Twelve years ago I posted on how our era is a rare unique “dreamtime” of fast growth, wide cultural integration, and delusional beliefs. But I think I missed a big reason why we have the delusions we do:
1. A possible counterexample to your idea: there’s a hypothesis in evolutionary psychology that the reason people in rich countries are more likely to be obese if they’re lower class is that self-perception as relatively low status flips a switch from ‘eat when hungry’ to ‘eat when see food’. Which evolved because relatively low status people were at higher risk of starvation in prehistory.
If so, this would be an example of a drive determined by relative rather than absolute status/wealth. But unlike many other such drives, not a signalling game.
2. Re:
low status humans are consistently more violent than are high status ones. Thus this theory predicts what we have seen: declining rates of violence and conflict, less war, and widening moral circles.
Isn’t this better explained by low absolute wealth humans being at greater absolute risk of death (from eg starvation) if they lose property/land etc, so having to take stronger measures to protect them? I.e. modern middle class people don’t kill each other because they’re not at risk of being fatally killed or impoverished themselves. (Misestimation of relative status needn’t come into it.)
Your logic on increasing lifespans since industrial revolution also explains the falling lifespan of poor American whites recently as their status has decreased.
Seems like most of these can be explained simply as people adapting to more wealth and other changes in society. Wealth provides a cushion against adverse events, reducing stress, and allows people to spend effort on status-raising activities instead of survival. It also allows time to spend on politics. A longer time horizon is adaptive in a stable society that effectively enforces laws. And a wider moral horizon makes sense in a large and complex society where everyone must rely on others doing their jobs in order to function.
Do most folks really care about their relative status anymore? Who are our “winners” when it comes to wealth status? New York socialites who care what other people think of them? Gross. Insecure celebrities? Look at how goofy and needy Jeff Bezos came off after his foray into “space.” People like Amazon but he’s extremely mistaken if he thinks anybody thinks about him. I wouldn’t sleep with his girlfriend with a ten foot pole. I just found that out the other day because an article had a photo. Status, if it exists, comes from all directions and never exists long enough to be measurable. If you are a brain surgeon, you have intelligence, concentration and skill in tandem beyond my capacity to even fathom. If you have that and are on your third wife, I’ll know something isn’t right about you, especially if you drive a dumb convertible around on Sundays. I’m probably lower middle class and have had a few too many failures but I have so many interests that I don’t have time to think about my status relative to people in my life. Friends seek me out because I am fun to be around. Some of them are multimillionaires, some are barely getting by. If we have a good rapport and laughs, what’s the difference to me? My dog is cooler and cuter than anyone else’s. Is that status? For me or for him? He’s only met like 30 people.
I'm having a bit of trouble pulling out the actual empirical content here as opposed to the part that's merely applying different words to phenomenon we already know about.
For instance, how would one distinguish the theory that said: no it's not that we estimate our status using absolute wealth it's just that wealth lets most members of the society afford what was once reserved only for the highest status individuals? Indeed, when you talk about how lower status means more disease etc… it sounded like you were saying that it's the apprehension of low status that causes this increase in ailments. Indeed, that seems to be a critical argumentative step as otherwise the far simpler theory that it's access to resources which is doing the work and just that scarcity means low-status individuals get less resources making violence etc.. a more attractive strategy. .
But it seems doubtful that this disease etc.. is caused directly by a perception of low status. Surely evolution wouldn't select for a mechanism that made you more susceptible to germs etc when low status unless there was a constraint that required it and once you postulate a resources constraint that does that work it seems like it does all the work here and doesn't leave much left directly for status.
—-
But I'm pretty sure I'm misunderstanding something about what you are claiming so maybe you can correct my misunderstanding.
I'm surprised you didn't mention one big change. Originally status was relative to an individual's intrinsic accomplishments, but more recently humanity has created inherited status. Individuals can have high status because one or more of their ancestors earned above-average wealth, power or fame; and their descendants can "coast" for a while on this inherited status without having to exert themselves. Of course if they don't live up to their potential, they may squander this high-status; and descend to a lower status.
Do remember that we humans are mainly adaptation-executers and not utility-maximizers. So even though becoming a queen is no longer the best way to have lots of grandchildren, it used to be so for the preceding millenia over which these behavioral tendencies had formed.
I don't find "For example, a young woman might delay fertility to invest in poetry, music, etc., hoping to then be chosen as queen, which would allow her kids to have many grandkids." particularly plausible. Why do you assume that people are fertility-maximizing, and if they are, why are they so bad at it? If I wanted to optimize for the number of grandchildren I had, I would presumably want a religious upbringing and a low-income child (https://www.statista.com/st..., for example). That seems a lot easier than focusing on being chosen as a queen. I also don't have evidence that this function is secretly quadratic somehow, and the uber-wealthy have many many children: Zuckerberg has two children, Bill Gates three.
I find the falling economic productivity and rising costs of children arguments for declining childbirth rates much more convincing.
Isn't this the point of scientific inquiry? To seek objective truth? Perhaps not every human has the personality to be a scientist, but are you suggesting that Robin is significantly different in attitude from any other active research scientist? Surely pretty much all of them feel a "need to be right".
