Power Corrupts Prestige
Some terminology:
Power is the ability to influence people and things, via strength, weapons, money, position, looks, charisma, “a way with words”, etc.
Product is the stuff we want to happen in the world, e.g., health re doctors, insight re intellectuals, and fun re entertainment.
Productive is a tendency to cause product.
A bigshot is a person or org with a wide reputation for having & using power.
Prestige is a wide reputation, of a person, org, area, or topic for making product.
Status is a wide reputation for admirability, via power, prestige, or other features.
Status markers are the features widely used by a culture to judge status.
Promise is a wide reputation for the potential to achieve status.
Humans have long shared norms that say to resist power, but admire prestige. So people with power have long sought to launder their power into prestige; they’d rather be seen as prestigious, instead of a bigshot.
Yes, power is in fact productive (and prestige gives some power), but norms against power make powerful people eager to claim more credit for product than power alone can justify. Their efforts are aided by the fact that power has clearer status markers than does productivity.
To manage employees, bosses must exercise power, but anti-power norms push employees to resist this. So firms try to make bosses seem prestigious, to reduce employee resistance. Arguably, this is one of the most important boss functions. So yes, there are some social benefits from laundering power as prestige.
Even so, the powerful plausibly tend to go further than is socially optimal trying to take credit for product. Bosses claim credit for their subordinates’ product, art producers and critics claim credit for the product of artists they fund and oversee, and academic funders, editors, department heads, and technical twiddlers claim credit for nearby intellectual progress.
Imagine a positive product fluctuation somewhere, that happens to result in more valuable product than is usual or expected. The prestige of topics, orgs, and people near that fluctuation will then increase, and adjacent people will try to push closer, to claim more credit for it. Compared to folks who are actually most causally responsible for such fluctuations, those with power can push better, and as a result push away those more causally responsible. And the prospect of losing credit for their product in this way makes the productive less eager to produce.
For example, Silicon Valley was unusually productive in the 90’s and 00’s and then when the ’08 crash shutdown the usual paths for elite college students to go into law, finance, and management consulting, many flocked to tech, and soon were in control there. Tech then became less innovative, but more prestigious, and more responsive to elite student concerns.
In my world, I think I can see better than do distant observers who is more productive, and thus who deserves more to be seen as prestigious. But I can see that resources tend to go instead to those who are more powerful, primarily due to powerful outside supporters like donors finding them more congenial. When some area becomes unusual productive, the powerful move in and become stronger there, favoring other powerful folks, and pushing out the productive. Pulling productivity in that area back down to the usual levels.
Over time, humans have developed better institutions for preventing the powerful from grabbing credit for product. For example, millennia ago we invented property rights and authorship. Aristocrats from centuries ago were seen as prestigious merely for being rich and well-born, but today we are more careful about who deserves credit for what admirable products. Hopefully in the future, prediction markets, decision markets, and academic prestige futures can make the connection between actual product and prestige even stronger.
Enjoyed this way of looking at these terms. But where do you fit kindness and morality into the equation?
"Power is...influence"? So status is not power? If "Prestige is a reputation for making product" and "Status is a reputation for admirability." Why are beautiful people or poets usually high in prestige status? Why can charismatic strangers in plain clothes immediately be high status when they enter a room, even without any reputation or status markers? Isn't a "big-shot" high in prestige status?
I have difficulty following implications of your terminology. The discussion about status is muddled by the lack of clear terms. My attempt to clear things a bit up: I define status as the potential to influence the behavior of other people.
Status can be obtained in two basic ways. Dominance – by subduing others – using force or the threat of force. The behavior is influenced by the threat of causing harm (costs). It is based on the submission of the other party in the hope of avoiding further harm from conflict (costs).
Prestige status is based on a person’s competence, ingenuity, and superior characteristics: such as size (height and muscularity), beauty, skills, knowledge, bravery, social and networking skills, verbal ability, entertaining ability, entrepreneurship, leadership. The behavior of others is altered by awe, admiration, and expectation of benefits to be gained by deferring. These can take many forms such as access to mates, goods, services, knowledge & information coordination, leadership, and gaining status through association. The resulting cooperation from prestige is based on voluntarily conferred deference.
Dominance status is “push”, prestige status is “pull”. Dominance creates subordinates, prestige creates followers. Dominant individuals are avoided by subordinates. Prestigious individuals are sought out by their followers, who want to be near them and pay the high-status individual with attention and other services and goods.
The same feature can play a role in different status strategies. In today’s modern societies, the hypertrophied human muscles built in gyms are mostly not meant for dyadic physical confrontation, but for show. They are now a signal of prestige rather than dominance.
Although using distinct psychological structures, different behavioral patterns, and ethological displays prestige has the same origin as dominance – striving to influence the behavior of others. When thinking about prestige and dominance status in terms of potential gains (prestige) and the threat of incurring costs (dominance), one must keep in mind that the price of a particular behavior (cost) is defined by the foregone profit of the second-best alternative not chosen (opportunity cost). Thus, prestige and dominance are just names for strategies in the same status economy, and one cannot clearly separate them. For example, a prestigious individual’s refusal to accept deference from and associate with a follower imposes costs on the follower, so it is strictly a dominance status move. Or the prestigious individual sometimes becomes a protector of lower status followers from other dominant individuals, so the use of prestige status in this case is a dominance tactic. Prestige and dominance are two different strategies with the same goal – to maximize status (influence).
https://www.jurajkarpis.com/moneyisstatusmemory/