8 ms·

We moderns are status-drunk

102 points by Tycho 5y ago

drewcoo 5y ago
We're a social species. We are constantly scrutinizing one another. The author's thesis seems overly baroque: "evolution had humans use their absolute income/wealth to judge their relative status." And that's not considering that evolution didn't have a damned thing to do with income even though heredity does have to do with taxes.
- amelius 5y ago
  Also status is highly context dependent. For example, a person can feel high status at work, but when visiting e.g. some physics conference can suddenly feel very low status. And no amount of money would help.
firethief 5y ago
> For example, for most social mammals, being higher status protects you more from stressful life events, so that you less often invoke the standard mammal stress response. By not spending on stress, you body invests more in growth and immunity. So higher status primates are less sick, and live longer. Does data support modern humans having lower stress levels than similar mammals? (Or, for that matter, that higher-status mammals have lower stress?) How would the proposed adaptation not be equally beneficial to lower-status mammals? The strongest argument for this hypothesis seems to be its explanatory power; it smells like grasping at straws
digital-cygnet 5y ago
Honestly, this did not resonate with me at all. It seems like more of a just-so story than a coherent argument commensurate with his sweeping hypothesis (that much of human history can be explained by our erroneously using absolute wealth to judge relative status). I'm not sure why we need this 'status theory' to tie together the trends of modern history that he describes ("rising lifespans, lower fertility, falling violence, more school, more effort into art/travel/invention/etc"), when each of them seems much more directly related to the overarching trend of "we have more (food, economic, time, technological) surplus than ancients did". Briefly: Rising lifespans - we have vaccines, infinite and fortified food, a safer environment,... Lower fertility - people (particularly women) have other options, childhood mortality is lower because of the prior item, contraception exists,... Falling violence - people living closer to subsistence have less to lose from violence than those whose survival is otherwise assured; when sufficient means of survival exist there is no need to kill each other over them; we have enough resources now to spend on policing and deterring violence;... More school and more effort spent on art etc - obviously a society of subsistence farmers will spend less on art and invention than one where a single farmer can feed a thousand people. The modern surplus is what makes this investment even possible I know that he gives lip service against some of these counterarguments (e.g., re life expectancy "these factors do a poor job of explaining the magnitude and steadiness of the mortality fall over the last few centuries"), but I need more evidence than that to reject the simple explanation in favor of the speculative hypothesis presented here. He also subtly confuses status _obsession_ with an erroneous _perception_ of high status. If people believe they are already high-status, why would it make sense to devote more resources to getting and achieving status instead of e.g. fertility? I believe that status-obsession certainly drives many parts of our collective behavior, but that seems entirely noncontroversial and separable from Hanson's "miscallibration from absolute wealth" hypothesis. In sum, I was disappointed by this post and am moderately revising down my expectations from Robin Hanson going forward.
- Tycho 5y ago
  I think his general argument is that the trends of modern history are not adequately explained by the obvious factors you mention, and that a single hypothesis that logically explains these effect-behaviour gaps is preferable to lots of ad hoc explanations around each individual trend. With respect to obsession vs perception, he's saying that it only makes sense to pursue more status if you are already high status. Greater status is not attainable for most. If you mistakingly think you are high status, you will accomplish little except wasting your time. Case in point: useless advanced degrees.
jw02 5y ago
Its why every social network/content generation/attention capture architecture such as FB, HN, YouTube, Twitter et al cant function without a Like/Click/View/Upvote count publicly visible signaling status. They claim the counts signal value. Obviously not. These days you can be a domain expert but no one will take your view seriously unless some buffoon on social media who has accumulated enough Likes validates what you are saying. In the past it had to be a King or Pope (ie someone with wealth and power). So naturally the chimp troupe craves status. You can't get anything done with out it.
- Juliate 5y ago
  And, you also get complete clowns that accumulate visibility and social-media-status-points thanks to the understanding of the manipulation tools offered to them but are actually incompetent to the verge of dangerous and in the worst case can become geopolitical issues.
lmm 5y ago
The idea that higher-status people would be more status-chasing seems dubious. In the evolutionary environment there would have been diminishing returns to status, and in any environment social climbers are noticeably lower status than those with real "old money" status.
- kqr 5y ago
