A Cold Compress for Status Fever

by Will Wilkinson on September 3, 2006

In the August 30 New York Times, Cornell economist Robert Frank writes about The Great Gatsby and happiness research. Frank worries a lot more about status-seeking than I think is warranted by the evidence. And I see this topic has caught fire on the blogowebs. So, here’s a few points that I make in a piece on positional competition I wrote that is coming out later this month in the Australian Center for Independent Studies’ Policy magazine.

In his books, Frank provides evolutionary arguments about why you should expect us to be status obsessed. I don’t deny that we are motivated by status. The evolutionary logic makes sense. But I do deny that the status-seeking game is globally zero-sum. Frank overestimates the importance of evidence from non-human primate deference-dominance hierarchies and, as far as I can tell, pretty much ignores the profound effects the unique human cultural capacity has on the pursuit of status. These are:

Culturally mediated variability. Like other built-in behavioral dispositions, the expression of status-seeking will be mediated by cultural norms. I eat with a knife and fork, and I don’t feel like I need to ask a young lady’s parents if I can have a sexual relationship with her. In other places, you eat with your hands, and you’ll be killed if you don’t get dad’s permission. Like chimps, we all eat, and young males will seek to have sex with young females. Unlike chimps, these behavioral patterns are strongly culturally shaped, and can be very different from group to group. Status-seeking is no different. Wealth probably correlates fairly strongly with status in most human populations. But humans confer status on each other for many reasons–for being a good athlete, for being funny, for being a good leader, for being smart, for being a charismatic performer, for having an impressive skill, for being spiritually profound–and most of the reasons status is conferred have nothing to do with command of material resources.

Status as payment. Crudely, the point of a cultural capacity is to gain an advantage for yourself and your offspring by accumulating and transmitting adaptive information and abilities in cultural (fast) rather than biological (slow) time. But everybody has an incentive to free-ride–to receive valuable information and skills, but never invest in gaining them for transmission. One way to solve the free-rider problem is to subsidize the acquisition of excellence by freely conferring praise, prestige, status, and fame on those who go through the trouble to learn something useful. In this case, the conferral of status is part of a profound positive-sum exchange–it is what makes the benefits of human culture possible. Positional status competition on any given dimension is zero-sum. There can only be one best jazz guitarist in Tucson. But the motivation to be the best flows from the status-benefits of being the best. And the status-benefits for cultural creatures are not based primarily in dominance-based access to scarce resources, as in other primate status hierarchies, but are freely granted by other cultural creatures as an incentive and reward. Winning on a particular status dimension creates a kind of positional externality for those who didn’t win. But if the benefits of status competition do not usually outweigh the costs, then we wouldn’t be disposed to so happily heap praise and status on bravura performers, and we would therefore get few bravura performances. Indeed, we would likely have no culture at all.

I wrote a long post on this a while back. Check it out. And I encourage everyone interested in all the hullabaloo about relative position to read the paper I discuss there by Joe Henrich and Franscisco Gil-White: “The Evolution of Prestige: freely conferred status as a mechanism for enhancing the benefits of cultural transmission.” (Evolution and Human Behavior, 22, 1-32).

The multidimensionality of status. Cultural mediation plus status-as-payment not only enables but encourages specialization in the pursuit of status. I find it truly weird how people like Brad DeLong, who are themselves high status individuals for reasons almost totally unrelated to income, fixate on income and wealth as if it is the preeminent dimension of status, and as if we have no choice but to care about it.

