Social Status as a Theory of Everything
The hedonic treadmill is about status, not money.
A bunch of newcomers have trickled in over the past month, thanks to a kind recommendation by Gabriel Weinberg. Welcome.
Gabriel and I have much in common. We both believe that investing in science is the best way to improve our standard of living — cheaper housing, unlimited energy, better healthcare, and more free time. And we’ve both been wondering recently about the “paradox of progress,” and the debate over what constitutes a higher standard of living.
On that note, I’d like to write today about social status as a theory of everything.
Money doesn’t buy happiness. But it buys status
Earlier this week, Derek Thompson and Morgan Housel had an interesting conversation about why we spend money on things that don’t bring us happiness.
Derek was eager to challenge Morgan: if money doesn’t buy happiness, why does a 2023 paper by Matthew Killingsworth claim that it does?
They danced around the obvious answer for the same reason we all do: no one wants to talk about the importance of social status. Especially for people like Derek and Morgan.
Tom Wolfe called status “the fundamental taboo, more so than sexuality and everything of that sort. It’s much easier for people to talk about their sex lives in this day and age than it is to talk about their status.”
For instance, Morgan claimed he only cares what his wife and children think. The next moment, he describes what he learned from hanging out with a bunch of professional NBA players.
He’s playing the game we all play and refuse to name: pretending he doesn’t care about status, and then signalling that he’s high status based on who he spends time with.
Money buys status. Status affords opportunities. Opportunities make us happy.
Slipping down the totem pole
I had a funny job at the Hewlett Foundation. I helped lead a grantmaking strategy to address the elite capture of public resources. And yet, though I hate to admit it, I was an elite working with other elites, distributing resources to our elite friends. We were the elite capture.
I was, you could say, high status. Any conference I went to, people would awkwardly line up to talk to me. Not because I was interesting or smart, but because I controlled a grantmaking budget, and if I gave them a grant, they would have more social status. A big social status circle jerk.
But once I was back at the office, I was like mid-status. I was pretty mediocre at playing organizational status games. I look at the Hewlett Foundation website now, and I chuckle. We all used to have very boring titles: director, officer, associate. Today, everyone seems to be a chief or a vice president.1 I picture myself walking cheerily around the office with my coffee, greeting my former colleagues: “Hey, chief!”
Anyway, now I’m low status.2 In my new gig, I’m copied on dozens of adoring emails to the head of the organization while I’m the invisible no-name. It’s been illuminating to witness how status directs attention and opens opportunities. Of course it does, which is why everyone wants more of it.
It’s why billionaires and famous actors launch podcasts. It’s not like they need more money or fame, but they’re highly attuned to social ranking, and they don’t want to slip down the totem pole.
High-status people complain about status
And so they give it other names, like “attention.” Christopher Hayes wrote a whole book about the corrosive battle for public attention, confessing his complicity as a TV host. But if we peer one layer deeper, the real battle is for social status among the attention-seekers.
Even Vivek Murthy talks to Maya Shankar about how we should care less about social status and focus more on purpose, connection, and service. I agree! But also, Vivek went to Harvard, then Yale, and then became the Surgeon General. Maya went to Yale, Oxford, and Stanford before working in the White House and launching a successful podcast. And we’re supposed to believe they don’t care about social status!? Their abundant social lives are, in fact, the result of their social status. High-status people hanging out with other high-status people.
Social status is the engine of ambition
Morgan Housel talks about growing up in a podunk mountain town, where “people were happier because it was so much easier to keep your ambitions in check.”
I believe him. Here in Oaxaca, people regularly tell me, “we’re poor, but we’re happy.” And they are.3 But ambition for social status is what keeps Morgan writing all those books, and his newsletter, and making the rounds on podcasts — even though he surely has plenty of money now to live the kind of life he extolls without playing the status games.
Ambition for social status is what keeps Arthur Brooks constantly speaking at conferences and writing books with famous people, even though he admits in those books that he regrets “sacrificing his closest relationships for the admiration of strangers.”
Ambition for social status made Scott Galloway a digital media powerhouse. Frankly, it’s refreshing to hear him recognize:
I’m addicted to money, and I’m addicted to the affirmation of others. And my addiction to money and the affirmation of others has haunted me for a long time.
I figured out that being more interesting to other men and more attractive to women meant making a lot of money. And I became obsessed with it. And quite frankly, it cost me my hair, it cost me my first marriage, and it was worth it.