  Do you have a source for either of those claims? The little historical anthropology I've read suggests the opposite: status is a constant struggle. You don't get it and then have it, you work to show it off every day or you lose it, because in a sense it's like Santa Claus; something that only exists when others believe in it. For others to believe in it, they have to be reminded of it. If anything, people are naturally suspicious of "old money" and other types of get-rich-with-little-effort situations (e.g. usury) and people with old money continuously have to invent new reasons to justify their wealth, not uncommonly resorting to violence to keep a stake in their claim. (This is an amalgamation of different sub-messages of Drive, Debt, The Elephant in the Brain, Savage Money, and quite probably other sources I've forgotten about, but could look up if you've read the above and want more.)
  - jerrre 5y ago
    is the last book you mention "The Savage Truth on Money - Terry Savage"? The first is by Pink?
    - kqr 5y ago
      First by Pink, last by Christopher something. I can look it up shortly. Edit: harder to find than I thought: https://www.amazon.com/Savage-Money-Studies-Anthropology-History/dp/9057020920 https://www.amazon.com/Savage-Money-Studies-Anthropology-His...
- acituan 5y ago
  Exactly this. Status requires keeping track of people’s standing, but we can’t naturally do that for numbers greater than Dunbar’s. There comes in play the prosthetic status through indirect signals and symbols, from the feathers on a tribe leader’s hat to follower counts on social media. Unfortunately since status is also a comparative good (it matters having more status than the other) the virtual competition space for prosthetic status is made infinitely stretchable and manipulable for the latter.
murphyslab 5y ago
Reminiscent of a podcast episode, "Robert Sapolsky on the toxic intersection of poverty and stress". Discussed some of the feedback between stress, status, and economic position. Worth listening to. https://go.stitcher.com/show/vox-conversations/episode/best-of-robert-sapolsky-on-the-toxic-intersection-of-poverty-and-stress-80042163 https://go.stitcher.com/show/vox-conversations/episode/best-...
zqna 5y ago
What a rubbish. Life is certainly less stressful in Cyprus than in US of A, where people worry every minute about there absolute and relative incomes, and keep busy creating pseudotheories to justify their "heaven on earth".
ElViajero 5y ago
> evolution had humans use their absolute income/wealth to judge their relative status This is false thru history. A noble man could be higher status than a rich merchant, to not talk about race. The article gets what could be some reasonable conclusion from wrong data. It seems that the author started from an opinion, and then build a case around it. > low level workers are often well advised to “keep *their* head down”, and just do their job. > *we* all tend to rise in status when we seem to influence the behavior of others, but fall when lower status others seem to influence us. Also, from the article I have an strong feeling that the author thinks of himself as high-status.
- notahacker 5y ago
  A more fundamental criticism is that "status" itself is a subjective, cultural and temporally unstable concept so I don't see how humanity can collectively "overestimate" our status simply because it doesn't accord with a particular economic measure of it. (It may be related to the old observation that the American poor see themselves as "temporarily embarrassed millionaires", but it's a massively overstated, stretchy version of that idea) There are plenty of reasons to see our "status" as closer to peers of Jeff Bezos or the Duke of Westminster than serfs deserving only to serve them (not least Jeff and the Duke probably seeing it that way too!) and I'm not sure the size of the economic gap corrects that perception, which is based mostly on other measures of self worth
- ansible 5y ago
  > Also, from the article I have an strong feeling that the author thinks of himself as high-status. It is Robin Hanson, so... yeah, that's exactly the thought process.
Animats 5y ago
Hm. It's an interesting conjecture, but needs more backing. From the article: "In most societies, investments in fertility take time and time and energy away from investments in status. Yes fertility confers some status, but in our world not as much. As people get rich, they are tempted to invest less in immediate fertility in order to gain in status" Maybe, but fertility has declined in developed countries for poor people as well as rich people. The article suffers from having one good idea and then trying to bash too much to fit it.
haecceity 5y ago
People were always status drunk. Maybe we didn't always have the language to talk about it? Isn't status a modern psychology/sociology term?
tgv 5y ago
> My key hypothesis is this: evolution had humans use their absolute income/wealth to judge their relative status. Then fails to operationalize it. What's absolute wealth? Does someone in Venezuela think his status is high because his income is 400k/month? And the writer also fails to explain how our wealth perception would actually work or how evolution would cause it.
christkv 5y ago
Any hierarchical system will contain a system off status. It seems a property of all organizations and societies. What’s considered status changes over time but there is always a ladder
throaway46546 5y ago
I read this as "Why modems are status-drunk" and was very confused. I think I need to get some sleep.
TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
It's an interesting idea. Reducing behaviour to a compulsive, hardwired, and irrational status instinct bypasses the nonsense about supposedly rational actors and such in economics. It also explains why why follower-chasing and like-farming on social media are a thing. And why too much is never enough. It's literally a game that can't be won, so millionaires try to become billionaires, and billionaires try to become trillionaires, and so on to infinity. But this would be so much more credible with some solid supporting research instead of unsupported opinion.
