Of the many things that moving to and living in Sweden from the United States has taught me, perhaps the most surprising was how quietly status-conscious Swedes are. Here we have the Nordic Social Democracy Par Excellence, subject of satirical maxims about "Jantelagen" (i.e. Tall Poppy Syndrome) and stereotypes that variously flatter Left-Liberal Utopian Dreams about equality on the one hand and Conservative Fever Dreams about grey Marxist sameness on the other. But even here, status and the envy thereof peek through!
Sweden may have extremely low inequality by Gini Coefficient and one of the flattest income inequalities in the world, but Swedes still remain extremely differentiated in both wealth and status. Wealth inequality is actually *higher* than in the United States, a fact that still shocks me.
And the more nebulous matter of status may be equally stratified: Before the neoliberal turn caught up with Sweden in the mid-1990s (helping to spike wealth inequality to the highest levels in Europe) and even at the peak of the Social Democratic Folkhemmet in the 1970s, there were sharp status distinctions and status anxieties largely unnoticed by outside observers. Sweden is one of the few countries in the world with a monarchy, but less known is that it retains an intact aristocracy, too. There is a Baroque mansion, the House of Nobility, at a commanding point on an island right in the middle of the city, where card-carrying aristocrats can host fête or summit, alike. Even less known, perhaps, is the dominance that dynastic family wealth and status (typified by the Wallenbergs) holds over Sweden today. Imagine Medici-era Italy, but with old money funding tech unicorns. Subtler still is the hold that British status signalling and mores hold over Swedes. TV is full of British programming, and with it, very British attitudes about class. Something that seemed paradoxical and discordant to me, at first, but makes perfect sense now.
Walking around extremely segregated and status-stratified Stockholm, you can quickly see that there are high-status areas that stand apart: Östermalm is Stockholm's Upper West Side, Södermalm its Williamsburg, Brooma perhaps Park Slope, Danderyds an Essex or Westchester County, and Lidingö a Sands Point Long Island-type seaside commuter town. Housing in these areas rivals or exceeds prices in the United States' most rarefied zip codes. And the price for entry into the high-status club is jealously guarded by more immaterial means, too.
If you are anyone who's anyone, you will also maintain a summerhouse on the Stockholm Archipelago, where you migrate in July, just as well-heeled New Yorkers make for the Hamptons. There you will engage in sailing and tasteful entertaining, just as if you were on Martha's Vineyard. Some of the "cottages" that will host you are quite grand, but Swede's True Preps know that something more understated confers higher status, still. (The rest of us can watch this ritual play out on TV, where various celebrities will flatter us with a vicarious invite). Now, it may be equally relaxing to take the caravan to lounge around a local lake or take a package holiday to the Canary Islands, but you may feel the need to obscure or even apologize for such mass-tourist, middlebrow activities. (The truly cool kids can deftly manage the mix of high-low culture to brew up a status cocktail even more potent!). In the winter, it's to the mountain retreats in the Alps or Åre for the outdoor activities that precede "After-Ski" (Swedes employ English phrases as a pretension similar to how pompous English speakers pepper their speech with French).
On the other side of the status divide, there are the other places you'd best avoid: marginal, low-income, high-unemployment, high-crime suburbs of the big cities; deindustrializing towns (like my wife is from); and fast-emptying agricultural areas. To a New Yorker, everywhere north of central park is "Upstate" and to a Swede, everywhere north of Stockholm is "Norrland," which is lower-status. Sweden's vast, less-populated, more-industrial Northern two-thirds has been essential for creating the raw materials that under-girded the state's wealth and power, and even today has some the the highest incomes in the country. But, like Northern England, the stark countryside and earthy settlements of Norrland lacks the Southern metropole's cache.
But you can also be far while being close. Marginal suburbs ringing the cities might be right at the edge of Stockholm, Göteborg, and Malmö, and well-connected by Sweden's excellent public transit systems. But they might as well be far beyond the outer reaches of Norrland for how alienated they are from mainstream Swedish society. Again, Netflix hosts plenty of Nordic Noir crime dramas to deepen your anxieties about what goes on there.
Even being from certain low-status neighborhoods can fill a Swede with deep shame (as dramatized in the Netflix miniseries, "The Playlist," about the rise of Spotify and its low-born, Rågsved-native billionaire founder, Daniel Ek). I live in a great, little urbanist area just up the train line from Rågsved, and my Swedish wife is often apologizing for this fact to guests. The *mere proximity* is shameful, you see! In a country where equality reigns, the stain of birth shouldn't have such a hold on people, and yet it does. Another hit Swedish drama on Netflix, "Snabba Cash" ("Fast Cash") plays the upstairs-downstairs contrast between "vulnerable" immigrant suburbs and monied Östermalm for narrative tension in a way very relatable to American (or British) audiences, watching from our own, unequal and status-anxious societies.
The famous Social Democratic Swedish prime minister of the 1960s and 70s, Olaf Palme, was an outspoken Leftist, but also a high-status individual long before he assumed office. Like a Swedish Kennedy or FDR, he was a scion of old money, aristocratic associations, and high-status, elite institutions. For high school, he attended the exclusive Sigtunaskolan Humanistiska Läroverket boarding school outside Stockholm (an inspiration for the setting of another status-driven Netflix series "Young Royals").
Palme is now as famous in death as he was lionized and infamous in life, since the prime minister was shot on a busy street in central Stockholm in a case that remained unsolved until the present. For those unfamiliar with the story, Netflix offers yet another Swedish-produced series ("The Unlikely Murderer") about Palme's killing that follows a prevailing theory about his assassination at the hand of Stig Engström (AKA Skandiamannen or "Skandia Man") and the alleged assassin's various status-anxieties and disappointments. By the show's telling, Engström was born into a "good family" who left him at a Swedish boarding school to rub shoulders with the right people, but became the butt of jokes his whole life, pursued a middling corporate track at Skandia, and resented and coveted "cool-guy" Palme so much that he shot him. He may be the perfect exemplar for "elite overproduction theory" and how it creates surplus elites nursing dangerous status-anxieties.
