We moderns are status-drunk
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We moderns are status-drunk
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Re: We moderns are status-drunk
#2We're a social species. We are constantly scrutinizing one another. The author's thesis seems overly baroque: "evolution had humans use their absolute income/wealth to judge their relative status." And that's not considering that evolution didn't have a damned thing to do with income even though heredity does have to do with taxes.
Re: We moderns are status-drunk
#3> For example, for most social mammals, being higher status protects you more from stressful life events, so that you less often invoke the standard mammal stress response. By not spending on stress, you body invests more in growth and immunity. So higher status primates are less sick, and live longer.
Does data support modern humans having lower stress levels than similar mammals? (Or, for that matter, that higher-status mammals have lower stress?)
How would the proposed adaptation not be equally beneficial to lower-status mammals?
The strongest argument for this hypothesis seems to be its explanatory power; it smells like grasping at straws
Re: We moderns are status-drunk
#4Honestly, this did not resonate with me at all. It seems like more of a just-so story than a coherent argument commensurate with his sweeping hypothesis (that much of human history can be explained by our erroneously using absolute wealth to judge relative status).
I'm not sure why we need this 'status theory' to tie together the trends of modern history that he describes ("rising lifespans, lower fertility, falling violence, more school, more effort into art/travel/invention/etc"), when each of them seems much more directly related to the overarching trend of "we have more (food, economic, time, technological) surplus than ancients did". Briefly:
Rising lifespans - we have vaccines, infinite and fortified food, a safer environment,...
Lower fertility - people (particularly women) have other options, childhood mortality is lower because of the prior item, contraception exists,...
Falling violence - people living closer to subsistence have less to lose from violence than those whose survival is otherwise assured; when sufficient means of survival exist there is no need to kill each other over them; we have enough resources now to spend on policing and deterring violence;...
More school and more effort spent on art etc - obviously a society of subsistence farmers will spend less on art and invention than one where a single farmer can feed a thousand people. The modern surplus is what makes this investment even possible
I know that he gives lip service against some of these counterarguments (e.g., re life expectancy "these factors do a poor job of explaining the magnitude and steadiness of the mortality fall over the last few centuries"), but I need more evidence than that to reject the simple explanation in favor of the speculative hypothesis presented here.
He also subtly confuses status _obsession_ with an erroneous _perception_ of high status. If people believe they are already high-status, why would it make sense to devote more resources to getting and achieving status instead of e.g. fertility? I believe that status-obsession certainly drives many parts of our collective behavior, but that seems entirely noncontroversial and separable from Hanson's "miscallibration from absolute wealth" hypothesis.
In sum, I was disappointed by this post and am moderately revising down my expectations from Robin Hanson going forward.
Re: We moderns are status-drunk
#5Its why every social network/content generation/attention capture architecture such as FB, HN, YouTube, Twitter et al cant function without a Like/Click/View/Upvote count publicly visible signaling status.
They claim the counts signal value. Obviously not.
These days you can be a domain expert but no one will take your view seriously unless some buffoon on social media who has accumulated enough Likes validates what you are saying. In the past it had to be a King or Pope (ie someone with wealth and power).
So naturally the chimp troupe craves status. You can't get anything done with out it.
Re: We moderns are status-drunk
#6The 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.
Re: We moderns are status-drunk
#7The 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.
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.)
Re: We moderns are status-drunk
#8Reminiscent of a podcast episode, "Robert Sapolsky on the toxic intersection of poverty and stress". Discussed some of the feedback between stress, status, and economic position. Worth listening to.
https://go.stitcher.com/show/vox-conversations/episode/best-...
Re: We moderns are status-drunk
#9The 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.
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.
Re: We moderns are status-drunk
#10What a rubbish. Life is certainly less stressful in Cyprus than in US of A, where people worry every minute about there absolute and relative incomes, and keep busy creating pseudotheories to justify their "heaven on earth".