marcus_holmes 5y ago
Evolutionary psychology just smells of "making shit up". There's no way of proving any of these conjectures. They don't make any predictions that could be falsified. And they're not that useful - this doesn't explain anything in any way that we could actually use.
- advael 5y ago
  I came here to say roughly this, so thank you for saving me the trouble
- jeofken 5y ago
  Even without a time machine to witness it, we can be certain that the evolutionary process has sorted away ancestors who failed to reproduce, leaving only those fit for the environment. But like machine learning, we can never know why life “chose” one way over the other. Still, that any trait in us or other species, psychology or other, is selected by evolution must be true, as any trait selected away by evolution by definition does not live. The alternative explanation of our psychology would require a supernatural spiritual force, which is even harder to falsify with experiment than evolutionary psychology. So to questions of “why” natural selection chose us who live now to have the psychology we have, can never be answered by experiment. When we can’t find knowledge through experiment, wouldn’t logic deduction and educated guesses/models be the best method - leaving us with the flawed but but interesting subject of the evolution of our psychology
  - marcus_holmes 5y ago
    > wouldn’t logic deduction and educated guesses/models be the best method I would agree, if I saw anyone actually doing this. But every single time I see someone using evolutionary psychology to explain something they already believe in. It might be interesting to start with a blank slate, no assumptions, and work from there to see what sort of psychology you end up with. But that would be a bit like predicting evolution: if you started out with some amino acids the odds of getting to Elvis are ridiculously small. There's no guarantee that if we started with a blank slate we'd end up where we are. There's too many other possibilities, the process is chaotic. Obviously our psychology evolved. But that provides a mechanism, not an explanation. Just like "why are our eyeballs the wrong way around?" has no answer except "because we evolved that way". "why is social media so bad for us?" has no answer except "because we evolved that way". You can't explain why our eyeballs are the wrong way around, because there were no "reasons" for that. It wasn't a choice that anyone made logically. Trying to provide reasons for it misses the point of evolution completely. Same for our psychology. Trying to reason about it misses the point. It is the way it is because that's a local optimum in the solution space of human-shaped brains.
11235813213455 5y ago
> During the forager era I think my lifestyle is closer to that era, I can forage 100% of my daily diet these days (figs!, but other months it can be persimons, clementines/mandarines, peaches, ..). I feel more or less disconnected to the "modern" society conventions
streamofdigits 5y ago
there is criticism of the post on the basis that is not substantiated by research but if we step back a bit this seems like another example of a new social science trying to burst into a scene (that has been heretofore thoroughly dominated by mainstream economics). we might call it "the economic organization of real people", behavioral economics++ or maybe economic anthropology[0] to be sure its not likely to have an easier time proving things compared to any other social science but going back to the raw material and piecing together more informed hypotheses, hopefully less ideologically biased, should be a good thing [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_anthropology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_anthropology
ArnoVW 5y ago
If you found this article interesting, I can highly recommend the book (and documentary) "Status Anxiety", by modern philosopher Alain de Botton. The video has a couple of gems, such as the comparisson between an english country-side vicar, and an american TV preacher. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1MqJPHxy6g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1MqJPHxy6g
mark_l_watson 5y ago
I see status seeking as a constant activity of people around me. The article got me thinking how this is similar in a way to power dynamics in a band of primates, a pecking or dominance order. I gave my car to my granddaughter a few years ago and decided to not replace it (I live in a small town and like to walk, I can borrow my wife’s car or ask friends to drive places). I often joke to people that I am poor and can’t afford a car. Recently an old friend got upset at this - she started lecturing me on how important maintaining status is. The reason social media like Facebook is so harmful is that it enables people to paint pictures of their wonderful lives to impress other people rather than simply quietly living wonderful lives. One of the most freeing things in life is realizing that personally that we are not special, that we rely on other people. We don’t have to be great at what we do, just being kind to ourselves and other people is all we need for a happy life.
tobmlt 5y ago
Has anybody read impro by Keith Johnstone? He’s got a write up in there about status, and how before they “figured it out,“ the actors couldn’t make believable scenes of “everyday conversation”. Then, after some play or another he hits on the idea of everybody trying to make their status just a little above or below the other person’s status in conversation. Suddenly the acted conversations became “authentic”. This post seems to be a similar take at a different scale and perspective. Interesting stuff.