I think if most people thought hard about it, they would find that they have jumped from one dimension of positional competition to another, looking for a race in which they can place, if not outright win. I know that’s the case for me. A little autobiography… I was for a very short time a musical theater major in college. I quit pretty quickly because, although I absolutely loved singing, I realized I wasn’t good enough to rate high in the musical theater game. So I concentrated on my art major. I thought I was good enough, but found I wasn’t motivated enough to seriously compete on the art scene. So I took a big chance and moved into philosophy. I found that I was really pretty good at that, but, again, found that I wasn’t motivated to compete according to the rules of academia. Now I’m working on a career as a public intellectual, because I’m highly motivated, and I think my prospects are decent. In a few years, I might find myself disappointed in my inability to get far in this field (stiff competition!), and shift to something I might have a better chance of succeeding at. Now, I know I would like to make a lot more money, since there a lot of things I would like to be able to buy, but I have simply never related the size of my income, or my net worth, to my sense of status. It has been pretty much irrelevant to what I care about status-wise. I don’t think I’m that different from many or most people. I think that there are lots of pastors, PTA presidents, police chiefs, local scenesters, small town newspaper editors, and competitive Scrabble champions who are pretty pleased with their high relative standing within the circle they care about. Back where I come from, a single blue ribbon for a strawberry rhubarb pie at the State Fair could carry a small-town lady for years.

The “cultural fragmentation” of liberal market societies that allows everybody to be relatively high status on some dimension or other is an immense egalitarian triumph. The other way markets are leveling, through equalization of quality all along the price range for various kinds of consumer goods, makes material status-signaling more difficult, which does indeed bid up the price for certain kinds of positional goods, like houses in Manhattan, or spots at Harvard. But this is a problem only if you are determined to compete in that status race. If you are so determined, and you’re having a hard time of it, that’s your problem. You are not suffering from inequality; you are suffering from your preferences, and, within fairly broad limits, our preferences are under our control. I certainly don’t mind if you choose not to opt out of a positional competition you are losing. But I do mind if you expect to be subsidized for your choice.

tubas

Glad I found this site, I’ve been searching for something like this for awhile now.

triticale

Actually, there can be more than one best jazz guitariist in Tucson, because jazz is a range of music. Just off the top of my head, I would suggest comparing Wes Montgomery and John McLaughlin.

Jadagul

DED: good questions. Let me start out by saying I don't think you're unreasonable, and I'm glad you're sticking around to argue with me.

I don't think preferences are infinitely malleable. But I do think they change, and I think part of the change is in response to what you're good at. There was a study cited in a recent Scientific American that in Europe, children born shortly after the cutoff date for entrance to a soccer league are more likely to become professional soccer players as adults—they start soccer older relative to their competition, so do better and care more about soccer, leading to improvement. I know that I can't quite get invested in activities that I've decided I'm just not going to be good at; that's why, say, I keep studying piano, but it doesn't bother me that lots of my friends are way better than I'll ever be. On the other hand, as you eliminate dimensions of competition the few that remain become more important, and it's less likely that I'll find my niche that I care about and that makes me happy.

Now, I do think income is special. It's special for two reasons. First, the fact that you need it to do lots of stuff. But this isn't subject to the status effects so much. If you're just worried about having the resources to pursue your goals, it doesn't matter if other people have more or less.

But income is also important because so many people buy into it as an important status competition. I think this is partly cultural and partly a result of the absolute effects of income; but I would guess that the people really caught up in that game are a specific subset of the upper-middle and above classes, who have everything material they want and so have nothing else to fight over. I mean, if you have no material needs and no particular interests or hobbies, you gotta have something to go for; and a lot of people choose income as a default. But that is a choice, and often the result of exteremly shallow interests. As evidence that even much of the upper-middle class doesn't buy into this game I offer college professors: most of them could have earned much more by going into law or industry, but choose academia because they don't want to fight out the status race. I bet there are lots of other, similar choices that are just harder to point to.

Finally, I agree with you that more income is pretty much always better than less. But the side-effects you mention of wealth seem more a product of absolute wealth than relative wealth—if everyone had enough money that kids didn't need to work and could devote themselves to whatever they wanted, the poorer kid can accomplish pretty much all of what the rich kid can. The problem is the lack of resources that some families have, forcing the children to spend more time working; the solution for this, as for child labor abroad, is raising everyone's standard of living so kids aren't caught in that trap.