Flash forward to our present day's political scene, and you could see the rise of the far-right Swedish Democrats, too, through the prism of status competition. SD's voters, like Trump's voters in the United States, are often referred to by academics here as the "left behinds" of Sweden's declining rural and industrial areas. If assassin Engström's murderous delusions and spoiled sense of entitlement were about the frustrations of a "surplus elite" who never achieved the potential of his station, the SD voter's status-anxiety is more about a native working-class and merely-middle-class seeking and failing to find that "normalcy" you referred to. And, here, unlike in the US, they really are the working class: fully half of the largest labor union in Sweden, LO, voted for SD in the last election. These declining-in-status regular Swedes seem to want the respect and stability due to the average worker during the Mid-Century Folkhemmet Era (ironically achieved under the decades-long dominance of the Social Democrats). This persona yearns for the Everyman status they remember their parents and grandparents having. The villains in their narrative are the usual suspects for the far-right: immigrants, globalists, urban elites, etc. Their preferred means of national renewal are a return to various nostalgically remembered things: a Sweden for Swedes, decent pay for honest hard work, revival of nuclear energy, and even (perhaps surprisingly) a stronger welfare state. When you strip away the racism, xenophobia, misogyny, and general thuggishness, you can even understand the appeal! If American Trumpists are said to want a return to the 1950s, Swedish Democrats seem to want a return to the 1970s. The time when people like them still had normal status, if not great income or wealth.
So, if disruptive status anxiety plagues even a country with low income inequality, perhaps status is an even more fundamental driver even than money? If a financially-comfortable middle-manager like Stig Engström could be driven to murder by humiliation and status-frustration, perhaps it wouldn't even be enough if all Swedes were upper-middle-class and materially thriving? Maybe money (either as income or wealth) is merely a means for status? Maybe we could even come up with a way to give more people status, even as it seems a zero-sum good?
Super interesting. I learned only recently from Piketty’s 2nd book that Sweden had a wealth requirement for voting at all until 1909. And only had a full franchise after WWI. Super interesting that Sweden has both recent aristocracy/oligarchy and the post WWII history of one of the most income equal social democracies in the world!
Seems to resemble the "banana theory"; in the jungle, having or not having is not an absolute, but only relative to how much banana the next fellow has.
I enjoyed this comment as much as I enjoyed the review - thanks both! This Jantelaw thing was an unknown concept to me until I visited Norway this July, before going to Italy. The contrast was stark. Both societies have hierarchies but in Italy it’s overt and acknowledging ones relative status is threaded throughout life and language. In Norway it’s far more subtle, but counterintuitively I felt more of a sense of liberation in Italy than Norway. Now there are factors that could have contributed too numerous to name in this comment - not least of which I was a ‘visitor’ to both - but that impression was starker than I ever would have predicted going in.
Another observation that is admittedly half-baked but throwing out for comment: Hierarchical, unequally distributed societies seem to have more impressive legacies of art and man-made beauty. Presumably bc the excess at some levels of hierarchy and desire to express / ringfence it inspired massive investments in artistic production …. But any counters / addendums you want to offer?
A delightfully enthusiastic review, thank you. (I do enjoy a review where the reviewer allows their affection for the writer, and enthusiasm for the book, to spill over, and doesn't try to step back a little from that enthusiasm, or ironise it.)
Oh, and Noah, if you enjoyed this book, and enjoy thinking about these ideas, you might get a lot out of a very short but powerful essay by Brian Eno from his 1995 diary (published by Faber in 1996 as A Year With Swollen Appendices).
"Let's start here: 'culture' is everything we don't have to do. We have to eat, but we don't have to have 'cuisines', Big Macs or Tournedos Rossini. We have to cover ourselves against the weather, but we don't have to be so concerned as we are about whether we put on Levi's or Yves Saint-Laurent. We have to move about the face of the globe, but we don't have to dance. These other things, we choose to do. We could survive if we chose not to."
And it ends up in some interesting places. I think it would complement W. David Marx's book nicely, because Marx is so (understandably!) enthusiastic about his central thesis that he perhaps may have neglected some of the other large forces driving culture, and cultural change, and the cycles of culture he discusses.
If you like the essay, it overlaps a lot with Eno's excellent, longer and more detailed, Peel lecture, broadcast on the BBC in 2015, which you can listen to here:
Anyway, thanks again for the review, I'll go get the book. (But do check out the Eno essay; I suspect a dash of Eno's salt in Marx's soup could make for a remarkably nourishing meal – while also filling in some of the gaps in Marx's book which you worry about in your review.)
Even more delightful than an enthusiastic review of a book is an enthusiastic review of a range of literature on a subject, given by a person who has romped through the topic already and come back to you with the choicest picks from their gathering. What a treat! This is what the Internet was made for!
The central idea of this book reminds me of "Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture," by Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter, published in 2004. Fascinating and highly recommended; written during a (sigh) more innocent time, before the advent of Social Media. I wonder what book Potter and Heath would write today, taking InstaTwitTok into account!
Dickens is almost entirely about these questions, emphasizing the ultimate consolations of hearth and home, where there is no marketplace for status. Dickens was similarly writing at a time of social and technological change, when anyone could be on top and fall back down at any moment. His status strivers usually met bad ends, to the consolation of readers.
Very nice review. I'm not sure the book is as polyphonic and as wideranging as Noah suggests - it has a few central themes it entertains recursively - but it had a kind of languorous breadth you often don't see in non fiction anymore.
Incidentally, the book is the perfect explanation for the current uproar over bluechecks on Twitter. Each time an elite marker of status has become available to the masses, they have abandoned it as swiftly as possible. You could explain pretty much the entire history of British fashion, which is far more classist than American fashion, this way. It's not about the money. Anyone who can afford to be on Twitter all day long can shell out eight dollars. It is that status, more than money, cannot exist with democratization.
This is extremely funny since many of the bluechecks are the same people who have been calling for the redistribution of wealth all this while. Everyone is a socialist except when it comes to his own assets.
This kind of suggests that "the bluechecks" are some vanguard of a redistributive politics. And, yet, the most famous Twitter user of our age was erstwhile Donald Trump. Now replaced by Elon Musk. So, whom are you referring to, exactly, who "have been calling for the redistribution of wealth all this while"? And is the redistribution of wealth really analogous enough to the democratization of (non-material) status to set up your irony here?
An excellent distinction. Of course, these classes of people aren't perfectly unrelated - there's a fair degree of overlap. But a lot of the bluechecks are journalists and politicians and writers who are enthusiastic to varying degrees about some form of wealth redistribution.
And secondly, yes, I think the analogy survives well enough to set up the irony. They are both valuable assets and they are both relatively scarce.
I've been off of Twitter so I don't follow the folkways of bluecheck politics. Nor do I want to.
But didn't the blue check mark mean that Twitter verified that the account is in fact in the custody of some public figure and not someone taking the name and/or posing as the public figure?
You are right: it is a tempest in a teapot. Such matters cannot help but be so. The bluecheck was created to signify authenticity. It ended up signifying status. As usual, intentions and outcomes failed to align with interesting consequences.
It was sort of like getting into Who's Who back when they didn't simply sell slots. You had to have some distinction or another to get into the tome, not just willing to pay the fee. (I remember my father getting into the NYC "Green Book" as the head of Miscellaneous Auditing in the Department of Social Services. That was about the apex for a civil servant.)
