medal. Above esteem, the pyramid keeps going, and that’s where I’m headed in Part 16: Above Self-Actualization Is the Universe.