David DePianto

Having pretty much beaten the dead horse that is status competition -- and, in the process, having learned just how firm Will's camp (everyone but myself?) is on this issue -- I'm not sure where to go from here.

Admittedly, I find a lot of the arguments in the above posts fairly interesting and persuasive, but the result -- that inequality is utterly irrelevant in itself -- is hard for me to swallow. Worse, it's hard for me to believe that it's not something of a "feel good" smokescreen for (some) privileged people to hide behind. Let me see if I can explain and you all can tell me where I go wrong or what I'm missing:

So long as the subsistence needs (however defined) of all societal groups are met and all people are generally getting better off, it doesn't matter that there is inequality. It doesn't matter that circumstance will push certain people (and, almost inevitably, their kids and grandkids) towards status competitions like the race for Harvard Law Review or captain of the debate team, while others will have to content themselves with being the best crack salesman on the block, the funniest in their family, or one of the top three employees at the local McDOnald's -- there's a place for everyone! We're all winners on some dimensions and losers on others, and we shouldn't concern ourselves with which competition(s) we end up pursuing. An "egalitarian triumph" indeed.

Is this really what you're saying? Is the multiplicity of status dimensions alone enough to render marked income inequality completely unworthy of concern? How about the "side effects" of being in certain status competitions, such as the relationship between having money and one's state of health (a variable that links highly with happiness)? There seems to be a lot of these side effects associated with income...

Personally, I feel lucky to have been a part of certain status competitions (law school, grad school) and I know that the financial situation of my parents played heavily into that possibility, both directly and indirectly. Further, I'm fairly certain that I'd have a hard time switching to something else like being the best ballroom dancer in my circle of friends -- anecdotal evidence that we can't just switch preferences willy nilly. Glen mentioned that he cares more about debate than he does about sports, which is convenient because he appears to be a good debater...but what if he went to a school without a debate team or had to work after school? Is it possible that certain circumstances might have limited his opportunity to exploit his skill to the fullest (and thus leave him less happy)? Or are your preferences infinitely malleable?

DED

Glen

DED -- Again, interesting points. Three responses. First, I don't think people have total control over their own preferences, but they do have limited control. To a great extent, they choose which status competitions to enter. When I was in high school, I very much cared about my status in debate -- something the jocks couldn't have cared less about.

Second, even if you rule out individual control entirely, and say our preferences are fully culturally determined, Will's point still stands: Western-style capitalist societies tend to generate a wider range of status competitions into which people will be sorted. That reduces the winner-take-all nature of the social process, because there can be many different ways to be a winner.

Third, you're right that winning in the soccer status race isn't as fungible as winning in the income status race. And none of us can do without income; even if you're totally soccer-focused, you need money to buy food, send your kids to college, etc. But remember the context of the discussion: Liberals have been trying to argue that income inequality is undesirable. Will and many others have argued in response is that we shouldn't care about inequality *per se* as long as people are generally getting better off, even at the bottom of the ladder -- which is assuredly true. The liberals have responded by saying inequality is bad *as such*, because it makes the people at the bottom feel bad by comparison (the status competition argument). That's where Will's argument in the current post refutes that defense.

In short, there are only two reasons to care about inequality. The first is absolute deprivation -- but that's not problem in America, because absolute welfare has increased for just about everyone. The second is relative deprivation -- but that position relies on the status model, which Will smacks down here.

John Thacker

In other words, the range of possible status competitions that future generations can engage in is limited by the income distribution of the present generation.

Wouldn't that itself be an argument for conspicuous consumption by the rich? If people most resent their own peers, the rich are drawn to particularly expensive sorts of status-seeking, and those with less money can find equally attractive but cheaper status competitions to compete in, then conspicuous consumption reduces the intergenerational differences in wealth and would be a good thing.

David DePianto

New question for all of you guys -- Glen, Slocum and the dancing mathematician -- who are totally on board with Will's theory about status competitions. So, assuming with Will (and against nearly all economists of any era), that "our preferences are under our control" and, further, that any status race is just about as good as any other in terms of the happiness it may yield, how can we relate this to (one of) the policy issues that motivated this mini-debate in the first place -- progressive taxation?