This is fascinating, because I thought everyone *knew* that everything was about status, and thus there was no point in writing a book about it. oops (not that I have the rhetorical chops to draft such a tome.
but in any case, yes - clearly status is behind almost everything, and the reason everything is so nasty online is because status is a zero-sum ladder, and people fight tooth and nail to avoid the possibility of dropping a rung. This is why older folks are more stuck in their ways, and younger folks are more willing to accept and act on crazy ideas - because the former stand to lose a lot of status if things change, and younger folk have no status to lose. This is why people glom on to trends amongst their peers - because if you don't jump into the trend, you risk losing status if the trend becomes a standard.
This also fuels something really interesting - the fracturing of the (online) world into a myriad of enclaves. In each enclave, there's a status ladder that is independent of the real-world status ladder, and you can compete within a much smaller pool. You may not be high status in the real world, but you can be standing alone in a corner at a party thinking "they don't know that I'm a guild leader in Ruin of Ragnarok Online", which is itself a source of status comfort.
This is also why they say science progresses one funeral at a time - because the older scientists don't want to be made extraneous by new ideas.
>>> This is fascinating, because I thought everyone *knew* that everything was about status, and thus there was no point in writing a book about it. oops (not that I have the rhetorical chops to draft such a tome.
Yeah, this is kind of my reaction to the review as well. The statement of its central thesis has me wondering if I'm missing something because of how seemingly obvious it is. I think the second-order analyses like how certain positive goods can't withstand being watered down by catering to a broader audience (like how American cinema was arguably a lot better in the 1990s before everything had to be an action movie that could play in China) or the whole Geeks / MOPs / Sociopaths analysis of entryism seems like a richer vein to mine.
The cultural framework I like to use is the S curve, like the one used for technology lifecycle progressions.
In music, for instance, the S curve begins at punk and ends with glam. Punk is a truly early, novel subgenre that produces an immediate visceral first impression. You either love it or hate it, and there's no going back on your choice to stick to it or avoid it.
Along the S curve, the more artistically sophisticated or gifted at showmanship evolve to be able to draw larger audiences and give room for the genre to grow on you later on.
Then you get to the critical mass stage, where the gatekeepers (record companies, broadcasters, concert promoters) let you in and deem you worthy to make money off of your talents. This is also the moment where culture crosses from the sacred (art for art's sake) to the profane (making money off of your talents).
The latter portion of the S curve is mainstream appeal, when an artist has to be everything to everybody and transcend genre. Culture has a life cycle and the artist and genre both become glam -- the work reflects spectacle and self-reference that the audience can no longer relate to. Eventually, the mainstream just wears out its welcome, engenders its own backlash (how '80s music was largely a reaction against '70s disco, and how '90s grunge/alternative was a reaction against '80s glam metal, etc.), or the punk-glam lifecycle is beginning elsewhere and the genre becomes boring-but-normal (the true fans stick around and keep the genre alive without having to go on the S-curve ride again).
The old saying among Manhattanites was that one should discard any article of clothing one sees entering the borough via bridge or tunnel. B&T was a pejorative.
"Normal status can be extended to everyone" can it? At that point, people will just use smaller attributes to remove one from normal status (aka Narcissism of small differences)
If we presuppose status-seeking as imperative, like Freud's pleasure principle, Nietzsche's will to power or Karl Marx's historical materialism, then we should assume that the normal course of behavior for a human is to be unable to climb a mountain and aspire to climb a molehill instead. Kind of an inverted Peter Principle.
Reminds me of seeing what seemed like universal ownership of a Louis Vuitton bag among Tokyo office commuters in early 2000s. A French luxury brand with storied history turned into a status object of ordinariness. As normal as having a stapler on your desk.
If it weren't possible to fall below normal status, what would stop people with normal status from feeling like losers? (I am not sure I buy into any theoretical claims about status I've read online in the past 5 years. The above is premised on buying into them.)
For comparison, Herodotus claimed that there were seven helots per citizen of Sparta. I bet almost all of the helots felt like losers. I point this out to show that the large majority of people sharing one status doesn't necessarily contribute anything to it being a normal status, rather than a loser status.
Well, people with normal status would presumably be offered a decent amount of respect and material benefits, so that would probably prevent them from feeling too much like losers...
Material goods are also zero-sum, first because there are limited material resources, and second, and more important, because material goods themselves are not very important after a level, it's about the relative measure of them (that is, whether you have as much or more than your peers, not so much what you have yourself in isolation)
The physical limits of the Earth and its resources and the carrying-capacity thresholds eventually breached by negative externalities and pollution make the production and distribution of material goods limited in a very meaningful sense.
Your friend Brad Delong frequently refers to humans as "jumped up plains apes". That's accurate, if unflattering. All of our social primate relatives, have groups which are organized as social heirarchies. Why should humans be different? The difference in humans is that we possess much more elaborate material cultures than our primate kin. The diversity of material cultures results in an immense range of behaviors. What that implies is there will be many alternative heirarchies of which an individual might be a participant.
You and Brad are both graduates of elite universities which places you both at a high level in the academic rankings. My graduate credentials and academic affiliations were much more modest. One status marker which I remember from my life in academia was the "name badge take". When you got on an elevator, individuals would glance at your name badge to determine if you, or your institution, were important. Since I was content in my modest affiliations, I was mostly amused by it. Another status heirarchy is being a great cosplay player. There are also parallel heirarchies in the cosplay community, e.g. Star Trek, Star Wars, and Sherlockian.
Aaron Renn in his old Urbanophile blog showed a similar tendency in organizations. Renn had worked as a consultant and on the blog introduced the concept of the "Tyranny of the Org Chart." In any organization, you're viewed and valued by the box you occupy on the chart.
Novel ideas lead to instability if they come from the lower boxes. Supervisors will either steal those ideas and claim them as their own, or make life worse for the subordinate if they sense a capable rival. There is also lateral instability, if a novel idea comes from one department finding a solution for another department (say, software developers coming up with a human resources workflow improvement that HR didn't think of first).
The role of outside consultants is to gather intelligence on these organizations to pass on this existing knowledge to executives in a way that can't be done because of org-chart dynamics.
I'm drafting my substack review of Marx's book right now. It's the best bad book I've read in a while. Bad because the central arguments fail - spectacularly - over and over again; best because it is really really rich in anecdote. It is as delightful as Paul Fussell's classic in the genre, and also as infuriating (not for its classism, but for its sloppy core argument). Any serious student of the subject should read Marx's book.
The basic mistake Marx makes is to assume that because we find status markers varying significantly across time and space, this makes them arbitrary and undercuts the legitimacy of claims that certain status evaluations are in fact merited rather than just the expression of de jour power relations. He mistakenly assumes that universality is required in order for a status judgment to be truly merited - a mistake because it ignores the possibility that status evaluations are better analyzed using frameworks like contextualism, particularism, or fitting attitude theories of value which can make sense of the objectivity of aesthetics and judgments of taste without the need for universal principles that hold always and everywhere.
