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

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.