8 ms·

The Economics of Status (2006)

53 points by pr337h4m 3y ago

epivosism 3y ago
David Friedman runs interesting slate star codex meetups periodically, where I've met a lot of interesting people. Recommended to attend if you would like to meet well-read people with all sorts of new ideas.
LuciBb 3y ago
[dead]
roenxi 3y ago
This article appears to be setting up debate over the meaning of a word without defining the word or outlining tests to tell what the word means to the author. The points being made are meaningless without more foundational definitions. Knowing whether status is a zero-sum or positive sum game requires knowing what the rules are. Unfortunately the word is so fuzzy that I don't think a HN comment can usefully outline what it means. And in some sense, useful discussions of status mechanics are taboo, people get uncomfortable and high-status people tend to dissemble on the topic because nothing good can come to them from more people understanding the game. Friedman explicitly acknowledges the lack of definition with: "One conclusion is that the last thing we want is a system for objectively ranking people, for defining status in a way that everyone agrees on". That is the sort of thing I mean about dissembling. Society is actually quite cruel to delusional people who misjudge their own status or don't bend to the commonly accepted status tells. Status is communally held and not just in one person's head; individuals will be given hard feedback until they conform to the externally developed status hierarchies. Their beliefs do not overrule the collective belief of their status. Evolution has also made humans remarkably sensitive to status signals and hints from the people around them to try and stop misalignments.
iamnotsure 3y ago
Who defines status?
- inglor_cz 3y ago
  Who defines love, fear and jealousy? I am not sure what do you mean by your question. Exact definitions of societal phenomena are rarely possible and usually unhelpful; humans are very far from pure maths, where exact definitions matter the most. Or are you looking for people who determine what counts as high status in certain groups? That is a more interesting question. It seems to be a somewhat emergent phenomena, but a bit malleable from the outside.
menshiki 3y ago
> How much one employee is paid is often less important to him than how his pay compares with that of other employees. Is this actually true of most people?
- begueradj 3y ago
  There is evidence of jealousy behaviors in our closest cousins, the chimpanzees. You can imagine how much that feeling is amplified within humans.
  - mathieuh 3y ago
    I don't think it's as much jealousy in this instance as it is a dislike of unfairness. My tech lead earns more money than me. This is absolutely acceptable to me because I am aware they are better at programming and they have more responsibilities than me. If I found out a coworker at the same level as me was earning more than me I would be upset with that situation.
- TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
  Somewhat. It's not a binary. At the lower end you absolutely need a minimum level of pay just to survive. As you get higher up the earnings tree it becomes more and more about status and less and less about actual spending. In the middle you get people on mid-six figures complaining about the cost of housing and school fees - which is an interesting mix of humble status bragging and genuine concern about limited disposable income. By the time you get to billionaires it's a childish status pissing contest with numbers that are almost meaningless in real terms.
robocat 3y ago
Paraphrasing anonymous' comment. The article mixes two different concepts about status: self-esteem — how highly you regard yourself reputation — how highly others regard you Reputation is more of a pecking-order which implies zero-sum. By choosing to belong to a group, then perhaps your status within the group is also more about how reputation is scored within the group. How you rank yourself can be rather different from how the group ranks you.
- cjfd 3y ago
  Reputation is not zero-sum. Say I know 10 people and consider them to be of a certain reputation. Next, I get to know 10 more people and also consider them to be of a certain reputation. Does this mean that in the process I have to halve the reputation of the first 10 people in order to not run out of available reputation? That is what the word zero-sum actually means.
  - TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
    No, it means that your pecking order now has 20 slots on the status ladder instead of 10. The individual placings still depend on the status metrics being applied. This is zero sum because the pecking order is a linear ordering. If one person moves up someone else has to move down, and there's only room for one person at the top. Real reputations don't work as nakedly and are more fluid, but the principle still applies. No individual can simultaneously be top, middle, and bottom of the same reputation order. Everyone gets one slot, and the relative reltionships are one dimensional. Zero sum is about differentials, not about absolute rankings in some (impossible) objective sense.
    - xboxnolifes 3y ago