Besides making one of his core arguments invalid, this has two negative consequences for other key parts of his book. First, it makes it really difficult and awkward to fully capture the phenomenology of status evaluation and cultural production. Presumably we often do the cool, fashionable, hip, or beautiful things because they are cool, fashionable, hip, or beautiful. They earn us status _because_ they are cool, fashionable, hip, and beautiful. We may also do them because they earn us status, but to say that we are mistaken about our primary reasons for undertaking something is the kind of surprising reductionism that takes more work to establish, especially when more naively realist alternatives haven't been ruled out. Here his Kantian foil is a total straw person and he doesn't engage any of the contemporary philosophical literature on aesthetics.
Second - and maybe worse - his reductionism completely undercuts his attempt to salvage us from the cultural stasis brought on by algorithmic media capitalism. He can't argue that we ought to value "radical creativity" more than other, more popular modes of cultural production. When he encourage us to strive for a cultural ecosystem that is "robust, diverse, and complex" rather than "bland, stagnant mono-culture" we're left wondering what basis he supply to convince us of this. When he says we ought to prefer "the skillful manipulation of higher-order symbols in new and surprising ways" the best he can do by way of justification is offer a facile psychologistic appeal: "complexity is good for our brains." (269-270).
I don't really blame Marx for this though; he's probably just got sociological / anthropological training and so takes critical theoretic reductionism of normative phenomena as settled stuff just as his advisors probably did. Very few trained philosophers take this kind of 70's/80's style critical theoretic reductionism seriously - and if they do, it's never by way of arguments that go so quick. There's of course a lot more to say here that I'll save for my review, but that's the gist of what makes it a bad book.
I was wondering why Noah was quoted so often at the end; now I know!
ah sorry if the placement of that last sentence was confusing! didn't mean to implicate you in the errors. and also, it's a really valuable book!
i would definitely recommend people read it in spite of the sloppy in argument. i'm just exercised by it because these french-inspired sociology books have more intellectual capital than they deserve and perpetuate a really pernicious intellectual tradition that arguably gave birth to post-truth identity politics and the very stagnation he laments.
A review of a book I am likely to skip. Why? Each additional year I live, the less the status I have attained matters to me and fewer people value the status I have. Eventually, you step off the merry-go-round and enjoy the pretty horsies prancing on their own.
One blogger from my old high school noted that only 10% of the students at my school understood the idea of popularity rendering the entire idea moot. She was much after my time, but it was amusing at how little things had changed aside from admitting girls, East Asians taking over from East Europeans, and the whole school being moved a few miles.
I was among the 90% who never understood popularity in high school. As I grew older, I started to understand its use as a tool but not as an end in and of itself. I still find the subject interesting, but I don't get the impression this book really digs into it, at least not from this review.
According to people I know who raise chickens, the whole pecking order thing is because a lot of people raise their chickens indoors with prepared feed. Chickens need protein, and chickens raised outdoors eat insects, worms and the like. They don't need a pecking order. The chickens who don't get enough protein peck other chickens to get the protein they need from other chickens' wounds.
I often wonder, in the context of our personal value judgements, how far status-seeking plays a role (eg the concept of 'luxury beliefs' seems plausible). Girard's ideas of mimetic desire help here too. Great review of yet another book I'll feel bad about never getting around to reading. Thus lowering my status in contrast to your readers who do.
There’s a song by Animal Collective called My Girls whose chorus is “I don't mean to seem like I care about material things / Like a social status / I just want four walls and adobe slabs for my girls”. I always think it’s hilarious that he thinks of social status as “material” and a solid house for his family as somehow not. It suggests to me the way we often conflate “material” with things that are somehow crass, when in this case he’s got it precisely backwards.
Shelter falls under survival in Maslow's hierarchy. All animals evolved to seek shelter; for protection from the elements, predators, or rivals among their own pack.
well, is it that hillarious though? material in this sense is about materialism and wantin what's redundant. Not about material vs spiritual, or serving basic needs, even if those are served from a material object like walls
“Our age has a distinct lack of grand theories of human society and behavior.”
That’s because progress in the science of understanding human behavior is occurring from the evolutionary perspective. Explaining people’s behavior in terms of their intentions and beliefs (the intentional stance, per Dennett) is an artifact of the human intuitive theory of mind, it's anthropomorphizing the human condition.
A quote from Pascal Boyer’s Minds Make Societies: “we should not expect the new scientific convergence I describe here to yield a general theory of human societies. But it can produce something vastly more useful and plausible, a series of clear explanations for the many different properties of human minds involved in building human societies.”
One of the issues in addressing poverty is to do so without imposing a loss of status. One of the reasons people do not go to food pantries is they don't want to be seen as someone who needs to go to food pantries.
Seems to cut in the other direction, too: even when we can afford to lift people from material deprivation or denial of basic social services, will doing so impact our own superior relative social status?
There's social science research and historical anecdote that suggests that people would rather give up the "nice things" entirely than have to share them with low-status others (e.g. closing public schools in Virginia to avoid integration, therefore increasing costs and denying quality education to all children, white and Black, alike).
We see this at the national level with "welfare chauvinism," or the tendency for a population only to support beneficial social programs when they are offered to an in-group and denied out-groups (minorities, immigrants, etc.).
Sociologists and political scientists call this framework Vladimir's Choice. (It's a yearning to see greater suffering in others, though at the same time disparaging Slavic cultures for having this tendency).
Political scientists have gamed out Vladimir's Choice, and sadly found that if a political system offered an option in which the greatest harm falls upon outgroups, the ingroup shows a preference for greatest harm even when presented with multiple options.
Of the many things that moving to and living in Sweden from the United States has taught me, perhaps the most surprising was how quietly status-conscious Swedes are. Here we have the Nordic Social Democracy Par Excellence, subject of satirical maxims about "Jantelagen" (i.e. Tall Poppy Syndrome) and stereotypes that variously flatter Left-Liberal Utopian Dreams about equality on the one hand and Conservative Fever Dreams about grey Marxist sameness on the other. But even here, status and the envy thereof peek through!
Sweden may have extremely low inequality by Gini Coefficient and one of the flattest income inequalities in the world, but Swedes still remain extremely differentiated in both wealth and status. Wealth inequality is actually *higher* than in the United States, a fact that still shocks me.