One of the chief concerns of people like Kahneman, who calls the positional quest for more income a "focusing illusion," is obviously that people are spinning their wheels trying to win a game that is, in the aggregate, zero-sum. Sort of a collective action problem: as long as there are status rewards to working more people will want to climb up the ladder, but if we limit the marginal benefit associated with more work then we will erode the (individual) tendency to indulge this "focusing illusion."

If I read you all correctly, this is not really a concern because people can just stop working so hard anytime they want, in favor of other (non-income generating) status competitions. Is there any concern, though, that certain politically important segments of society -- certain races, socioeconomic groups, etc. -- will tend to cluster around certain status competitions (to caricature: minorities who find themselves unable to compete academically find status in athletics)? In itself, the clustering of certain groups around particular status races shouldn't bother people who believe, as I think you all do, that people will ultimately find their niche(s) and achieve positional superiority somewhere....But what about the intergenerational/distributional consequences of this clustering?

Income seems different, and more important, than many other status competitions. Prestige -- such as that garnered from six-pack abs, a killer, award-winning pie or a "kickass blog" -- is not fungible in the same way money is. While being a good soccer player might enhance, in many ways, the likelihood of your daughter being a good soccer player, you can't pay for the college education of your offspring with the non-pecuniary rewards associated with that particular status race. Thus, the ability of people to compete in the "income race" is very important because it has implications for the opportunities of future generations. In other words, the range of possible status competitions that future generations can engage in is limited by the income distribution of the present generation.

Interested to hear any comments...

DED

Jadagul

Also, I suspect that most people participate in many status contests, but care most about a few. I do math, economics, and ballroom dance pretty seriously. I also do some weightlifting, sing, play piano, and write a blog that no one reads. But I care about the first three more than the rest (the first two especially). So I can feel better than Will because I understand measure theory better than he does, and he can feel better than me because he has a kickass blog and I write mainly to amuse myself.

With regard to culture determining status, I think it does only partially. Among other things, we care about others' opinions of us, but only some others. There are a lot of people whom I think are idiots, and I don't care if they respect me or not. Further, they can respect me for different things. I don't get status points from people for being buff or an amazing pianist, because I'm not. But I tend to get status points in the status games I care most about, so the others don't bother me. My athlete/semi-bodybuilder friends can be much buffer, and my amazing pianist friends better at that, without being threatened by my superior math ability.

As a side note, none of the three things I placed at the top of my list are things that our culture really puts at a premium for status, though I suppose econ comes closest. So ballroom dance is near the top of my status pile, even though lots of people think it's stupid.

Slocum

"It would be lovely if we could all be the best at something without making other people feel like 'losers' on that dimension, but is this realistic? Something tells me that in order for a particular status dimension to carry any importance, there must be losers."

No, I don't think that there have to be losers. There are things I'm good at that people I know ask me to help them with. In almost none of these areas am I anywhere near 'the best', but often I am the best option available on a Thursday night for the price of a couple beers. And there's a bit of status involved in having these abilities even though, in a highly competitive environment, I wouldn't win a lot of blue ribbons. The people I help aren't diminished as 'losers' because these aren't areas they've focused on.

Similarly, Will's status is enhanced by being skillful enough to have flirted with careers in musical theater and art (just as the guy in the next office's status is enhanced by, say, having played minor league baseball for a couple years). Status doesn't have to derive from being 'world class' in one specialized area--status can also come from being a local expert and being pretty good a number of things.

Paul Zrimsek

One interesting side-effect of the status debate is that it has caused Brad DeLong-- formerly (as you know) so far gone in his commitment to utilitarianism as to be unable even to comprehend the alternatives-- to abandon that philosophy altogether:

Surely spite is at least as offensive an other-regarding preference as envy, isn't it? Surely public policy should weigh the spite-generated utility the rich gain from their conspicuous consumption as worth less than nothing, shouldn't it?