      That's not usually what zero sum means though. The idea of zero-sum is that in order for one person to gain, another must lose. I don't lose respect for someone when I gain respect for another person. It's the same idea when talking about the economy. You can rank everyone by the sum of their assets, but wealth isn't a zero-sum game (long term). If it was about differentials, then there would exist no non-zero-sum anything. Also, reputation is not just a peking order. It's entirely possible for me to know 20 people and trust none of them to not steal from me. Just because 1 of them is technically my most respected, doesn't mean they are respected enough. There is an element of absolute in terms of reputation.
ctchocula 3y ago
This idea that everyone is at the top of a different status ladders appears to be the same basic thesis as the essay "Melancholy of Subculture Society" written by Gwern [1], which fleshes out the idea further and presents this as an ever-powerful force in the world driven by the Internet. I'm not sure I agree with it fully, but it's an interesting idea. I especially like the way the author wrote this paragraph: "... Harvard had, in at least one interesting way, the perfect social system: Everyone at the top of his own ladder. The small minority of students passionately interested in drama knew perfectly well that they were the most important people at the university; everyone else was there to provide them with an audience. The small minority passionately interested in politics knew that they were the most important ones; their friends were there to be herded into meetings of the Young Republicans and Young Democrats in order to get them elected to positions in those organizations that were the stepping stones to further political success." [1] https://gwern.net/subculture https://gwern.net/subculture
- suoduandao3 3y ago
  The concept brings to mind Frederic Laloux's thesis of an ecosystemic organizing principle. Essentially, the idea is that corporations get meritocracy but have trouble valuing everyone's humanity, while collectivist orgs value everyone's humanity but have trouble distinguishing competent from incompetent or defining spheres of responsibility. If I squint, his idea of a 'next step' that can recognize the value of everyone's unique humanity while also recognizing relative competence does look like the picture your quote paints.
- AnimalMuppet 3y ago
  Everybody's trying to find status, belonging, being somebody special - something that boosts their ego, essentially. It reminds me of C. S. Lewis's essay "The Inner Ring" (at https://www.lewissociety.org/innerring/ https://www.lewissociety.org/innerring/ ).
nickd2001 3y ago
I'd like to offer the viewpoint that seeking status is a way to unfortunately waste one's life and brain cycles. Not sure how economists model for the certain amount of people that "don't play the game" simply because there's more interesting things to do than compare themselves to others? There's a tradition amongst some Christians (and probably other religions too), that "we're all equal in the sight of God". Therefore, everyone is a somebody, and simultaneously, a nobody. People that contribute a lot, sure, in some sense they're more "valuable" to the rest of us. They've got a status worth having, but ironically, that's not what those people are seeking, usually its those who seek to help others and are fairly ego-less, that have the best status in other's eyes. I think what everyone should be doing is forget about status, feel happy in yourself, and try to do good for others. ;). Just my 2p.
- badpun 3y ago
  There's also tons of next-level thinking, i.e. seeking status via appearing to be good, or even by genuinely doing some helping. Charities, concerned celebrities visiting malnourished children in Africa etc.
  - nickd2001 3y ago
    I think there's a paradox, that only when you do things for others with genuinely no expectation of anything for yourself, do you actually get the most reward out of it (e:g in terms of feeling good about yourself or respected by others etc). As soon as you seek anything.. whoosh it's gone. As human beings we're all too often resistant to doing things for other people, or going without things, for no reward. We somehow get the idea of just looking after number one. In fact , the selfish thing to do is be unselfish, that's the paradox. Personally, (caveat - this is with religious convictions that others may not share) I believe God is both exasperated and amused by our behaviour. He says, "look, if you'd just all be nice to each other and stop being selfish, you know what you'd actually all be much happier.". But its like no-one wants to be the first person to be generous....
- spacebanana7 3y ago
  I suspect it's almost impossible to escape the status game. People who play the game of escaping ego often sadly get trapped in a different kind of status game. Think of monks chasing ever great asceticism. Humanists chasing moral purity. Fashion evaders seeking indie brands, thrift stores or other enterprises with the lowest marketing spend.
thomasfl 3y ago
Most of the consumption in the western world, is done to increase status in some form or another. Conspicuous consumption of clothing, hand bags, housing, cars and travel, is literally destroying our planet. Increasing the number of dimensions people can use to seek social status, is of vital importance to reduce damaging conspicuous consumption. Research in the field of social status and happiness, is just as important in order to reduce co2 emissions, as research in green tech.
- sokoloff 3y ago