102 points by Tycho 5y ago

We're a social species. We are constantly scrutinizing one another. The author's thesis seems overly baroque: "evolution had humans use their absolute income/wealth to judge their relative status." And that's not considering that evolution didn't have a damned thing to do with income even though heredity does have to do with taxes.

amelius 5y ago
Also status is highly context dependent. For example, a person can feel high status at work, but when visiting e.g. some physics conference can suddenly feel very low status. And no amount of money would help.

firethief 5y ago

> For example, for most social mammals, being higher status protects you more from stressful life events, so that you less often invoke the standard mammal stress response. By not spending on stress, you body invests more in growth and immunity. So higher status primates are less sick, and live longer. Does data support modern humans having lower stress levels than similar mammals? (Or, for that matter, that higher-status mammals have lower stress?) How would the proposed adaptation not be equally beneficial to lower-status mammals? The strongest argument for this hypothesis seems to be its explanatory power; it smells like grasping at straws

digital-cygnet 5y ago

Honestly, this did not resonate with me at all. It seems like more of a just-so story than a coherent argument commensurate with his sweeping hypothesis (that much of human history can be explained by our erroneously using absolute wealth to judge relative status). I'm not sure why we need this 'status theory' to tie together the trends of modern history that he describes ("rising lifespans, lower fertility, falling violence, more school, more effort into art/travel/invention/etc"), when each of them seems much more directly related to the overarching trend of "we have more (food, economic, time, technological) surplus than ancients did". Briefly: Rising lifespans - we have vaccines, infinite and fortified food, a safer environment,... Lower fertility - people (particularly women) have other options, childhood mortality is lower because of the prior item, contraception exists,... Falling violence - people living closer to subsistence have less to lose from violence than those whose survival is otherwise assured; when sufficient means of survival exist there is no need to kill each other over them; we have enough resources now to spend on policing and deterring violence;... More school and more effort spent on art etc - obviously a society of subsistence farmers will spend less on art and invention than one where a single farmer can feed a thousand people. The modern surplus is what makes this investment even possible I know that he gives lip service against some of these counterarguments (e.g., re life expectancy "these factors do a poor job of explaining the magnitude and steadiness of the mortality fall over the last few centuries"), but I need more evidence than that to reject the simple explanation in favor of the speculative hypothesis presented here. He also subtly confuses status _obsession_ with an erroneous _perception_ of high status. If people believe they are already high-status, why would it make sense to devote more resources to getting and achieving status instead of e.g. fertility? I believe that status-obsession certainly drives many parts of our collective behavior, but that seems entirely noncontroversial and separable from Hanson's "miscallibration from absolute wealth" hypothesis. In sum, I was disappointed by this post and am moderately revising down my expectations from Robin Hanson going forward.

Tycho 5y ago
I think his general argument is that the trends of modern history are not adequately explained by the obvious factors you mention, and that a single hypothesis that logically explains these effect-behaviour gaps is preferable to lots of ad hoc explanations around each individual trend. With respect to obsession vs perception, he's saying that it only makes sense to pursue more status if you are already high status. Greater status is not attainable for most. If you mistakingly think you are high status, you will accomplish little except wasting your time. Case in point: useless advanced degrees.

jw02 5y ago

Its why every social network/content generation/attention capture architecture such as FB, HN, YouTube, Twitter et al cant function without a Like/Click/View/Upvote count publicly visible signaling status. They claim the counts signal value. Obviously not. These days you can be a domain expert but no one will take your view seriously unless some buffoon on social media who has accumulated enough Likes validates what you are saying. In the past it had to be a King or Pope (ie someone with wealth and power). So naturally the chimp troupe craves status. You can't get anything done with out it.

Juliate 5y ago
And, you also get complete clowns that accumulate visibility and social-media-status-points thanks to the understanding of the manipulation tools offered to them but are actually incompetent to the verge of dangerous and in the worst case can become geopolitical issues.

lmm 5y ago

The idea that higher-status people would be more status-chasing seems dubious. In the evolutionary environment there would have been diminishing returns to status, and in any environment social climbers are noticeably lower status than those with real "old money" status.