I loved your book and I read your work because it prompts me to think and learn, and this post is no exception. However, I think your focus on wealth and dominance is incomplete because it ignores other sources of status, such as family and moral character, that are important in and of themselves but also would have likely interacted with wealth and power. Rather than everyone thinking they are high status, I think the issues you mention derive from people having a shallow definition of status. Instead of seeing status as a construct with multiple equilibria, our culture has misguidedly focused primarily on money and dominance.
Historically, with larger families and with a larger portion of the population earning their living from farming (compared to today), family and moral reputation would have served to provide a more diversified set of status sources - satisfying both an innate need for status and better serving the broader needs of the community.
Moral reputation was critical because, for a community to thrive, this would require the sharing of resources, but leadership and status, in these instances, would come not only from those who exhibit wealth and dominance but also from those who embody cooperation, generosity, wisdom, and other forms of moral character. Back in the time of family farms, there were stronger incentives for certain types of reciprocity - when you had an abundance of ripe honeydew that wasn't going to make it to market, you would share the abundance with your neighbor, who in turn would share an overabundance of tomatoes with you.
These repeated games provided resources but also an informational tool for understanding the quality of character behind it. You learn a lot about the quality of someone's generosity when they go the extra mile to make sure a neighbor who lives further away but is in greater need than others gets their needs met. Most people will have excess resources of some kind (you can only eat so much honeydew, after all) and all will have some incentive to share, but their character will be measured by how much effort they put into understanding and meeting their neighbors' needs over time.
Though this may seem like it's repeating your point because this type of behavior is likely to provide more access to resources over time, it does not necessarily lead to the high status individual translating those resources into wealth or dominance over time. An individual farmer could very well decide to take the additional resources they receive and further redistribute those to the community. To the extent that their redistribution demonstrates not just generosity, but also discernment, they earn more of a reputation for being wise, again increasing their status and providing a pathway for influence and power, distinct from that of dominance.
While you claim that "we hold ourselves to higher standards, but are also more willing to criticize others who see claim high status but fail to meet such standards," this approach is again incomplete because once earns one's moral reputation from following political correctness rules. We choose loyalty over trustworthiness, ruthless ambition over generosity, and appearance over substance, when all of these items should provide pathways to status. We've traded more diversified set of opportunities for high status for a set that is very narrow, and we are poorer for it.
1. A possible counterexample to your idea: there’s a hypothesis in evolutionary psychology that the reason people in rich countries are more likely to be obese if they’re lower class is that self-perception as relatively low status flips a switch from ‘eat when hungry’ to ‘eat when see food’. Which evolved because relatively low status people were at higher risk of starvation in prehistory.
If so, this would be an example of a drive determined by relative rather than absolute status/wealth. But unlike many other such drives, not a signalling game.
2. Re:
low status humans are consistently more violent than are high status ones. Thus this theory predicts what we have seen: declining rates of violence and conflict, less war, and widening moral circles.
Isn’t this better explained by low absolute wealth humans being at greater absolute risk of death (from eg starvation) if they lose property/land etc, so having to take stronger measures to protect them? I.e. modern middle class people don’t kill each other because they’re not at risk of being fatally killed or impoverished themselves. (Misestimation of relative status needn’t come into it.)
Your logic on increasing lifespans since industrial revolution also explains the falling lifespan of poor American whites recently as their status has decreased.
Seems like most of these can be explained simply as people adapting to more wealth and other changes in society. Wealth provides a cushion against adverse events, reducing stress, and allows people to spend effort on status-raising activities instead of survival. It also allows time to spend on politics. A longer time horizon is adaptive in a stable society that effectively enforces laws. And a wider moral horizon makes sense in a large and complex society where everyone must rely on others doing their jobs in order to function.
Do most folks really care about their relative status anymore? Who are our “winners” when it comes to wealth status? New York socialites who care what other people think of them? Gross. Insecure celebrities? Look at how goofy and needy Jeff Bezos came off after his foray into “space.” People like Amazon but he’s extremely mistaken if he thinks anybody thinks about him. I wouldn’t sleep with his girlfriend with a ten foot pole. I just found that out the other day because an article had a photo. Status, if it exists, comes from all directions and never exists long enough to be measurable. If you are a brain surgeon, you have intelligence, concentration and skill in tandem beyond my capacity to even fathom. If you have that and are on your third wife, I’ll know something isn’t right about you, especially if you drive a dumb convertible around on Sundays. I’m probably lower middle class and have had a few too many failures but I have so many interests that I don’t have time to think about my status relative to people in my life. Friends seek me out because I am fun to be around. Some of them are multimillionaires, some are barely getting by. If we have a good rapport and laughs, what’s the difference to me? My dog is cooler and cuter than anyone else’s. Is that status? For me or for him? He’s only met like 30 people.
I'm having a bit of trouble pulling out the actual empirical content here as opposed to the part that's merely applying different words to phenomenon we already know about.