  When my family travels, I don't believe we do it at all with status in mind. In fact, from a safety/opsec standpoint, I try to keep my travel entirely a secret until after it's completed. If you look at the cars we drive (a 2005 Honda CR-V and a 2015 Nissan LEAF), I doubt any significant status is accruing to us from those choices. [I am much more often asked "why do you still drive cars like this?!" than "Oooh, nice car!"] My ideal condition would be to have assets that would be able to provide a fully secure income stream in retirement but for no stranger to be able to reasonably guess that we have that.
  - frutiger 3y ago
    This entire comment is actually signalling status.
    - sokoloff 3y ago
      Yes, making sure to fill up the oil before loading two kids into the rusty, 19 year old, 235K mile CR-V to drive 750 miles to see their grandparents, while trying to not have someone break in and steal their stuff. High status, conspicuous consumption, gram-worthy life, indeed.
      - riehwvfbk 3y ago
        Yeah actually. The key is the phrase "why do you still drive cars like this?" It's not because you have to, but because you are signaling that a car as a status signal is irrelevant to you. That's actually the next level status signal :)
bjornsing 3y ago
Interesting read. I’ve thought much of this myself. Living in a consensus / conformist culture (Sweden) one of the things I dislike the most is that it’s very much “single ladder” and zero sum oriented. But hopefully that’s changing to some extent now.
kulor 3y ago
The OP has a useful framing of status being attributed in verticals but we'll still (illogically) struggle with this logic. Inwardly we'll compare the status of a doctor, lawyer, or software engineer vs. our profession like a game of Top Trumps. Status games are fundamental evolutionary behaviours however much we want to believe otherwise. Here are a couple of relevant pull quotes from https://www.robkhenderson.com/p/what-is-social-status https://www.robkhenderson.com/p/what-is-social-status: "Research indicates that our brains spend about 50% of the time mind wandering. Researchers find that the areas of the brain that are active during mind wandering overlap with the areas of the brain that concentrate on our social lives and ourselves. Left to your own devices, with no task demanding your immediate concentration, you tend to spend a good deal of time thinking about other people—your judgments of them; their evaluations of you." "So what did status get our human ancestors? Resources, allies, territory, mates, and, most importantly, offspring. The idea is that humans who cared a lot about status were more likely to win romantic partners and thus had children who also cared a lot about status. It’s possible that there were early humans who didn’t care much about status or reproduction. They might’ve only cared about safety, survival, and didn’t concentrate on attracting mates or having children. They didn’t reproduce. Those early humans are not our ancestors."
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
djhope99 3y ago
Isn't the Guinness Book of World Records like this? in the sense that it gives people the opportunity to find something nobody else has done and gain some kind of status that didn't really exist before. I absolutely loved watching the show "Record Breakers" as a kid, we should try to expand opportunities in this way it seems very positive for society.
j45 3y ago
Look at that, a mini HN with comments on a blog post.
jongjong 3y ago
What annoys me most is how status and one's ability to earn money have become intertwined. It would be great if they were separate; then those who seek money without status wouldn't have to compete with so many reckless, cheating, psychopathic status-seekers. I guess the silver lining is that one's ability to spend money efficiently (to maximise satisfaction per unit of currency) runs opposite to one's desire for status. There are so many ways to get great value from little money nowadays... Precisely because rich status seekers aren't interested in high quality no-name goods, services and destinations. That's where all the real value is. Real value is essentially wherever the rich people aren't. Everything rich people want most is overpriced by definition because they create inflation in the markets they participate in. Then they stay trapped in those markets because of social peer pressure. 'Decreasing marginal utility' is a euphemism for inflation. That's why I try hard not to participate in the same markets as rich people when buying stuff. I want to earn my money working for rich people and spend it buying stuff from poor people.
jongjong 3y ago
I completely disagree that status is not a zero-sum game. It definitely is! Think about an individual's status as positive attention given to them; total number of person-hours dedicated to thinking positively about that specific individual. The amount of attention of all people on earth, especially positive attention, from which status is derived, is a limited resource. If current online celebrities are capturing 90% of all online traffic and consumers are already glued to their phones, then if I want to capture 20% of all online traffic, it means that I MUST steal some traffic from current celebrities. Existing consumers cannot create more hours in their days and they need to work for a living. The only way to get their attention is to redirect it away from other people/things towards me. Zero-sum game. Suggesting that status is not a zero-sum game is laughably wrong. Does anyone actually believe that every person on earth could be famous? Is your own brain capable of even memorizing the names and faces of 8 billion people? Most people can barely remember 1000 people's names. Celebrities have to compete for these limited slots.