kqr 5y ago
Do you have a source for either of those claims? The little historical anthropology I've read suggests the opposite: status is a constant struggle. You don't get it and then have it, you work to show it off every day or you lose it, because in a sense it's like Santa Claus; something that only exists when others believe in it. For others to believe in it, they have to be reminded of it. If anything, people are naturally suspicious of "old money" and other types of get-rich-with-little-effort situations (e.g. usury) and people with old money continuously have to invent new reasons to justify their wealth, not uncommonly resorting to violence to keep a stake in their claim. (This is an amalgamation of different sub-messages of Drive, Debt, The Elephant in the Brain, Savage Money, and quite probably other sources I've forgotten about, but could look up if you've read the above and want more.)
- jerrre 5y ago
  is the last book you mention "The Savage Truth on Money - Terry Savage"? The first is by Pink?
  - kqr 5y ago
    First by Pink, last by Christopher something. I can look it up shortly. Edit: harder to find than I thought: https://www.amazon.com/Savage-Money-Studies-Anthropology-History/dp/9057020920 https://www.amazon.com/Savage-Money-Studies-Anthropology-His...
acituan 5y ago
Exactly this. Status requires keeping track of people’s standing, but we can’t naturally do that for numbers greater than Dunbar’s. There comes in play the prosthetic status through indirect signals and symbols, from the feathers on a tribe leader’s hat to follower counts on social media. Unfortunately since status is also a comparative good (it matters having more status than the other) the virtual competition space for prosthetic status is made infinitely stretchable and manipulable for the latter.

murphyslab 5y ago

Reminiscent of a podcast episode, "Robert Sapolsky on the toxic intersection of poverty and stress". Discussed some of the feedback between stress, status, and economic position. Worth listening to. https://go.stitcher.com/show/vox-conversations/episode/best-of-robert-sapolsky-on-the-toxic-intersection-of-poverty-and-stress-80042163 https://go.stitcher.com/show/vox-conversations/episode/best-...

zqna 5y ago

What a rubbish. Life is certainly less stressful in Cyprus than in US of A, where people worry every minute about there absolute and relative incomes, and keep busy creating pseudotheories to justify their "heaven on earth".

ElViajero 5y ago

> evolution had humans use their absolute income/wealth to judge their relative status This is false thru history. A noble man could be higher status than a rich merchant, to not talk about race. The article gets what could be some reasonable conclusion from wrong data. It seems that the author started from an opinion, and then build a case around it. > low level workers are often well advised to “keep *their* head down”, and just do their job. > *we* all tend to rise in status when we seem to influence the behavior of others, but fall when lower status others seem to influence us. Also, from the article I have an strong feeling that the author thinks of himself as high-status.

notahacker 5y ago
A more fundamental criticism is that "status" itself is a subjective, cultural and temporally unstable concept so I don't see how humanity can collectively "overestimate" our status simply because it doesn't accord with a particular economic measure of it. (It may be related to the old observation that the American poor see themselves as "temporarily embarrassed millionaires", but it's a massively overstated, stretchy version of that idea) There are plenty of reasons to see our "status" as closer to peers of Jeff Bezos or the Duke of Westminster than serfs deserving only to serve them (not least Jeff and the Duke probably seeing it that way too!) and I'm not sure the size of the economic gap corrects that perception, which is based mostly on other measures of self worth
ansible 5y ago
> Also, from the article I have an strong feeling that the author thinks of himself as high-status. It is Robin Hanson, so... yeah, that's exactly the thought process.

Animats 5y ago

Hm. It's an interesting conjecture, but needs more backing. From the article: "In most societies, investments in fertility take time and time and energy away from investments in status. Yes fertility confers some status, but in our world not as much. As people get rich, they are tempted to invest less in immediate fertility in order to gain in status" Maybe, but fertility has declined in developed countries for poor people as well as rich people. The article suffers from having one good idea and then trying to bash too much to fit it.

haecceity 5y ago

People were always status drunk. Maybe we didn't always have the language to talk about it? Isn't status a modern psychology/sociology term?

tgv 5y ago

> My key hypothesis is this: evolution had humans use their absolute income/wealth to judge their relative status. Then fails to operationalize it. What's absolute wealth? Does someone in Venezuela think his status is high because his income is 400k/month? And the writer also fails to explain how our wealth perception would actually work or how evolution would cause it.

christkv 5y ago

Any hierarchical system will contain a system off status. It seems a property of all organizations and societies. What’s considered status changes over time but there is always a ladder

throaway46546 5y ago

I read this as "Why modems are status-drunk" and was very confused. I think I need to get some sleep.

