In health and medicine, we have many government agencies, and private philanthropies, devoted to many specific medical conditions, and also to studying and reforming medicine in general, at a meta level.
The challenge with status is that, unlike the other areas you discuss (commerce, medicine, education) there is no useful general criterion for is A > B. Human status is relative to a specific community of observers. Yes, you could ask a random selection of people is A > B, and get an answer, but the answer wouldn't be useful because it would diverge so much from how specialists would rank status.
This problem, I think, is why in our culture as a whole wealth is often taken as a proxy for status. It's a common denominator that more-or-less correlates with status/power/influence.
His point is that "status" inherently depends on who is judging it. Status of math professors, as judged by other math professors, is different from status of math professors, as judged by the average American. And there is no underlying ground truth by which we could say which is right, because status is entirely a question of how people judge your social rank.
There are plenty of orgs that (intentionally or as a side effect) collapse the various dimensions of status / prestige into a single dimension that makes every person commensurable.
1. social media ("number of followers" is an extremely general and conflationary notion of status)
2. Fortune 500 ("amount of money you have" is another very general notion of status)
3. Time 100 / person of the year write-ups engage with the meta-status question very directly.
the social media case is the most interesting one, I think. you genuinely have a novel measure of general status, correlated significantly with almost every more specific status dimension, and elicited continuously via a wisdom of the crowds. if there were benefits to setting up orgs that study meta-trust we should observe them here, right?
ah by "studying status" you mean something like "estimate the amount of status caused by various features like college education, attractiveness, wealth"? Social scientists do these kinds of analysis, but what would be the market incentive for a big private org to do so?
Hm, they're human so they definitely care about status. Could it be simply that 'status' is too broad, it's like having a big private charity devoted to 'Truth' or 'The Good' - many orgs will say they aim at them privately, but usually advertise in terms of a particular attack on the problem, to differentiate themselves from other orgs and also because it would be pretentious. Religions and political parties are the only orgs with broad enough claims on "intellectual territory" to tackle 'status in general', and they do!
As evidence that 'generality' is the problem, there's a lot of more specific study and reform efforts. The Thiel Fellowship comes to mind as a successful intervention aimed at reducing the influence of education on status. And tons of charities aiming to reduce the influence of weight, race, gender, etc on status.
I feel like an organization like this would struggle unless they strove to be entirely behind-the-scenes, like the NSA.
Like if they were trying to publicly steer more "status" to some non-academia-or-career area, it wouldn't work, because high status people don't listen to dweebs and government bureaucrats. Nobody cool or high status would play along, and all such interventions would die in the cradle.
And if they're trying to do it silently and behind the scenes, it's gonna drive a lot of scandal and reaction, because any methods to do that are going to look like government manipulation and marketing and brainswashing, and some of those methods will inevitably become public, or be surfaced by analysis, or people who work at Twitter, or whatever.
Arnold Kling's Fantasy Intellectual Teams was a meta status effort. He had hoped that someone would be inspired to form an organization to keep it going--alas, no one did.
Well, there is one public organization that uses dominance status to measure and change the prestige status landscape: the IRS. Money is Prestige Status Memory
Yes, but money is more important in status economy than people are willing to admit (for the same reasons that there are no meta-status orgs, as you argue), as it is the only generally accepted platform for status transfer: "The value of the status memory depends on the number of people using it (nodes in the network). The network effect of money leads to the hegemony of the winner of this competition.
Other forms of prestige status platforms evolved, such as various artifacts like fist wedges, hunting and salmon-running rights, titles, surnames, bloodlines, and caste. Today they are car, watch, smartphone, club membership, neighborhood, political functions, academic degrees, citations, academic awards, religious ranks, reputation, businesses, social contacts, number of employees, number of subordinates (serfs in the past), and ownership of various assets such as houses, stocks, cattle, bonds, commodities, cryptocurrencies, art, number of followers/subscribers/likes on social media, etc.
These other forms of prestige status platforms do not allow status transfer as universally as money (e.g., surnames), or have much higher transaction costs (art), low divisibility (houses), or no unit of account status and thus volatile exchange value (bonds, stocks, and other assets).
Money is the solution to the problem of the most efficient memory of prestige status in the current technological and social context.
Money as a status memory enables the replication and evolution of the production structure of the economy. It serves a function similar to that of DNA in the organism for economic membionts."
Wouldn't, almost by definition, membership in precisely that organization become the ultimate status marker? It logically doesn't get much higher in the status hierarchy than being the people who get to allot how much status everyone else "deserves".
I feel like academia is pretty much a meta status organization. I think your concern is not that it doesn't exist, but that its determinations are not sufficiently rational or scientific, or are too captured by specific interest groups.