For instance, how would one distinguish the theory that said: no it's not that we estimate our status using absolute wealth it's just that wealth lets most members of the society afford what was once reserved only for the highest status individuals? Indeed, when you talk about how lower status means more disease etc… it sounded like you were saying that it's the apprehension of low status that causes this increase in ailments. Indeed, that seems to be a critical argumentative step as otherwise the far simpler theory that it's access to resources which is doing the work and just that scarcity means low-status individuals get less resources making violence etc.. a more attractive strategy. .
But it seems doubtful that this disease etc.. is caused directly by a perception of low status. Surely evolution wouldn't select for a mechanism that made you more susceptible to germs etc when low status unless there was a constraint that required it and once you postulate a resources constraint that does that work it seems like it does all the work here and doesn't leave much left directly for status.
—-
But I'm pretty sure I'm misunderstanding something about what you are claiming so maybe you can correct my misunderstanding.
Does this also work in reverse? In a time of stagnation, where our absolute wealth is short of expectations, we feel a loss of relative status?
Especially in a time of social media raising status salience and distorting comparisons. Hence more envy and social/political dissatisfaction
I'm surprised you didn't mention one big change. Originally status was relative to an individual's intrinsic accomplishments, but more recently humanity has created inherited status. Individuals can have high status because one or more of their ancestors earned above-average wealth, power or fame; and their descendants can "coast" for a while on this inherited status without having to exert themselves. Of course if they don't live up to their potential, they may squander this high-status; and descend to a lower status.
Do remember that we humans are mainly adaptation-executers and not utility-maximizers. So even though becoming a queen is no longer the best way to have lots of grandchildren, it used to be so for the preceding millenia over which these behavioral tendencies had formed.
Thanks!
I don't think you are taking natural selection seriously enough. We expect it to be VERY attentive to finding ways to promote reproduction.
I don't find "For example, a young woman might delay fertility to invest in poetry, music, etc., hoping to then be chosen as queen, which would allow her kids to have many grandkids." particularly plausible. Why do you assume that people are fertility-maximizing, and if they are, why are they so bad at it? If I wanted to optimize for the number of grandchildren I had, I would presumably want a religious upbringing and a low-income child (https://www.statista.com/st..., for example). That seems a lot easier than focusing on being chosen as a queen. I also don't have evidence that this function is secretly quadratic somehow, and the uber-wealthy have many many children: Zuckerberg has two children, Bill Gates three.
I find the falling economic productivity and rising costs of children arguments for declining childbirth rates much more convincing.
Isn't this the point of scientific inquiry? To seek objective truth? Perhaps not every human has the personality to be a scientist, but are you suggesting that Robin is significantly different in attitude from any other active research scientist? Surely pretty much all of them feel a "need to be right".
I loved your book and I read your work because it prompts me to think and learn, and this post is no exception. However, I think your focus on wealth and dominance is incomplete because it ignores other sources of status, such as family and moral character, that are important in and of themselves but also would have likely interacted with wealth and power. Rather than everyone thinking they are high status, I think the issues you mention derive from people having a shallow definition of status. Instead of seeing status as a construct with multiple equilibria, our culture has misguidedly focused primarily on money and dominance.
Historically, with larger families and with a larger portion of the population earning their living from farming (compared to today), family and moral reputation would have served to provide a more diversified set of status sources - satisfying both an innate need for status and better serving the broader needs of the community.
Moral reputation was critical because, for a community to thrive, this would require the sharing of resources, but leadership and status, in these instances, would come not only from those who exhibit wealth and dominance but also from those who embody cooperation, generosity, wisdom, and other forms of moral character. Back in the time of family farms, there were stronger incentives for certain types of reciprocity - when you had an abundance of ripe honeydew that wasn't going to make it to market, you would share the abundance with your neighbor, who in turn would share an overabundance of tomatoes with you.
These repeated games provided resources but also an informational tool for understanding the quality of character behind it. You learn a lot about the quality of someone's generosity when they go the extra mile to make sure a neighbor who lives further away but is in greater need than others gets their needs met. Most people will have excess resources of some kind (you can only eat so much honeydew, after all) and all will have some incentive to share, but their character will be measured by how much effort they put into understanding and meeting their neighbors' needs over time.
Though this may seem like it's repeating your point because this type of behavior is likely to provide more access to resources over time, it does not necessarily lead to the high status individual translating those resources into wealth or dominance over time. An individual farmer could very well decide to take the additional resources they receive and further redistribute those to the community. To the extent that their redistribution demonstrates not just generosity, but also discernment, they earn more of a reputation for being wise, again increasing their status and providing a pathway for influence and power, distinct from that of dominance.
While you claim that "we hold ourselves to higher standards, but are also more willing to criticize others who see claim high status but fail to meet such standards," this approach is again incomplete because once earns one's moral reputation from following political correctness rules. We choose loyalty over trustworthiness, ruthless ambition over generosity, and appearance over substance, when all of these items should provide pathways to status. We've traded more diversified set of opportunities for high status for a set that is very narrow, and we are poorer for it.
I usually think of our differing descendants as "us" for these purposes.
There's also going for duchess, countess, baroness, etc. One can always try to raise one's status.
Everyone wants his beliefs to be true.