Status and Culture: How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant Change

by W. David Marx

Very little knowledge is required to read the status meanings of a giant mansion, a stretch limousine, or an oversized gold watch. The avant-garde, at the other extreme, relies on ideas of great symbolic complexity to erect fences between erudite allies and hopeless philistines. Full understanding of these inventions may require access to education, money, and leisure time, but the distinction emerges in the realm of symbols referencing other symbols, not simply in the direct display of acquisition costs. There emerges, then, a clear connection between signaling costs and the symbolic complexity of the resulting convention. This relationship can be mapped on a spectrum, from pure economic costs to pure cultural costs, with “semieconomic” costs in the middle (where wealth is not the direct signaling cost, but assists in acquiring the knowledge to decode the symbol).