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Comment by ericd | Hacker News Reader

Status markers are much more complicated than you imagine, and they tend to be extremely expensive to produce. If you think that the govt. could make a status marker that rich people actually care about, you're dreaming.

The finer things in life really are finer, and it becomes nonlinearly more expensive to produce them the finer they are.

A $500 meal at Per Se in NYC isn't just for signalling, if it is at all. It's an extremely memorable experience.

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Study cognitive neuroscience. Much of the reason that $500 meal at Per Se is such an amazingly memorable experience is because it's so expensive; evolution has taught your brain to feel good about signalling status.

Actually, I think status markers created by the government would be far, far more appealing to the wealthy. It's like Hegel's master-slave dialectic - a master doesn't feel like a real master because he knows all the struggles and difficulties of maintaining his position. If he really is a master, not just an ordinary man who finds himself with power, why does he have to work so hard to maintain it? The only time he really sees himself as a master is when he catches a glimpse of himself as his slave sees him, and paradoxically, this makes him dependent on the slave's recognition of him. The master is desperate to impress him and provoke envy. That's why in all Ayn Rand novels, the protagonist's problem isn't just the fact that the masses interfere with his projects and thwart his greatness - the problem is that they do this because they don't recognize him as superior. That's what really burns. The whole purpose of going Galt is to force society to recognize them.

If the rich are so desperate for our approval, why not give it to them? They don't need to play stupid and wasteful status games to seduce us into admiring them, they can compete with each other, we'll add up the score, everyone gets ranked and that will be the end of it. OK, maybe there will be an awards ceremony on TV every year.

The main obstacle to this system is that most of the rich wouldn't go for it because they'd never admit that they crave recognition from people they consider inferior.

I wonder if you're confusing reality with Rand novels. As far as I'm aware (since I'm not one of them), most wealthy people aren't trying to impress anybody. They're just enjoying their lives, relatively quietly. The incentive provided by wealth is not status, but enjoyment. A BMW is much more enjoyable to drive than a Buick. Go ahead and pry all the logos off my car, it'll still be more fun to drive.

What's more, "status" is only a proxy for wealth and power. Status is only as useful as the additional influence it brings. Consider it from an evolutionary biology perspective: higher status means higher capability to support mates and offspring. If you take away the additional wealth that brings higher status, then the higher status is lost as well, as it doesn't actually signal a higher capability to provide.

I was just going to mention BMW - when I drive one, I'm definitely not thinking about other people, just the machine and the road.

Right, but why do you even need a proxy, why isn't it enough to just have money and power? It's because other people need to know.

I love my old M3, but I wonder if it falls in a special category distinct from other luxury items--as Aldous Huxley said, "speed provides the one genuinely modern pleasure."

I think you have a pretty simplistic view of rich people - on average, they're much more complex than just wanting to show off to the masses. I fall into the same trap with a lot of things, but it's important to realize that a lot of them are extremely smart, and there are a lot of motivations there.

But with your original point on luxury goods, luxury goods are usually subjectively, if not objectively better than less expensive alternatives, even when noone knows which one costs more. Your govt. ID, if it's only a pure status symbol and carries no weight, might be valued by some, but truly rich people wouldn't care. They don't need validation from "people they consider inferior". You're describing a small subset there. In general, they just want the best of everything, and the marginal utility of the money they're giving up is meaningless in comparison.

That's why in all Ayn Rand novels, the protagonist's problem isn't just the fact that the masses interfere with his projects and thwart his greatness - the problem is that they do this because they don't recognize him as superior.

I have no idea why so many people feel the need to comment on Ayn Rand without reading it.

If you read the Fountainhead to the end, you'd realize that Roark was completely happy toiling in anonymity, as long as his building was built properly.

A farmer who has difficulty plowing straight lines because his oxen are recalcitrant doesn't get his feelings hurt and write lengthy books in oxen language for the oxen to read whining about how he is a superior type of animal and why can't they just realize that! Then the farmers says "I'm tired of being unappreciated!" and leaves the farm in a huff just to show the oxen that if without him, there'd be no-one to feed them or clean out the stables. The reason this doesn't happen is that the farmer really is superior to the oxen, so he doesn't need to prove anything - for him, recalcitrant oxen are just one of many obstacles involved in farming.

Despite all claims to the contrary, the very fact that Rand even bothered to write a book at all betrays her secret, perhaps unconscious need for recognition. Here, the medium is a message - if Rand's audience is the superior people, why did she choose to communicate her ideas in the format most accessible to the "oxen" of society, the novel, instead of a dense philosophical treatise? She even helped to make the movie version of The Fountainhead, an even more accessible format.

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