Status ambiguity is essential for a non-hierarchical group to function, because nobody wants to feel like they're lower status. Even in hierarchical groups, followers that take direction from the leader, must know that the leader thinks of them as "lesser" in a fundamental sense. The boys trusts, respect and obey him, but must feel sufficiently valued and also be able to take comfort of having equal status to those that share their rank. This creates a sense of belonging. If everyone was assigned an "objective" status number, well these numbers would confer privilege which would breed jealousy, which would break unity and destroy the social basis of cooperation.
So we use and assign specialized social roles, with which everyone (hopefully) can find their niche and cooperate in ways that they are useful at.
Illegibility, subjectivity and contextuality of social status, are all features, not bugs.
Seems to me this is a feature and not a bug for our society. We all care about status, and we all compete against each other for status. However, because there are many different axes of status that are difficult to cross-compare, we don't have to wage a status war of all against all. We can satisfy our status urges by finding our niches. I think a universally accepted single axis of status would cause a lot of ugliness in our social relations.
>However, no large orgs devote themselves to studying or reforming status and prestige in general, at the meta level.
Is that exactly what much of the academia and aligned activists have been doing for the last few decades? Privilege, oppression, intersectionality, patriarchy, racism, sexism are all ultimately about redistribution of (from some perspectives) inappropriately assigned status.
People tend to trust those that they respect. A growing lack of respect could reflect a growing lack of status.
Of course, even if this is a decent proxy, it only works (some) for society-level status assessment. "I write for the New York Times" is a serious status symbol *for certain groups of people*. For some, it's actually a cause for disrespect. And maybe for most, it's a shrug of the shoulders or maybe mild respect.
Measuring status might be harder today than ever due to political polarization. Are even literal rock-stars *that* highly regarded these days? I think of all the big musical celebrities that endorsed Harris, and yet Trump still won.
The challenge with status is that, unlike the other areas you discuss (commerce, medicine, education) there is no useful general criterion for is A > B. Human status is relative to a specific community of observers. Yes, you could ask a random selection of people is A > B, and get an answer, but the answer wouldn't be useful because it would diverge so much from how specialists would rank status.
This problem, I think, is why in our culture as a whole wealth is often taken as a proxy for status. It's a common denominator that more-or-less correlates with status/power/influence.
You think we have a clear formula for who is healthier or more educated? We could measure status as accurately as those, if we tried.
His point is that "status" inherently depends on who is judging it. Status of math professors, as judged by other math professors, is different from status of math professors, as judged by the average American. And there is no underlying ground truth by which we could say which is right, because status is entirely a question of how people judge your social rank.
https://xkcd.com/927/
There are plenty of orgs that (intentionally or as a side effect) collapse the various dimensions of status / prestige into a single dimension that makes every person commensurable.
1. social media ("number of followers" is an extremely general and conflationary notion of status)
2. Fortune 500 ("amount of money you have" is another very general notion of status)
3. Time 100 / person of the year write-ups engage with the meta-status question very directly.
4. less seriously, https://eloeverything.co/leaderboard rates MLK Jr, Tesla, and Da Vinci as the highest overall status people ever)
the social media case is the most interesting one, I think. you genuinely have a novel measure of general status, correlated significantly with almost every more specific status dimension, and elicited continuously via a wisdom of the crowds. if there were benefits to setting up orgs that study meta-trust we should observe them here, right?
Those are orgs that create or reify particuilar kinds of status. They don't study or reform our status systems as a whole.
ah by "studying status" you mean something like "estimate the amount of status caused by various features like college education, attractiveness, wealth"? Social scientists do these kinds of analysis, but what would be the market incentive for a big private org to do so?
Why do we have big private charities devoted to education or medicine? Because donors care. Why don't they care about status?
Hm, they're human so they definitely care about status. Could it be simply that 'status' is too broad, it's like having a big private charity devoted to 'Truth' or 'The Good' - many orgs will say they aim at them privately, but usually advertise in terms of a particular attack on the problem, to differentiate themselves from other orgs and also because it would be pretentious. Religions and political parties are the only orgs with broad enough claims on "intellectual territory" to tackle 'status in general', and they do!
As evidence that 'generality' is the problem, there's a lot of more specific study and reform efforts. The Thiel Fellowship comes to mind as a successful intervention aimed at reducing the influence of education on status. And tons of charities aiming to reduce the influence of weight, race, gender, etc on status.
I feel like an organization like this would struggle unless they strove to be entirely behind-the-scenes, like the NSA.
Like if they were trying to publicly steer more "status" to some non-academia-or-career area, it wouldn't work, because high status people don't listen to dweebs and government bureaucrats. Nobody cool or high status would play along, and all such interventions would die in the cradle.