53 points by pr337h4m 3y ago

David Friedman runs interesting slate star codex meetups periodically, where I've met a lot of interesting people. Recommended to attend if you would like to meet well-read people with all sorts of new ideas.

LuciBb 3y ago

[dead]

roenxi 3y ago

This article appears to be setting up debate over the meaning of a word without defining the word or outlining tests to tell what the word means to the author. The points being made are meaningless without more foundational definitions. Knowing whether status is a zero-sum or positive sum game requires knowing what the rules are. Unfortunately the word is so fuzzy that I don't think a HN comment can usefully outline what it means. And in some sense, useful discussions of status mechanics are taboo, people get uncomfortable and high-status people tend to dissemble on the topic because nothing good can come to them from more people understanding the game. Friedman explicitly acknowledges the lack of definition with: "One conclusion is that the last thing we want is a system for objectively ranking people, for defining status in a way that everyone agrees on". That is the sort of thing I mean about dissembling. Society is actually quite cruel to delusional people who misjudge their own status or don't bend to the commonly accepted status tells. Status is communally held and not just in one person's head; individuals will be given hard feedback until they conform to the externally developed status hierarchies. Their beliefs do not overrule the collective belief of their status. Evolution has also made humans remarkably sensitive to status signals and hints from the people around them to try and stop misalignments.

iamnotsure 3y ago

Who defines status?

inglor_cz 3y ago
Who defines love, fear and jealousy? I am not sure what do you mean by your question. Exact definitions of societal phenomena are rarely possible and usually unhelpful; humans are very far from pure maths, where exact definitions matter the most. Or are you looking for people who determine what counts as high status in certain groups? That is a more interesting question. It seems to be a somewhat emergent phenomena, but a bit malleable from the outside.

menshiki 3y ago

> How much one employee is paid is often less important to him than how his pay compares with that of other employees. Is this actually true of most people?

begueradj 3y ago
There is evidence of jealousy behaviors in our closest cousins, the chimpanzees. You can imagine how much that feeling is amplified within humans.
- mathieuh 3y ago
  I don't think it's as much jealousy in this instance as it is a dislike of unfairness. My tech lead earns more money than me. This is absolutely acceptable to me because I am aware they are better at programming and they have more responsibilities than me. If I found out a coworker at the same level as me was earning more than me I would be upset with that situation.
TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
Somewhat. It's not a binary. At the lower end you absolutely need a minimum level of pay just to survive. As you get higher up the earnings tree it becomes more and more about status and less and less about actual spending. In the middle you get people on mid-six figures complaining about the cost of housing and school fees - which is an interesting mix of humble status bragging and genuine concern about limited disposable income. By the time you get to billionaires it's a childish status pissing contest with numbers that are almost meaningless in real terms.

robocat 3y ago

Paraphrasing anonymous' comment. The article mixes two different concepts about status: self-esteem — how highly you regard yourself reputation — how highly others regard you Reputation is more of a pecking-order which implies zero-sum. By choosing to belong to a group, then perhaps your status within the group is also more about how reputation is scored within the group. How you rank yourself can be rather different from how the group ranks you.

cjfd 3y ago
Reputation is not zero-sum. Say I know 10 people and consider them to be of a certain reputation. Next, I get to know 10 more people and also consider them to be of a certain reputation. Does this mean that in the process I have to halve the reputation of the first 10 people in order to not run out of available reputation? That is what the word zero-sum actually means.
- TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
  No, it means that your pecking order now has 20 slots on the status ladder instead of 10. The individual placings still depend on the status metrics being applied. This is zero sum because the pecking order is a linear ordering. If one person moves up someone else has to move down, and there's only room for one person at the top. Real reputations don't work as nakedly and are more fluid, but the principle still applies. No individual can simultaneously be top, middle, and bottom of the same reputation order. Everyone gets one slot, and the relative reltionships are one dimensional. Zero sum is about differentials, not about absolute rankings in some (impossible) objective sense.
  - xboxnolifes 3y ago
    That's not usually what zero sum means though. The idea of zero-sum is that in order for one person to gain, another must lose. I don't lose respect for someone when I gain respect for another person. It's the same idea when talking about the economy. You can rank everyone by the sum of their assets, but wealth isn't a zero-sum game (long term). If it was about differentials, then there would exist no non-zero-sum anything. Also, reputation is not just a peking order. It's entirely possible for me to know 20 people and trust none of them to not steal from me. Just because 1 of them is technically my most respected, doesn't mean they are respected enough. There is an element of absolute in terms of reputation.

