On the other hand, small project-based meetings are often productive and useful from a planning, idea-sharing and motivating point of view. These meetings also reinforce the power hierarchy, but they are at least worth the time and cost of the employees (not to mention the demoralization of people who have to spend time wasted in meetings).

I suspect that most of the contributors to this blog use meetings to get work done, not to display status. By sharing my own experiences, I’m not placing myself above or trying separate myself from others here.

I actually don’t know what it’s like in Robin’s research group so I can’t say what his meetings are like, but I’d guess they’re more like our research meetings here and less like Dilbert’s meetings. I did have lunch with Robin and his colleagues and we had a lively discussion which did not seem to me to have anything to do with status. As I said, we’re all aware of Dilbert-style meetings (and Dilbert is funny partly because it’s so true) but that doesn’t mean that all meetings are like this.

Also, I think it illustrates how nontransparent stasis is maintained: if one attempts to increase transparency about a phenomenon, it can create an opening for another person to remark the situational equivalent of “I don’t know what it’s like in YOUR research group”.

I think it’s an empirical question the degree to which there are nontransparent status maximizing behaviors, and the degree to which some people have the propensity to read nontransparent status maximizing behaviors into situations where they’re not occuring.

Although I suppose a typical person is supposed to realize that those words are all prefaced by “according to Tyler Cowen’s intuition”.

Aside from that, I agree that greater transparency (and empirical research into)economically significant activities like meetings should be fruitful in figuring out how to reduce social waste. And it does seem like there’s a lot of economic waste, and a lot of nontransparency, regarding status signals and buying off socially unproductive/freeriding behavior like that of blowhards.

Off the top of my head, here’s some other behavior (underdiscussed on this blog, to my knowledge), that may have nontransparent reasons and motivations behind them, that in aggregate seem very economically wasteful:

1. cultural aversion to telecommuting (mostly management side)
2. cultural aversion to outsourcing (mostly citizen side)
3. cultural aversion to open borders for talented labor and capital (mostly citizen side)