And the more nebulous matter of status may be equally stratified: Before the neoliberal turn caught up with Sweden in the mid-1990s (helping to spike wealth inequality to the highest levels in Europe) and even at the peak of the Social Democratic Folkhemmet in the 1970s, there were sharp status distinctions and status anxieties largely unnoticed by outside observers. Sweden is one of the few countries in the world with a monarchy, but less known is that it retains an intact aristocracy, too. There is a Baroque mansion, the House of Nobility, at a commanding point on an island right in the middle of the city, where card-carrying aristocrats can host fête or summit, alike. Even less known, perhaps, is the dominance that dynastic family wealth and status (typified by the Wallenbergs) holds over Sweden today. Imagine Medici-era Italy, but with old money funding tech unicorns. Subtler still is the hold that British status signalling and mores hold over Swedes. TV is full of British programming, and with it, very British attitudes about class. Something that seemed paradoxical and discordant to me, at first, but makes perfect sense now.
Walking around extremely segregated and status-stratified Stockholm, you can quickly see that there are high-status areas that stand apart: Östermalm is Stockholm's Upper West Side, Södermalm its Williamsburg, Brooma perhaps Park Slope, Danderyds an Essex or Westchester County, and Lidingö a Sands Point Long Island-type seaside commuter town. Housing in these areas rivals or exceeds prices in the United States' most rarefied zip codes. And the price for entry into the high-status club is jealously guarded by more immaterial means, too.
If you are anyone who's anyone, you will also maintain a summerhouse on the Stockholm Archipelago, where you migrate in July, just as well-heeled New Yorkers make for the Hamptons. There you will engage in sailing and tasteful entertaining, just as if you were on Martha's Vineyard. Some of the "cottages" that will host you are quite grand, but Swede's True Preps know that something more understated confers higher status, still. (The rest of us can watch this ritual play out on TV, where various celebrities will flatter us with a vicarious invite). Now, it may be equally relaxing to take the caravan to lounge around a local lake or take a package holiday to the Canary Islands, but you may feel the need to obscure or even apologize for such mass-tourist, middlebrow activities. (The truly cool kids can deftly manage the mix of high-low culture to brew up a status cocktail even more potent!). In the winter, it's to the mountain retreats in the Alps or Åre for the outdoor activities that precede "After-Ski" (Swedes employ English phrases as a pretension similar to how pompous English speakers pepper their speech with French).
On the other side of the status divide, there are the other places you'd best avoid: marginal, low-income, high-unemployment, high-crime suburbs of the big cities; deindustrializing towns (like my wife is from); and fast-emptying agricultural areas. To a New Yorker, everywhere north of central park is "Upstate" and to a Swede, everywhere north of Stockholm is "Norrland," which is lower-status. Sweden's vast, less-populated, more-industrial Northern two-thirds has been essential for creating the raw materials that under-girded the state's wealth and power, and even today has some the the highest incomes in the country. But, like Northern England, the stark countryside and earthy settlements of Norrland lacks the Southern metropole's cache.
But you can also be far while being close. Marginal suburbs ringing the cities might be right at the edge of Stockholm, Göteborg, and Malmö, and well-connected by Sweden's excellent public transit systems. But they might as well be far beyond the outer reaches of Norrland for how alienated they are from mainstream Swedish society. Again, Netflix hosts plenty of Nordic Noir crime dramas to deepen your anxieties about what goes on there.
Even being from certain low-status neighborhoods can fill a Swede with deep shame (as dramatized in the Netflix miniseries, "The Playlist," about the rise of Spotify and its low-born, Rågsved-native billionaire founder, Daniel Ek). I live in a great, little urbanist area just up the train line from Rågsved, and my Swedish wife is often apologizing for this fact to guests. The *mere proximity* is shameful, you see! In a country where equality reigns, the stain of birth shouldn't have such a hold on people, and yet it does. Another hit Swedish drama on Netflix, "Snabba Cash" ("Fast Cash") plays the upstairs-downstairs contrast between "vulnerable" immigrant suburbs and monied Östermalm for narrative tension in a way very relatable to American (or British) audiences, watching from our own, unequal and status-anxious societies.
The famous Social Democratic Swedish prime minister of the 1960s and 70s, Olaf Palme, was an outspoken Leftist, but also a high-status individual long before he assumed office. Like a Swedish Kennedy or FDR, he was a scion of old money, aristocratic associations, and high-status, elite institutions. For high school, he attended the exclusive Sigtunaskolan Humanistiska Läroverket boarding school outside Stockholm (an inspiration for the setting of another status-driven Netflix series "Young Royals").
Palme is now as famous in death as he was lionized and infamous in life, since the prime minister was shot on a busy street in central Stockholm in a case that remained unsolved until the present. For those unfamiliar with the story, Netflix offers yet another Swedish-produced series ("The Unlikely Murderer") about Palme's killing that follows a prevailing theory about his assassination at the hand of Stig Engström (AKA Skandiamannen or "Skandia Man") and the alleged assassin's various status-anxieties and disappointments. By the show's telling, Engström was born into a "good family" who left him at a Swedish boarding school to rub shoulders with the right people, but became the butt of jokes his whole life, pursued a middling corporate track at Skandia, and resented and coveted "cool-guy" Palme so much that he shot him. He may be the perfect exemplar for "elite overproduction theory" and how it creates surplus elites nursing dangerous status-anxieties.
Flash forward to our present day's political scene, and you could see the rise of the far-right Swedish Democrats, too, through the prism of status competition. SD's voters, like Trump's voters in the United States, are often referred to by academics here as the "left behinds" of Sweden's declining rural and industrial areas. If assassin Engström's murderous delusions and spoiled sense of entitlement were about the frustrations of a "surplus elite" who never achieved the potential of his station, the SD voter's status-anxiety is more about a native working-class and merely-middle-class seeking and failing to find that "normalcy" you referred to. And, here, unlike in the US, they really are the working class: fully half of the largest labor union in Sweden, LO, voted for SD in the last election. These declining-in-status regular Swedes seem to want the respect and stability due to the average worker during the Mid-Century Folkhemmet Era (ironically achieved under the decades-long dominance of the Social Democrats). This persona yearns for the Everyman status they remember their parents and grandparents having. The villains in their narrative are the usual suspects for the far-right: immigrants, globalists, urban elites, etc. Their preferred means of national renewal are a return to various nostalgically remembered things: a Sweden for Swedes, decent pay for honest hard work, revival of nuclear energy, and even (perhaps surprisingly) a stronger welfare state. When you strip away the racism, xenophobia, misogyny, and general thuggishness, you can even understand the appeal! If American Trumpists are said to want a return to the 1950s, Swedish Democrats seem to want a return to the 1970s. The time when people like them still had normal status, if not great income or wealth.