ctchocula 3y ago

This idea that everyone is at the top of a different status ladders appears to be the same basic thesis as the essay "Melancholy of Subculture Society" written by Gwern [1], which fleshes out the idea further and presents this as an ever-powerful force in the world driven by the Internet. I'm not sure I agree with it fully, but it's an interesting idea. I especially like the way the author wrote this paragraph: "... Harvard had, in at least one interesting way, the perfect social system: Everyone at the top of his own ladder. The small minority of students passionately interested in drama knew perfectly well that they were the most important people at the university; everyone else was there to provide them with an audience. The small minority passionately interested in politics knew that they were the most important ones; their friends were there to be herded into meetings of the Young Republicans and Young Democrats in order to get them elected to positions in those organizations that were the stepping stones to further political success." [1] https://gwern.net/subculture https://gwern.net/subculture

suoduandao3 3y ago
The concept brings to mind Frederic Laloux's thesis of an ecosystemic organizing principle. Essentially, the idea is that corporations get meritocracy but have trouble valuing everyone's humanity, while collectivist orgs value everyone's humanity but have trouble distinguishing competent from incompetent or defining spheres of responsibility. If I squint, his idea of a 'next step' that can recognize the value of everyone's unique humanity while also recognizing relative competence does look like the picture your quote paints.
AnimalMuppet 3y ago
Everybody's trying to find status, belonging, being somebody special - something that boosts their ego, essentially. It reminds me of C. S. Lewis's essay "The Inner Ring" (at https://www.lewissociety.org/innerring/ https://www.lewissociety.org/innerring/ ).

nickd2001 3y ago

I'd like to offer the viewpoint that seeking status is a way to unfortunately waste one's life and brain cycles. Not sure how economists model for the certain amount of people that "don't play the game" simply because there's more interesting things to do than compare themselves to others? There's a tradition amongst some Christians (and probably other religions too), that "we're all equal in the sight of God". Therefore, everyone is a somebody, and simultaneously, a nobody. People that contribute a lot, sure, in some sense they're more "valuable" to the rest of us. They've got a status worth having, but ironically, that's not what those people are seeking, usually its those who seek to help others and are fairly ego-less, that have the best status in other's eyes. I think what everyone should be doing is forget about status, feel happy in yourself, and try to do good for others. ;). Just my 2p.

badpun 3y ago
There's also tons of next-level thinking, i.e. seeking status via appearing to be good, or even by genuinely doing some helping. Charities, concerned celebrities visiting malnourished children in Africa etc.
- nickd2001 3y ago
  I think there's a paradox, that only when you do things for others with genuinely no expectation of anything for yourself, do you actually get the most reward out of it (e:g in terms of feeling good about yourself or respected by others etc). As soon as you seek anything.. whoosh it's gone. As human beings we're all too often resistant to doing things for other people, or going without things, for no reward. We somehow get the idea of just looking after number one. In fact , the selfish thing to do is be unselfish, that's the paradox. Personally, (caveat - this is with religious convictions that others may not share) I believe God is both exasperated and amused by our behaviour. He says, "look, if you'd just all be nice to each other and stop being selfish, you know what you'd actually all be much happier.". But its like no-one wants to be the first person to be generous....
spacebanana7 3y ago
I suspect it's almost impossible to escape the status game. People who play the game of escaping ego often sadly get trapped in a different kind of status game. Think of monks chasing ever great asceticism. Humanists chasing moral purity. Fashion evaders seeking indie brands, thrift stores or other enterprises with the lowest marketing spend.

thomasfl 3y ago

Most of the consumption in the western world, is done to increase status in some form or another. Conspicuous consumption of clothing, hand bags, housing, cars and travel, is literally destroying our planet. Increasing the number of dimensions people can use to seek social status, is of vital importance to reduce damaging conspicuous consumption. Research in the field of social status and happiness, is just as important in order to reduce co2 emissions, as research in green tech.

