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?
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.)
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 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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
“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.
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?
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.)
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 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.
Isn’t status necessarily a zero sum game? Unlike with material goods, we can’t float all boats because status is a relative measure.
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.
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!
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.
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
“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.