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Comment by lmm | Hacker News Reader

The idea that higher-status people would be more status-chasing seems dubious. In the evolutionary environment there would have been diminishing returns to status, and in any environment social climbers are noticeably lower status than those with real "old money" status.

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Do you have a source for either of those claims? The little historical anthropology I've read suggests the opposite: status is a constant struggle. You don't get it and then have it, you work to show it off every day or you lose it, because in a sense it's like Santa Claus; something that only exists when others believe in it. For others to believe in it, they have to be reminded of it.

If anything, people are naturally suspicious of "old money" and other types of get-rich-with-little-effort situations (e.g. usury) and people with old money continuously have to invent new reasons to justify their wealth, not uncommonly resorting to violence to keep a stake in their claim.

(This is an amalgamation of different sub-messages of Drive, Debt, The Elephant in the Brain, Savage Money, and quite probably other sources I've forgotten about, but could look up if you've read the above and want more.)

is the last book you mention "The Savage Truth on Money - Terry Savage"?

The first is by Pink?

First by Pink, last by Christopher something. I can look it up shortly.

Edit: harder to find than I thought: https://www.amazon.com/Savage-Money-Studies-Anthropology-His...

The children of "old money" families are exactly the ones who are "Instagram famous" or "TikTok stars" on social media, or funding their own startups, or working in 'elite' art galleries and auction houses for low wages, or doing a long series of unpaid internships are top companies. Those things are often status seeking activities. Being born in to a high-status family drives you to maintain that status, and often gives you the resources necessary to circumvent the usual grind of getting to the top. That doesn't mean there aren't low-status people working their way up as well.

I see many more "old money/high status" families that keep it quiet, finding stable/calm positions to keep on doing what they do, rather than seeking the riskiest famous lifestyles.

High status != high maintenance neither high visibility.

Edit to add: this is exactly the mistake that tabloids & people magazine do, and that social networks reproduce in the mind of people. Actual status, in the mid/long term relates to what you do/contribute for yourself or to society, not what you look like/say/think. In that regard fame != status.

For anything that goes to the headlines, there is considerably much more that happens under the radar, not necessarily because it does not know how to advertise itself, but because it does not want to advertise itself as that would be a distraction.

This is the same disconnect which, in France at least, makes no distinction between nobility, bourgeoisie and wealth, when those 3 concepts have evolved and are only overlapping in specific cases.

> The children of "old money" families are exactly the ones who are "Instagram famous" or "TikTok stars" on social media,

Are they? Can you give some examples? I thought the people you were talking about came from well-off upper-middle class families who never really had to struggle and have probably been similarly well-off for a few generations, but not 'old money' (which to me at least has aristocratic implications).

Exactly this. Status requires keeping track of people’s standing, but we can’t naturally do that for numbers greater than Dunbar’s.

There comes in play the prosthetic status through indirect signals and symbols, from the feathers on a tribe leader’s hat to follower counts on social media. Unfortunately since status is also a comparative good (it matters having more status than the other) the virtual competition space for prosthetic status is made infinitely stretchable and manipulable for the latter.

> Status requires keeping track of people’s standing, but we can’t naturally do that for numbers greater than Dunbar’s.

Status isn't symmetric: a local Lord can be a high status person in the eyes of more than Dunbar's number of peasants, because he doesn't need to care much about their status (he has advisors on payroll for that.) Obviously, he's in all their Dunbar-sized circles.

I think a better characterization would be "status is not necessarily reciprocal"; the person evaluated for status does not need to be aware of the evaluators, as long as they can leverage the evaluated status itself. I think this is exactly the property that allows for prosthetic status. But it also makes it much more game-able than the real, just-in-time, participatory status.

In the case of a lord, the carrier of status is actually the title than the person who happens to be the lord at that time. Lordship is the technology that attempts to scale the status across time and across a higher number of people. The problem of giving what is ultimately dead-matter so much power is that anyone who can capture it can also use it, regardless of legitimacy. This is a perennial problem woven into literature and philosophy for centuries.

The high-follower-count as a status technology is just a newer, planet scale version of this game, but it is not the ultimate status carrier either. The ultimate status is held by the tech company that can give the follower count its meaning. It is the immediate entity that can convince us to divorce status from its original, participatory meaning and to respond to its reduced form that is the number. It is the almost transparent medium where numbers and attention flow through, all of which it can ultimately can turn into money.

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