Standing versus allocation separates two questions a society constantly fuses. Standing answers who counts? — who remains a legitimate participant, eligible for consideration at all. Allocation answers something else entirely: who gets what, when not everyone can have it? The first is unconditional; the second is a bounded, contestable decision made under real limits. Confusing them is how a resource shortage quietly turns into a verdict on worth — we cannot give everyone this silently becoming you were never entitled to count.
Keeping them apart is what lets standing stay absolute without pretending scarcity has vanished. A participant’s standing does not rise or fall with how a scarce good is distributed, and an allocation rule, however sharp, does not touch their membership in the ecology. Abundance changes what the allocation question is for but never dissolves it — some goods stay scarce even in wealth — which is why a mature architecture needs an allocation theory sitting alongside standing rather than folded into it.