sokoloff 3y ago
When my family travels, I don't believe we do it at all with status in mind. In fact, from a safety/opsec standpoint, I try to keep my travel entirely a secret until after it's completed. If you look at the cars we drive (a 2005 Honda CR-V and a 2015 Nissan LEAF), I doubt any significant status is accruing to us from those choices. [I am much more often asked "why do you still drive cars like this?!" than "Oooh, nice car!"] My ideal condition would be to have assets that would be able to provide a fully secure income stream in retirement but for no stranger to be able to reasonably guess that we have that.
- frutiger 3y ago
  This entire comment is actually signalling status.
  - sokoloff 3y ago
    Yes, making sure to fill up the oil before loading two kids into the rusty, 19 year old, 235K mile CR-V to drive 750 miles to see their grandparents, while trying to not have someone break in and steal their stuff. High status, conspicuous consumption, gram-worthy life, indeed.
    - riehwvfbk 3y ago
      Yeah actually. The key is the phrase "why do you still drive cars like this?" It's not because you have to, but because you are signaling that a car as a status signal is irrelevant to you. That's actually the next level status signal :)

bjornsing 3y ago

Interesting read. I’ve thought much of this myself. Living in a consensus / conformist culture (Sweden) one of the things I dislike the most is that it’s very much “single ladder” and zero sum oriented. But hopefully that’s changing to some extent now.

kulor 3y ago

The OP has a useful framing of status being attributed in verticals but we'll still (illogically) struggle with this logic. Inwardly we'll compare the status of a doctor, lawyer, or software engineer vs. our profession like a game of Top Trumps. Status games are fundamental evolutionary behaviours however much we want to believe otherwise. Here are a couple of relevant pull quotes from https://www.robkhenderson.com/p/what-is-social-status https://www.robkhenderson.com/p/what-is-social-status: "Research indicates that our brains spend about 50% of the time mind wandering. Researchers find that the areas of the brain that are active during mind wandering overlap with the areas of the brain that concentrate on our social lives and ourselves. Left to your own devices, with no task demanding your immediate concentration, you tend to spend a good deal of time thinking about other people—your judgments of them; their evaluations of you." "So what did status get our human ancestors? Resources, allies, territory, mates, and, most importantly, offspring. The idea is that humans who cared a lot about status were more likely to win romantic partners and thus had children who also cared a lot about status. It’s possible that there were early humans who didn’t care much about status or reproduction. They might’ve only cared about safety, survival, and didn’t concentrate on attracting mates or having children. They didn’t reproduce. Those early humans are not our ancestors."

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

djhope99 3y ago

Isn't the Guinness Book of World Records like this? in the sense that it gives people the opportunity to find something nobody else has done and gain some kind of status that didn't really exist before. I absolutely loved watching the show "Record Breakers" as a kid, we should try to expand opportunities in this way it seems very positive for society.

j45 3y ago

Look at that, a mini HN with comments on a blog post.

jongjong 3y ago

What annoys me most is how status and one's ability to earn money have become intertwined. It would be great if they were separate; then those who seek money without status wouldn't have to compete with so many reckless, cheating, psychopathic status-seekers. I guess the silver lining is that one's ability to spend money efficiently (to maximise satisfaction per unit of currency) runs opposite to one's desire for status. There are so many ways to get great value from little money nowadays... Precisely because rich status seekers aren't interested in high quality no-name goods, services and destinations. That's where all the real value is. Real value is essentially wherever the rich people aren't. Everything rich people want most is overpriced by definition because they create inflation in the markets they participate in. Then they stay trapped in those markets because of social peer pressure. 'Decreasing marginal utility' is a euphemism for inflation. That's why I try hard not to participate in the same markets as rich people when buying stuff. I want to earn my money working for rich people and spend it buying stuff from poor people.

jongjong 3y ago

I completely disagree that status is not a zero-sum game. It definitely is! Think about an individual's status as positive attention given to them; total number of person-hours dedicated to thinking positively about that specific individual. The amount of attention of all people on earth, especially positive attention, from which status is derived, is a limited resource. If current online celebrities are capturing 90% of all online traffic and consumers are already glued to their phones, then if I want to capture 20% of all online traffic, it means that I MUST steal some traffic from current celebrities. Existing consumers cannot create more hours in their days and they need to work for a living. The only way to get their attention is to redirect it away from other people/things towards me. Zero-sum game. Suggesting that status is not a zero-sum game is laughably wrong. Does anyone actually believe that every person on earth could be famous? Is your own brain capable of even memorizing the names and faces of 8 billion people? Most people can barely remember 1000 people's names. Celebrities have to compete for these limited slots.