So, if disruptive status anxiety plagues even a country with low income inequality, perhaps status is an even more fundamental driver even than money? If a financially-comfortable middle-manager like Stig Engström could be driven to murder by humiliation and status-frustration, perhaps it wouldn't even be enough if all Swedes were upper-middle-class and materially thriving? Maybe money (either as income or wealth) is merely a means for status? Maybe we could even come up with a way to give more people status, even as it seems a zero-sum good?
That's an incredible write-up. Thank you.
Would be curious how status might be surmised when interacting or observing folks in central Stockholm.
Super interesting. I learned only recently from Piketty’s 2nd book that Sweden had a wealth requirement for voting at all until 1909. And only had a full franchise after WWI. Super interesting that Sweden has both recent aristocracy/oligarchy and the post WWII history of one of the most income equal social democracies in the world!
Great analysis.
Seems to resemble the "banana theory"; in the jungle, having or not having is not an absolute, but only relative to how much banana the next fellow has.
I enjoyed this comment as much as I enjoyed the review - thanks both! This Jantelaw thing was an unknown concept to me until I visited Norway this July, before going to Italy. The contrast was stark. Both societies have hierarchies but in Italy it’s overt and acknowledging ones relative status is threaded throughout life and language. In Norway it’s far more subtle, but counterintuitively I felt more of a sense of liberation in Italy than Norway. Now there are factors that could have contributed too numerous to name in this comment - not least of which I was a ‘visitor’ to both - but that impression was starker than I ever would have predicted going in.
Another observation that is admittedly half-baked but throwing out for comment: Hierarchical, unequally distributed societies seem to have more impressive legacies of art and man-made beauty. Presumably bc the excess at some levels of hierarchy and desire to express / ringfence it inspired massive investments in artistic production …. But any counters / addendums you want to offer?
A delightfully enthusiastic review, thank you. (I do enjoy a review where the reviewer allows their affection for the writer, and enthusiasm for the book, to spill over, and doesn't try to step back a little from that enthusiasm, or ironise it.)
Oh, and Noah, if you enjoyed this book, and enjoy thinking about these ideas, you might get a lot out of a very short but powerful essay by Brian Eno from his 1995 diary (published by Faber in 1996 as A Year With Swollen Appendices).
There's a PDF of the whole essay here: http://designblog.uniandes.edu.co/blogs/dise2102/files/2008/11/brian-eno-culture-essay.pdf
This is how it opens:
"Let's start here: 'culture' is everything we don't have to do. We have to eat, but we don't have to have 'cuisines', Big Macs or Tournedos Rossini. We have to cover ourselves against the weather, but we don't have to be so concerned as we are about whether we put on Levi's or Yves Saint-Laurent. We have to move about the face of the globe, but we don't have to dance. These other things, we choose to do. We could survive if we chose not to."
And it ends up in some interesting places. I think it would complement W. David Marx's book nicely, because Marx is so (understandably!) enthusiastic about his central thesis that he perhaps may have neglected some of the other large forces driving culture, and cultural change, and the cycles of culture he discusses.
If you like the essay, it overlaps a lot with Eno's excellent, longer and more detailed, Peel lecture, broadcast on the BBC in 2015, which you can listen to here:
https://www.openculture.com/2015/12/brian-enos-peel-lecture-on-art.html
Transcript here, if you prefer reading (you can skip the long introduction by Mark Radcliffe):
http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/6music/johnpeellecture/brian-eno-john-peel-lecture.pdf
Anyway, thanks again for the review, I'll go get the book. (But do check out the Eno essay; I suspect a dash of Eno's salt in Marx's soup could make for a remarkably nourishing meal – while also filling in some of the gaps in Marx's book which you worry about in your review.)
Even more delightful than an enthusiastic review of a book is an enthusiastic review of a range of literature on a subject, given by a person who has romped through the topic already and come back to you with the choicest picks from their gathering. What a treat! This is what the Internet was made for!
I blush! Thanks Geoffrey. Hope you find Eno's thoughts on this subject as enjoyable and thought-provoking as I do.
The central idea of this book reminds me of "Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture," by Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter, published in 2004. Fascinating and highly recommended; written during a (sigh) more innocent time, before the advent of Social Media. I wonder what book Potter and Heath would write today, taking InstaTwitTok into account!
Dickens is almost entirely about these questions, emphasizing the ultimate consolations of hearth and home, where there is no marketplace for status. Dickens was similarly writing at a time of social and technological change, when anyone could be on top and fall back down at any moment. His status strivers usually met bad ends, to the consolation of readers.
Very nice review. I'm not sure the book is as polyphonic and as wideranging as Noah suggests - it has a few central themes it entertains recursively - but it had a kind of languorous breadth you often don't see in non fiction anymore.
Incidentally, the book is the perfect explanation for the current uproar over bluechecks on Twitter. Each time an elite marker of status has become available to the masses, they have abandoned it as swiftly as possible. You could explain pretty much the entire history of British fashion, which is far more classist than American fashion, this way. It's not about the money. Anyone who can afford to be on Twitter all day long can shell out eight dollars. It is that status, more than money, cannot exist with democratization.
This is extremely funny since many of the bluechecks are the same people who have been calling for the redistribution of wealth all this while. Everyone is a socialist except when it comes to his own assets.
This kind of suggests that "the bluechecks" are some vanguard of a redistributive politics. And, yet, the most famous Twitter user of our age was erstwhile Donald Trump. Now replaced by Elon Musk. So, whom are you referring to, exactly, who "have been calling for the redistribution of wealth all this while"? And is the redistribution of wealth really analogous enough to the democratization of (non-material) status to set up your irony here?
An excellent distinction. Of course, these classes of people aren't perfectly unrelated - there's a fair degree of overlap. But a lot of the bluechecks are journalists and politicians and writers who are enthusiastic to varying degrees about some form of wealth redistribution.
And secondly, yes, I think the analogy survives well enough to set up the irony. They are both valuable assets and they are both relatively scarce.
I've been off of Twitter so I don't follow the folkways of bluecheck politics. Nor do I want to.
But didn't the blue check mark mean that Twitter verified that the account is in fact in the custody of some public figure and not someone taking the name and/or posing as the public figure?
A classic tempest in a teapot.
You are right: it is a tempest in a teapot. Such matters cannot help but be so. The bluecheck was created to signify authenticity. It ended up signifying status. As usual, intentions and outcomes failed to align with interesting consequences.
It was sort of like getting into Who's Who back when they didn't simply sell slots. You had to have some distinction or another to get into the tome, not just willing to pay the fee. (I remember my father getting into the NYC "Green Book" as the head of Miscellaneous Auditing in the Department of Social Services. That was about the apex for a civil servant.)
Is Who's Who like the Social Register?
