The Economics of Status (2006)
daviddfriedman.blogspot.com
daviddfriedman.blogspot.com
As an example, nearly everyone on the planet knows who the US President and Pope are and recognize them as the highest status (even if you don't like them - don't ask me why this is). If one of those people walked into any of those smaller groups, they would inherit the highest status immediately, without having to do any of the in-group activities.
Unfortunately this concept holds neither in mathematics, nor within the psyche.
If a number of people are competing with you, your relative status within the group is an important factor for determining winning conditions.
If ten people are competing for one job, none of them have any reason to care about an effect which, say, increase the education-level of all of them. But each might be willing to take a class if it increased their chance of getting the relative to the other.
As for myself, I try to fight against it by refusing to share information that's not contextually relevant. It kind of sucks sometimes, but I think it's the "status-free" way to do something. Living in MA, I always manage to be amazed as some Ivy-League graduates slip the fact that they attended an Ivy League school into a conversation that has nothing to do with their education or pedigree.
I think you're low status because you can't crush 300kg deadlifts like me, you think I'm low status because I don't appreciate classic music like you.
Everybody can be high status if they care to define status in terms of the things they're good at.
As for the hypothetical situation you mentioned -- no, everyone would not be high status. Say you had three people who liked running, football and computer science respectively. It may be true that they do not "compete" with each other for status, but assuming they're in a system in which there is at least one other player in their respective fields: running, football and computer science, status would still be zero sum.
In the situation in which they are the only player, that would mean the status that they are deriving is not coming solely from what they are doing, because if it was, there simply would be no status to begin with.
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Of course this premise that you can get your status solely from a single thing with no residual effects from the "greater life" or context itself is pretty ridiculous. So in the case with the running and football, they're both athletes, so even though they're different sports, they still share the status pool. Similarly, computer science and athletics are both school extracurriculars. Expand out until you get to humanity. Zero sum persists.
In in practice that is the case. Most people in the world won't care to have this particular discussion with me, but here in HN I can find like-minded people and hopefully get sweet posting karma.
That allows people to focus less on the global zero-sum status game, and more on finding a community or group that they can usefully contribute to.
The most simple hypothetical example:
There are only two people in the world, Adam and Jane, and they form two 'groups', A and B, with 2 members each.
If Adam values group A more than group B, and Jane conversely, then we can see that the most efficient 'status allocation' is for each to work for higher status in their respective groups.
This avoids the zero sum situation where both Adam and Jane care equally about their status in the same group.
You can see this in practice playing out -- every person is nominally a member of many different groups (their PTA, their HOA, country, city, family, company, work team, etc.), but they're ok with being low or average status in most of them and put their energy in status in groups that really benefit them in some direct way.
If groups A and B have 2 members each, but one of the members cares about the group status, while the other one doesn't, don't they effectively have only 1 member?
I.e. group of "me and someone who doesn't care" would just be a group of "me". Then that group isn't useful to be high status in, since it doesn't offer any extra benefits (a group of "me" can't do more than just me).
If the weights weren't 1 and 0 for A and B respectively, but something like 1 and 0.5, then the group's value would just be (status within the group) * sum(participants sans self * their weight * their influence). (assuming influence can be quantified somehow)
Then if I gain status in a group, and other members of the group lose a bit of their status, I can evaluate the gains and losses and the sum will be 0.
To get the global status I just sum the results for all the groups I'm part of, and compare to other people.
So a person A can be highly regarded in a paper airplane folding club, but unless there's a surprising number of top politicians/lobbyists/whatever who care about the club a lot, person B who plays golf with Donald Trump will probably have higher global status.
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Looking at it now, I guess you could say that the global status is technically non-zero sum, since it will inflate with creation of new groups.
Maybe the weights representing how much people care should need to sum to 1 for every person, that would solve the inflation? Then it only inflates when new people appear.
Anyway, the global status is just a ranking showing who can "move the most pieces", as it were.
That doesn't mean that it's necessarily zero sum, but it means we're not completely in control of framing it the way that you and the article are suggesting. But you are right that there are different dimensions of status because different people value different characteristics. Some people are attracted to strong men that can lift 300 pounds and others prefer the refinement of a knowledge of classical music. But if you choose to define your status to far from the societal norms, you won't find others that agree with that framing and you'll be isolated out of the gene pool.
This is somewhat of an oversimplification and we use status for more than just mate selection, but our dimensions for status seeking are still based on how we want to attract sexual partners.
> The problem with that argument
> Everybody can be high status if they care to define status in terms of the things they're good at.
I'm arguing that you don't get to define status for yourself, so there are limits to how you can distinguish yourself and still claim status. You have to be graded on a recognized dimension of status. That makes it virtually impossible for everyone to be high status.
Also, certain dimensions of status are far more universal than others. I don't care how much you can bench press, you're going to be almost universally seen as lower status than a handsome, movie-star actor. Those dimensions of status are so widespread that you really can't define your way past them.
And it works in reverse too...certain dimensions are almost universally unrecognized. For example, I can hold my breath for just over 8 minutes. That puts me in elite company and people are almost always impressed by it. A couple of decades ago, going that long without breathing would have met the medical definition of death despite my never having lost consciousness. But I can assure you that it confers basically zero status, no matter how much I'd like it to.