David DePianto

Glen --

It's nice to know someone reads these comments -- thanks for the response!

I take your point that people can be both winners and losers on different dimensions, but does the fact that we can win on one dimension erase the significance of the dimensions on which we fare poorly? Even if the latter are (culturally) very salient social dimensions? It seems to me that there are only so many status dimensions that can plausibly yield any sense of accomplishment on the part of the relavant competitors.

ALso, (and perhaps more importantly) I haven't heard any response on the notion that status dimensions are often dictated and reinforced by culture and circumstance (social circle, socio-economic status, innate ability) and are very costly to change. It's not that such dimensions are "natural" or inevitable -- they vary across cultures after all -- but they can be deeply embedded within a given social context, making them very costly to change. THis point is important because the harder it is to change one's preferred "status race" the more we might be concerned about policy level solutions.

Let me know what you think...DED

Davison Grant

Other commentators have noted that the ability to think in other than in zero-sum terms may be one of the most profound advances in human consciousness since the species developed the organization capable of supporting cities.

Your analysis of status competition is spot on. I also believe it may fit in with your identification of "hedons" as a possible means to measure what motivates people. The diversity of how different people acquire "hedons" may provide the basis to analyze how they diversify their means of achieving status. Obsessively status conscious persons may simply be persons that lack recourse to other means of obtaining "hedons," except in relationship to the status of others. This suggests that the kindest thing we can do for others is teach them how to discover ways for them to acquire "hedons" in a manner that is within their own personnal resources and does not rely on comparison with others.

Glen

A quick reaction to DED's last point. It really would be pointless if no status competition ever had losers, because all the losers bailed out for other status competitions. For winning to mean anything, there must also be the prospect of losing. However, I think Will's point is rescued by recognizing that most people enter multiple status contests, and they lose at most of them while winning or placing in one or two. That means the very same people are both winners and losers.

David DePianto

Will --

In the latter part of your posting, you suggest that the abundance of (culturally mediated) status dimensions across which people may compete serves to soften the disutility associated with being bad at any one dimension. If your strawberry rhubarb pies aren't up to snuff, in other words, try something else and continue to do so until you find a status dimension in which "you can place, if not outright win." Ideally, each person will eventually find their niche, making the race (or, perhaps more appropriately, all of the races taken collectively) a productive endeavor as opposed to a zero-sum game.

I wonder if this line of thinking ignores, or at least underplays, a couple of considerations. First, can people really abandon a particular status race merely by willing a change in their preferences? Though it's relatively easy to change one's clothes, listen to different music, or take up a new hobby -- all of which might enhance a person's credibility in certain scenes -- changing status races is often very costly. It might involve changing a group of friends, going against the grain of popular culture (i.e. taking up the tuba rather than becoming a DJ) or abandoning a dream in which one was heavily invested for a long time. It might also be limited by innate ability -- for instance, my goal to be the most athletic or physically fit of my friends seems to be constantly undermined by my lack of fast-twitch muscles and my profound "appreciation" for fattening foods. That may be a bad example, but my general point is that changing races is costly in many contexts, and that this has implications for the number of status dimension that may reasonably operate in such circles.

A second point -- one which we actually discussed briefly at the IHS Stanford conference -- regards the relationship between the number of people in any given status race and its importance. It would be lovely if we could all be the best at something without making other people feel like "losers" on that dimension, but is this realistic? Something tells me that in order for a particular status dimension to carry any importance, there must be losers. When enough "losers" flee to another dimension, moreover, that particular social dimension will lose its importance (bringing us back to a zero-sum situation). If this is the case, an abundance of competitive dimensions doesn't help the situation.

What's your take on all of this?

DED

Eric Barnhill

Krishnamurti had a lot to say on this. He basically went around India pointing out to all the gurus and monks that they had traded in one form of status-striving for another. K. felt that it was the act of striving in the first place that was causing the world's problems, and that we should seek for action free of striving, which he believed was possible if the mind was truly clear and sensitive to its own limitations.