TheOtherHobbes 5y ago

It's an interesting idea. Reducing behaviour to a compulsive, hardwired, and irrational status instinct bypasses the nonsense about supposedly rational actors and such in economics. It also explains why why follower-chasing and like-farming on social media are a thing. And why too much is never enough. It's literally a game that can't be won, so millionaires try to become billionaires, and billionaires try to become trillionaires, and so on to infinity. But this would be so much more credible with some solid supporting research instead of unsupported opinion.

marcus_holmes 5y ago

Evolutionary psychology just smells of "making shit up". There's no way of proving any of these conjectures. They don't make any predictions that could be falsified. And they're not that useful - this doesn't explain anything in any way that we could actually use.

advael 5y ago
I came here to say roughly this, so thank you for saving me the trouble
jeofken 5y ago
Even without a time machine to witness it, we can be certain that the evolutionary process has sorted away ancestors who failed to reproduce, leaving only those fit for the environment. But like machine learning, we can never know why life “chose” one way over the other. Still, that any trait in us or other species, psychology or other, is selected by evolution must be true, as any trait selected away by evolution by definition does not live. The alternative explanation of our psychology would require a supernatural spiritual force, which is even harder to falsify with experiment than evolutionary psychology. So to questions of “why” natural selection chose us who live now to have the psychology we have, can never be answered by experiment. When we can’t find knowledge through experiment, wouldn’t logic deduction and educated guesses/models be the best method - leaving us with the flawed but but interesting subject of the evolution of our psychology
- marcus_holmes 5y ago
  > wouldn’t logic deduction and educated guesses/models be the best method I would agree, if I saw anyone actually doing this. But every single time I see someone using evolutionary psychology to explain something they already believe in. It might be interesting to start with a blank slate, no assumptions, and work from there to see what sort of psychology you end up with. But that would be a bit like predicting evolution: if you started out with some amino acids the odds of getting to Elvis are ridiculously small. There's no guarantee that if we started with a blank slate we'd end up where we are. There's too many other possibilities, the process is chaotic. Obviously our psychology evolved. But that provides a mechanism, not an explanation. Just like "why are our eyeballs the wrong way around?" has no answer except "because we evolved that way". "why is social media so bad for us?" has no answer except "because we evolved that way". You can't explain why our eyeballs are the wrong way around, because there were no "reasons" for that. It wasn't a choice that anyone made logically. Trying to provide reasons for it misses the point of evolution completely. Same for our psychology. Trying to reason about it misses the point. It is the way it is because that's a local optimum in the solution space of human-shaped brains.

11235813213455 5y ago

> During the forager era I think my lifestyle is closer to that era, I can forage 100% of my daily diet these days (figs!, but other months it can be persimons, clementines/mandarines, peaches, ..). I feel more or less disconnected to the "modern" society conventions

streamofdigits 5y ago

there is criticism of the post on the basis that is not substantiated by research but if we step back a bit this seems like another example of a new social science trying to burst into a scene (that has been heretofore thoroughly dominated by mainstream economics). we might call it "the economic organization of real people", behavioral economics++ or maybe economic anthropology[0] to be sure its not likely to have an easier time proving things compared to any other social science but going back to the raw material and piecing together more informed hypotheses, hopefully less ideologically biased, should be a good thing [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_anthropology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_anthropology

ArnoVW 5y ago

If you found this article interesting, I can highly recommend the book (and documentary) "Status Anxiety", by modern philosopher Alain de Botton. The video has a couple of gems, such as the comparisson between an english country-side vicar, and an american TV preacher. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1MqJPHxy6g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1MqJPHxy6g

mark_l_watson 5y ago

I see status seeking as a constant activity of people around me. The article got me thinking how this is similar in a way to power dynamics in a band of primates, a pecking or dominance order. I gave my car to my granddaughter a few years ago and decided to not replace it (I live in a small town and like to walk, I can borrow my wife’s car or ask friends to drive places). I often joke to people that I am poor and can’t afford a car. Recently an old friend got upset at this - she started lecturing me on how important maintaining status is. The reason social media like Facebook is so harmful is that it enables people to paint pictures of their wonderful lives to impress other people rather than simply quietly living wonderful lives. One of the most freeing things in life is realizing that personally that we are not special, that we rely on other people. We don’t have to be great at what we do, just being kind to ourselves and other people is all we need for a happy life.

tobmlt 5y ago

Has anybody read impro by Keith Johnstone? He’s got a write up in there about status, and how before they “figured it out,“ the actors couldn’t make believable scenes of “everyday conversation”. Then, after some play or another he hits on the idea of everybody trying to make their status just a little above or below the other person’s status in conversation. Suddenly the acted conversations became “authentic”. This post seems to be a similar take at a different scale and perspective. Interesting stuff.