And if they're trying to do it silently and behind the scenes, it's gonna drive a lot of scandal and reaction, because any methods to do that are going to look like government manipulation and marketing and brainswashing, and some of those methods will inevitably become public, or be surfaced by analysis, or people who work at Twitter, or whatever.
Arnold Kling's Fantasy Intellectual Teams was a meta status effort. He had hoped that someone would be inspired to form an organization to keep it going--alas, no one did.
Well, there is one public organization that uses dominance status to measure and change the prestige status landscape: the IRS. Money is Prestige Status Memory
Money is well measured, but only one contribution to status.
Yes, but money is more important in status economy than people are willing to admit (for the same reasons that there are no meta-status orgs, as you argue), as it is the only generally accepted platform for status transfer: "The value of the status memory depends on the number of people using it (nodes in the network). The network effect of money leads to the hegemony of the winner of this competition.
Other forms of prestige status platforms evolved, such as various artifacts like fist wedges, hunting and salmon-running rights, titles, surnames, bloodlines, and caste. Today they are car, watch, smartphone, club membership, neighborhood, political functions, academic degrees, citations, academic awards, religious ranks, reputation, businesses, social contacts, number of employees, number of subordinates (serfs in the past), and ownership of various assets such as houses, stocks, cattle, bonds, commodities, cryptocurrencies, art, number of followers/subscribers/likes on social media, etc.
These other forms of prestige status platforms do not allow status transfer as universally as money (e.g., surnames), or have much higher transaction costs (art), low divisibility (houses), or no unit of account status and thus volatile exchange value (bonds, stocks, and other assets).
Money is the solution to the problem of the most efficient memory of prestige status in the current technological and social context.
Money as a status memory enables the replication and evolution of the production structure of the economy. It serves a function similar to that of DNA in the organism for economic membionts."
Wouldn't, almost by definition, membership in precisely that organization become the ultimate status marker? It logically doesn't get much higher in the status hierarchy than being the people who get to allot how much status everyone else "deserves".
No; it probably wouldn't have much dominance, and wouldn't need it.
I feel like academia is pretty much a meta status organization. I think your concern is not that it doesn't exist, but that its determinations are not sufficiently rational or scientific, or are too captured by specific interest groups.
Academia hands out status a lot, but doesn't much collect stats on status, nor study reforms of status.
It's all mixed up with tribalism.
Yes we do. Academia.
To add - you could found a new department! A Natural fit.
Status ambiguity is essential for a non-hierarchical group to function, because nobody wants to feel like they're lower status. Even in hierarchical groups, followers that take direction from the leader, must know that the leader thinks of them as "lesser" in a fundamental sense. The boys trusts, respect and obey him, but must feel sufficiently valued and also be able to take comfort of having equal status to those that share their rank. This creates a sense of belonging. If everyone was assigned an "objective" status number, well these numbers would confer privilege which would breed jealousy, which would break unity and destroy the social basis of cooperation.
So we use and assign specialized social roles, with which everyone (hopefully) can find their niche and cooperate in ways that they are useful at.
Illegibility, subjectivity and contextuality of social status, are all features, not bugs.
Shout out to that beautiful Baha'i temple!
What about knighthood? (specific to the United Kingdom, sure) Knighthood researches and verifies status, and does so across a broad range of domains.
Bring back Knighthood!
Seems to me this is a feature and not a bug for our society. We all care about status, and we all compete against each other for status. However, because there are many different axes of status that are difficult to cross-compare, we don't have to wage a status war of all against all. We can satisfy our status urges by finding our niches. I think a universally accepted single axis of status would cause a lot of ugliness in our social relations.
>However, no large orgs devote themselves to studying or reforming status and prestige in general, at the meta level.
Is that exactly what much of the academia and aligned activists have been doing for the last few decades? Privilege, oppression, intersectionality, patriarchy, racism, sexism are all ultimately about redistribution of (from some perspectives) inappropriately assigned status.
Do you think something like this might be a good proxy for status?: https://www.statista.com/chart/14514/the-institutions-americans-trust-most-and-least/
People tend to trust those that they respect. A growing lack of respect could reflect a growing lack of status.
Of course, even if this is a decent proxy, it only works (some) for society-level status assessment. "I write for the New York Times" is a serious status symbol *for certain groups of people*. For some, it's actually a cause for disrespect. And maybe for most, it's a shrug of the shoulders or maybe mild respect.
Measuring status might be harder today than ever due to political polarization. Are even literal rock-stars *that* highly regarded these days? I think of all the big musical celebrities that endorsed Harris, and yet Trump still won.