You could learn to free dive in a couple of weeks and use your capacity for breath holding to get yourself on most countries' national team (doubt that would cut it for the US team, but you could win some regional meets). Being a national athlete confers decent status, more so if you pick up a medal.
From a quick Google for an example, the current NZ and 4th global women's record for women is 7 minutes 45 in static apnea [1], and she easily beat the men's champion, so 8 minutes would presumably be very good. I'm basing the mapping from "apnea capability" to "free diving capability" off what a free diving friend told me.
(I don't disagree with the rest of your point.)
[1] http://www.nzherald.co.nz/sport/news/article.cfm?c_id=4&obje...
I basically came to freediving too late in life to ever be world class in any of the disciplines. The funny thing is that, when it comes to status, what little my freediving training has gained me has come from the associated weight loss.
You will never get rid of it.
But yes, if you are involved in society, then you can't avoid status entirely.
Incidentally, most of his writing is pretty amazing. "How Real is Real?", for example.
One of my favorite example is the experiment where two people are (ostensibly, as in all psychology experiments) asked to figure out how to spot disease patterns in certainly images of blood cells.
The experimental setup is that subjects A and B each have a screen a button to indicate whether the picture shows a diseased or healthy cell and a light showing them whether they were right.
The nasty bit is that whereas A's light is hooked up to his answers, B's light is not. It is also hooked up to A's and they aren't shown the same pictures. So A gets proper feedback whereas B gets essentially random feedback.
Since the task is not that hard, the As quickly figure out the simple rule, whereas the Bs concoct ever more elaborate theories.
The really nasty bit is that they then bring A and B together to discuss and present their findings. And it turns out that the Bs almost without fail convince the As that they are wrong, because how could such a ridiculously simple answer be correct, whereas the As are convinced by the sophisticated answers the Bs have come up with.
Explains so much.
With zero-sum games the habitual loser would eventually wise up and wish to stop playing
Update: scratch the above, you're right. But in my experience the ones arguing that we're in a non zero-sum game also argue against redistribution.
> but in technology people spend
> a lot less time worrying about
> that
- Big-name employer (Google, Facebook, etc)
- Inflated job titles (CxO or VP at a 2 person firm)
- Going into management when they don't enjoy it
- "Meritocracy"
- Arguing in architecture or planning meetings
- Using the latest and coolest technology
- Speaking at every opportunity at events
It's possible to do all and any of those -- and to any degree -- without status seeking. But many people do those for the status.
EDIT: Personally I spent a fair amount of time and money on a mid-career Ivy League MSc I didn't need, almost entirely for the signalling effect.
Also, plenty of psychological research has shown that status is usually valued more than money in one's job, where status encompasses things like "my boss tells me I'm doing a good job" (which means more coming from your boss or the VP than the intern) or "my team appreciates the work I do".
That has not been my experience. I'd say people in technology are just as political and status obsessed as anyone else. I think people in general don't want equality as much as they want dominance. They want to have it better than the other guy and high status helps achieve that.
You're not wrong that many in tech don't worry about status or power or politics, whatever you choose to call the great messy interplay of self-interested humans nominally assembled toward a common goal. Those who don't are vulnerable to exploitation by those who do, and frequently find themselves hosed in extremely consequential ways as a result. Is that healthy?
Oh, and yes, if you or someone else clicks on both our links you'll see that you have far more karma here than I do, suggesting that perhaps your opinion on these matters should be valued over mine, and/or that you can both dish out and weather down-votes more than I can, both because of your higher status here.
[edit: slight grammar tweak for clarity]
I realize the point you're trying to make. I'm just not sure it's applicable here.
If OP prefaced every comment with "by the way, I was the founder of such-and-such which was acquired" and then went on to discuss something completely different, THAT would be status seeking. Instead, it was a very short, objective summary of his career in perhaps a dozen words.
My point is simple: not everybody is status seeking all the time. Sometimes people are just trying to communicate with no ulterior motive.
As for HN points, that just indicates procrastination (spending too much time on HN).
It is ok to care about how others perceive you. We are social creatures, and we care about what others think. That isn't a bad thing.
And yes we're social creatures, and we all want to be understood and appreciated. But that's quite a different thing from pursuing social status.
Oh no! please put it back. The value to other HN users far exceeds the cost of a weird personal snipe, uncalled-for though it was.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13799970 and marked it off-topic.
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.
Author of the linked blog.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_D._Friedman
David Director Friedman (born February 12, 1945) is an American economist, physicist, legal scholar, and libertarian theorist. He is known for his textbook writings on microeconomics and the libertarian theory of anarcho-capitalism, which is the subject of his most popular book, The Machinery of Freedom.[2] Besides The Machinery of Freedom, he has authored several other books and articles, including Price Theory: An Intermediate Text (1986), Law's Order: What Economics Has to Do with Law and Why It Matters (2000), Hidden Order: The Economics of Everyday Life (1996), and Future Imperfect (2008).[3]
Trump's ambassador to Israel
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_M._Friedman
David Melech Friedman is an American bankruptcy lawyer.