Not knowing who the author was, I read this thinking it must've been written by a teenager taking his first stabs at intellectual discussion of socioeconomics.

Not knowing who the author was, I read this thinking it must've been written by a teenager taking his first stabs at intellectual discussion of socioeconomics. Turns out he's Trump's ambassador to Israel. I can't decide which is less credible. We all value status. It's easy to miss how bad this generalization is since this piece is entirely generalization. It reveals the assumption underpinning Friedman's argument — that status is important to everyone. He seems to think that those who don't value traditional signifiers of status must find other ways to scratch that itch. I understand this is a short blog piece but you can't credibly talk about status in a societal sense without also acknowledging the ways in which each society tends to limit the rights of those at the very bottom of its status hierarchy. Status is not just self-perception, it has a very tangible, external impact on someone's well-being in a society. The biggest problem with this piece is that it doesn't acknowledge the very real possibility that status simply matters less to some people than others. The best people I know are the ones who devote the least amount of energy to comparing themselves to everyone around them. Personally I believe that striving for a level of detachment from competitive self-evaluation is a lot more important than achieving any of the forms of status Friedman seems to care about. Maybe instead of moving towards Friedman's capitalist utopia where everyone can be high-status we should instead strive for a place where status just matters less to everyone.