Discussion about this post

User's avatar
free_agent's avatar

Originally, I found this page searching for how historians measured whether or not a particular era suffered from elite overproduction.

But an element that this post underemphasizes is "class" distinctions. The excess elite isn't just pushed down in some distribution relative to where they think they should be, there is a restricted number of positions defined by some class distinction. (One writer sorted jobs in Algeria as "government jobs", "the state oil company", and "Islamic clerics and scholars".) People whose status-conception is tied to being within a particular class are at risk of not obtaining positions within it at all.

Expand full comment
Kobie's avatar

NFTs are a great example of "we now put more weight on many smaller lower-noise status markers, instead of fewer bigger noisier markers"

Like people are literally falling over themselves to buy jpegs of rocks and cars

Expand full comment
13 more comments...

No posts