Yikes! But I appreciate the honesty. The only guy willing to say what everyone else is thinking.
Social status is the engine of culture and politics
One of my favorite nonfiction books: “Status and Culture: How our desire for social rank creates taste, identity, art, fashion, and constant change” by W. David Marx.
He uses Adam Smith’s metaphor of the “invisible hand.” Smith claimed that markets form naturally from self-interested individuals. Marx says culture evolves naturally from competition among status-seeking artists and fashionistas. Wealthy people buy expensive things to reveal that they can buy expensive things, he writes. But then artists disrupt the “social status quo,” creating new categories of taste and status.
You never win the status game, he notes. The more status you attain, the more you want. Wherever you are in the pecking order, you remain focused on who’s ahead of you.
There’s no such thing as status equality
What does all of this have to do with the paradox of progress, you may be wondering.
Progress is not zero-sum, but social status is.
Things like clean water, vaccines, prescription glasses, solar panels, Wikipedia pages … they benefit everyone. When you buy a solar panel, it doesn’t deprive me of mine.
Social status doesn’t work that way. If my social status rises, someone else’s falls. We talk about social mobility because it’s too icky to talk about status mobility, but that’s really it.
And everyone seems to think that their social status is threatened. Men think their social status is threatened by the so-called feminization of society. Women think men want to hold them down with the patriarchy. White people fear they’re facing demographic decline. People of color say they’ll always be second-class citizens. The closer we inch toward demographic equality, the worse we feel, even though our material conditions improve.
The Internet hasn’t helped. We used to play status games within communities of a few dozen people. Now, we face an endless scroll of an infinite status game, and it feels like we’re falling further behind in a winner-takes-all game. A surgeon in a town of farmers feels high status; that same surgeon in a room of Nobel Prize winners (eg, the internet) feels low status.
The Future of Status
What will I think about status when I re-open the time capsule in 20 years?
I’ve always been drawn to status, and it’s something I dislike about myself. I think many of us feel that way, and I don’t expect it to change in 20 years. But I think I can get better.
I spend too much of my time with high-status people who make me feel bad and not enough time with low-status people who make me feel good. The more you hang out with high-status people, the more you pay attention to status. It’s a vicious cycle, and one best to stay away from. I hope that in 20 years, I’ll have learned that lesson.
I’m part of the camp that thinks AI Changes Everything. Including status. I’m intrigued by the argument that AI might help equalize status, or at least change its dimensions. We afford status to people who have privileged information and who communicate effectively. What if we all have access to the same information through AI? What if the robots communicate more clearly and persuasively than any of us?
Speaking of which, it’s time for me to ask Claude to edit this piece and warn me what you might object to. If you made it this far, thanks for reading, and I would love to hear your reactions.
And some people have titles that definitely don’t fit on a business card!
I highly recommend to anyone who had a high-status job that they spend some productive, uncomfortable time in what Anu calls “status limbo.”
For now. I assume this will change as young Oaxacans grow up with the same global status expectations as everyone else with a cell phone.
Great piece - thanks David.
I'm sitting with the question of whether status seeking is something to strive to reduce at the population level. My bias is yes - b/c I can see it as driver of greed, inequality, war, etc - and yet I also recognize how's it a driver of innovation and some kinds of progress.
I find it helpful to ground the question at the personal level, as you do. In there, it feels clear to me that I want to reduce my personal tendency towards status seeking.
So if it's something to strive to reduce in our society, what could help?
One piece that feels key is community. As you imply, the type of status we're evolutionarily programmed to seek is as the community level. Status seeking at the internet / national / global scale is an adaptation, a distortion of that basic drive; underneath large-scale status seeking there is a basic hunger for small-scale belonging and community.
Yet in-person communities continue to disintegrate in favor of virtual, global-level ones, what can we do?
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"The Internet hasn’t helped ... A surgeon in a town of farmers feels high status; that same surgeon in a room of Nobel Prize winners (eg, the internet) feels low status."
Intrigued by the connection to what makes good philanthropy! Increasingly, I’m playing with a concept of “philanthropy should bet on people, not policies.” When philanthropy puts their priorities first, elites set the agenda. If philanthropy focused on betting on leaders, we would get less action on the ideas elites care about and more action on the ideas that leaders get from talking to voters, neighbors, and allies.