This is fascinating, because I thought everyone *knew* that everything was about status, and thus there was no point in writing a book about it. oops (not that I have the rhetorical chops to draft such a tome.
but in any case, yes - clearly status is behind almost everything, and the reason everything is so nasty online is because status is a zero-sum ladder, and people fight tooth and nail to avoid the possibility of dropping a rung. This is why older folks are more stuck in their ways, and younger folks are more willing to accept and act on crazy ideas - because the former stand to lose a lot of status if things change, and younger folk have no status to lose. This is why people glom on to trends amongst their peers - because if you don't jump into the trend, you risk losing status if the trend becomes a standard.
This also fuels something really interesting - the fracturing of the (online) world into a myriad of enclaves. In each enclave, there's a status ladder that is independent of the real-world status ladder, and you can compete within a much smaller pool. You may not be high status in the real world, but you can be standing alone in a corner at a party thinking "they don't know that I'm a guild leader in Ruin of Ragnarok Online", which is itself a source of status comfort.
This is also why they say science progresses one funeral at a time - because the older scientists don't want to be made extraneous by new ideas.
>>> This is fascinating, because I thought everyone *knew* that everything was about status, and thus there was no point in writing a book about it. oops (not that I have the rhetorical chops to draft such a tome.
Yeah, this is kind of my reaction to the review as well. The statement of its central thesis has me wondering if I'm missing something because of how seemingly obvious it is. I think the second-order analyses like how certain positive goods can't withstand being watered down by catering to a broader audience (like how American cinema was arguably a lot better in the 1990s before everything had to be an action movie that could play in China) or the whole Geeks / MOPs / Sociopaths analysis of entryism seems like a richer vein to mine.
The cultural framework I like to use is the S curve, like the one used for technology lifecycle progressions.
In music, for instance, the S curve begins at punk and ends with glam. Punk is a truly early, novel subgenre that produces an immediate visceral first impression. You either love it or hate it, and there's no going back on your choice to stick to it or avoid it.
Along the S curve, the more artistically sophisticated or gifted at showmanship evolve to be able to draw larger audiences and give room for the genre to grow on you later on.
Then you get to the critical mass stage, where the gatekeepers (record companies, broadcasters, concert promoters) let you in and deem you worthy to make money off of your talents. This is also the moment where culture crosses from the sacred (art for art's sake) to the profane (making money off of your talents).
The latter portion of the S curve is mainstream appeal, when an artist has to be everything to everybody and transcend genre. Culture has a life cycle and the artist and genre both become glam -- the work reflects spectacle and self-reference that the audience can no longer relate to. Eventually, the mainstream just wears out its welcome, engenders its own backlash (how '80s music was largely a reaction against '70s disco, and how '90s grunge/alternative was a reaction against '80s glam metal, etc.), or the punk-glam lifecycle is beginning elsewhere and the genre becomes boring-but-normal (the true fans stick around and keep the genre alive without having to go on the S-curve ride again).
The old saying among Manhattanites was that one should discard any article of clothing one sees entering the borough via bridge or tunnel. B&T was a pejorative.
Isn’t status necessarily a zero sum game? Unlike with material goods, we can’t float all boats because status is a relative measure.
High status is. Normal status can be extended to everyone!
"Normal status can be extended to everyone" can it? At that point, people will just use smaller attributes to remove one from normal status (aka Narcissism of small differences)
It's why subcultures form.
If we presuppose status-seeking as imperative, like Freud's pleasure principle, Nietzsche's will to power or Karl Marx's historical materialism, then we should assume that the normal course of behavior for a human is to be unable to climb a mountain and aspire to climb a molehill instead. Kind of an inverted Peter Principle.
Reminds me of seeing what seemed like universal ownership of a Louis Vuitton bag among Tokyo office commuters in early 2000s. A French luxury brand with storied history turned into a status object of ordinariness. As normal as having a stapler on your desk.
If it weren't possible to fall below normal status, what would stop people with normal status from feeling like losers? (I am not sure I buy into any theoretical claims about status I've read online in the past 5 years. The above is premised on buying into them.)
For comparison, Herodotus claimed that there were seven helots per citizen of Sparta. I bet almost all of the helots felt like losers. I point this out to show that the large majority of people sharing one status doesn't necessarily contribute anything to it being a normal status, rather than a loser status.
Well, people with normal status would presumably be offered a decent amount of respect and material benefits, so that would probably prevent them from feeling too much like losers...
Helots feeling like losers is understating things. They were literally hunted for sport by the Spartiate during the Krypteia.
Material goods are also zero-sum, first because there are limited material resources, and second, and more important, because material goods themselves are not very important after a level, it's about the relative measure of them (that is, whether you have as much or more than your peers, not so much what you have yourself in isolation)
Material goods aren’t resource limited in any meaningful sense.
The physical limits of the Earth and its resources and the carrying-capacity thresholds eventually breached by negative externalities and pollution make the production and distribution of material goods limited in a very meaningful sense.
This really depends on where you live. For Westerners sure, but for a large portion of the world's population is still living as subsistence farmers.
In planet with limited resources (and already under great environmental strain to boot) that would be news...
Your friend Brad Delong frequently refers to humans as "jumped up plains apes". That's accurate, if unflattering. All of our social primate relatives, have groups which are organized as social heirarchies. Why should humans be different? The difference in humans is that we possess much more elaborate material cultures than our primate kin. The diversity of material cultures results in an immense range of behaviors. What that implies is there will be many alternative heirarchies of which an individual might be a participant.
You and Brad are both graduates of elite universities which places you both at a high level in the academic rankings. My graduate credentials and academic affiliations were much more modest. One status marker which I remember from my life in academia was the "name badge take". When you got on an elevator, individuals would glance at your name badge to determine if you, or your institution, were important. Since I was content in my modest affiliations, I was mostly amused by it. Another status heirarchy is being a great cosplay player. There are also parallel heirarchies in the cosplay community, e.g. Star Trek, Star Wars, and Sherlockian.
Aaron Renn in his old Urbanophile blog showed a similar tendency in organizations. Renn had worked as a consultant and on the blog introduced the concept of the "Tyranny of the Org Chart." In any organization, you're viewed and valued by the box you occupy on the chart.
Novel ideas lead to instability if they come from the lower boxes. Supervisors will either steal those ideas and claim them as their own, or make life worse for the subordinate if they sense a capable rival. There is also lateral instability, if a novel idea comes from one department finding a solution for another department (say, software developers coming up with a human resources workflow improvement that HR didn't think of first).
The role of outside consultants is to gather intelligence on these organizations to pass on this existing knowledge to executives in a way that can't be done because of org-chart dynamics.
Sam Harris had a conversation recently on status...
I'm drafting my substack review of Marx's book right now. It's the best bad book I've read in a while. Bad because the central arguments fail - spectacularly - over and over again; best because it is really really rich in anecdote. It is as delightful as Paul Fussell's classic in the genre, and also as infuriating (not for its classism, but for its sloppy core argument). Any serious student of the subject should read Marx's book.
The basic mistake Marx makes is to assume that because we find status markers varying significantly across time and space, this makes them arbitrary and undercuts the legitimacy of claims that certain status evaluations are in fact merited rather than just the expression of de jour power relations. He mistakenly assumes that universality is required in order for a status judgment to be truly merited - a mistake because it ignores the possibility that status evaluations are better analyzed using frameworks like contextualism, particularism, or fitting attitude theories of value which can make sense of the objectivity of aesthetics and judgments of taste without the need for universal principles that hold always and everywhere.
Besides making one of his core arguments invalid, this has two negative consequences for other key parts of his book. First, it makes it really difficult and awkward to fully capture the phenomenology of status evaluation and cultural production. Presumably we often do the cool, fashionable, hip, or beautiful things because they are cool, fashionable, hip, or beautiful. They earn us status _because_ they are cool, fashionable, hip, and beautiful. We may also do them because they earn us status, but to say that we are mistaken about our primary reasons for undertaking something is the kind of surprising reductionism that takes more work to establish, especially when more naively realist alternatives haven't been ruled out. Here his Kantian foil is a total straw person and he doesn't engage any of the contemporary philosophical literature on aesthetics.
Second - and maybe worse - his reductionism completely undercuts his attempt to salvage us from the cultural stasis brought on by algorithmic media capitalism. He can't argue that we ought to value "radical creativity" more than other, more popular modes of cultural production. When he encourage us to strive for a cultural ecosystem that is "robust, diverse, and complex" rather than "bland, stagnant mono-culture" we're left wondering what basis he supply to convince us of this. When he says we ought to prefer "the skillful manipulation of higher-order symbols in new and surprising ways" the best he can do by way of justification is offer a facile psychologistic appeal: "complexity is good for our brains." (269-270).
I don't really blame Marx for this though; he's probably just got sociological / anthropological training and so takes critical theoretic reductionism of normative phenomena as settled stuff just as his advisors probably did. Very few trained philosophers take this kind of 70's/80's style critical theoretic reductionism seriously - and if they do, it's never by way of arguments that go so quick. There's of course a lot more to say here that I'll save for my review, but that's the gist of what makes it a bad book.
I was wondering why Noah was quoted so often at the end; now I know!
Cool story bro
ah sorry if the placement of that last sentence was confusing! didn't mean to implicate you in the errors. and also, it's a really valuable book!
i would definitely recommend people read it in spite of the sloppy in argument. i'm just exercised by it because these french-inspired sociology books have more intellectual capital than they deserve and perpetuate a really pernicious intellectual tradition that arguably gave birth to post-truth identity politics and the very stagnation he laments.
here's the review: https://tailwindthinking.substack.com/p/the-limits-of-egalitarian-taste-making
A review of a book I am likely to skip. Why? Each additional year I live, the less the status I have attained matters to me and fewer people value the status I have. Eventually, you step off the merry-go-round and enjoy the pretty horsies prancing on their own.
One blogger from my old high school noted that only 10% of the students at my school understood the idea of popularity rendering the entire idea moot. She was much after my time, but it was amusing at how little things had changed aside from admitting girls, East Asians taking over from East Europeans, and the whole school being moved a few miles.
I was among the 90% who never understood popularity in high school. As I grew older, I started to understand its use as a tool but not as an end in and of itself. I still find the subject interesting, but I don't get the impression this book really digs into it, at least not from this review.
According to people I know who raise chickens, the whole pecking order thing is because a lot of people raise their chickens indoors with prepared feed. Chickens need protein, and chickens raised outdoors eat insects, worms and the like. They don't need a pecking order. The chickens who don't get enough protein peck other chickens to get the protein they need from other chickens' wounds.
Great review which has made me want to seek this out to read
Thanks for posting!
I often wonder, in the context of our personal value judgements, how far status-seeking plays a role (eg the concept of 'luxury beliefs' seems plausible). Girard's ideas of mimetic desire help here too. Great review of yet another book I'll feel bad about never getting around to reading. Thus lowering my status in contrast to your readers who do.
There’s a song by Animal Collective called My Girls whose chorus is “I don't mean to seem like I care about material things / Like a social status / I just want four walls and adobe slabs for my girls”. I always think it’s hilarious that he thinks of social status as “material” and a solid house for his family as somehow not. It suggests to me the way we often conflate “material” with things that are somehow crass, when in this case he’s got it precisely backwards.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zol2MJf6XNE
Shelter falls under survival in Maslow's hierarchy. All animals evolved to seek shelter; for protection from the elements, predators, or rivals among their own pack.
well, is it that hillarious though? material in this sense is about materialism and wantin what's redundant. Not about material vs spiritual, or serving basic needs, even if those are served from a material object like walls
“Our age has a distinct lack of grand theories of human society and behavior.”
That’s because progress in the science of understanding human behavior is occurring from the evolutionary perspective. Explaining people’s behavior in terms of their intentions and beliefs (the intentional stance, per Dennett) is an artifact of the human intuitive theory of mind, it's anthropomorphizing the human condition.
A quote from Pascal Boyer’s Minds Make Societies: “we should not expect the new scientific convergence I describe here to yield a general theory of human societies. But it can produce something vastly more useful and plausible, a series of clear explanations for the many different properties of human minds involved in building human societies.”
I agree with the general thesis.
One of the issues in addressing poverty is to do so without imposing a loss of status. One of the reasons people do not go to food pantries is they don't want to be seen as someone who needs to go to food pantries.
Seems to cut in the other direction, too: even when we can afford to lift people from material deprivation or denial of basic social services, will doing so impact our own superior relative social status?
There's social science research and historical anecdote that suggests that people would rather give up the "nice things" entirely than have to share them with low-status others (e.g. closing public schools in Virginia to avoid integration, therefore increasing costs and denying quality education to all children, white and Black, alike).
We see this at the national level with "welfare chauvinism," or the tendency for a population only to support beneficial social programs when they are offered to an in-group and denied out-groups (minorities, immigrants, etc.).
Sociologists and political scientists call this framework Vladimir's Choice. (It's a yearning to see greater suffering in others, though at the same time disparaging Slavic cultures for having this tendency).
Political scientists have gamed out Vladimir's Choice, and sadly found that if a political system offered an option in which the greatest harm falls upon outgroups, the ingroup shows a preference for greatest harm even when presented with multiple options.
Corporate consultant turned writer Hilary Gallo explains the Vladimir's Choice fable. Warning: It involves mutilation. http://www.hilarygallo.com/project/vladimirs-choice/
Sad but too often true.
That gibes with The Guide for the Perplexed and its notions of charity.