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January 2 - February 6, 2023
When ice first became available in Sri Lanka, fishermen were finally able to sell their catch in urban markets. With rising incomes, many decided to emulate their middle-class superiors by buying televisions. They proudly placed the new TV sets in the very center of their huts—in villages that lacked electricity. To solve the mysteries of human behavior, bioanthropologists point to instincts. Psychologists suggest manias, phobias, and disorders. Economists assume rationality. But the Sri Lankan fishermen’s behavior is best explained through conventions—namely, actions taken in pursuit of
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The term “signaling” is used in both economics and zoology to describe when individuals communicate their high quality through specific clues in order to be selected by another party. In the wild, male birds signal their fitness for mating by flaunting gaudy plumage. In the job market, candidates signal their fitness for jobs by pointing to college degrees.
We don’t have to signal to everyone—only in times of information asymmetry. Our friends, family, and neighbors know us well and made conclusions about our status level long ago. Most public individuals have a reputation based on past actions and interactions. (Fame maximizes these reputations to extreme degrees, with the mass media educating millions on the high status of celebrities.) But in modernity—the epoch that the anthropologist Charles Lindholm defines as “the condition of living among strangers”—most of us need to constantly claim status upon interaction with unknown parties.
“Nothing is so unimpressive as behavior designed to impress.”
The 1970s basketball star Walt Frazier signaled his success by driving around Manhattan in a Rolls-Royce. To reveal his deep musical knowledge, Beck name-dropped obscure albums.
The philosopher Simone de Beauvoir believed women dressed up more than men because a man could rely on his profession for status claims, while “the woman who is deprived of doing anything feels that she expresses what she is” through adornment.
“The home is not merely an interior within which the couple is shut away; it is also the expression of that couple’s standard of life, its financial status, its taste, and thus the home must need be on view to other people.”
A garbage truck is more expensive to purchase than most Lamborghinis, but no one considers a garbage truck to be a luxury automobile, because rich people don’t drive them.
Each status group believes in the supremacy of its preferred status criteria, and this influences which signaling costs the members of the group care most about. New Money focuses on financial costs. Subcultures thrive on exclusive access and knowledge.
Authenticity has become particularly important in the modern era, where manufacturers can easily pump out ersatz copies of desirable goods.
Ideally all signals should be behavioral residue—reflections of how we live rather than items acquired for the purpose of claiming status. Authentic tastes are “natural” tastes—an effortless extension of the inner self and origin story rather than a calculated set of borrowings and acquisitions.
All of this leads us to the central paradox of authenticity: we are supposed to listen to the voice in our hearts, to “discover and articulate our own identity”—and yet, only others can judge whether we are authentic. Appraisers compare our taste with our demographic profile, and where there is a suspicious mismatch, they deny us status.
Perhaps the most significant lesson from authenticity is that our status appraisers never judge us on a single signal, cue, or significant absence: they compare our tastes against our demographics to understand who we are.
Which “I” are we talking about? There appear to be three: persona, identity, and self. In signaling, we build personas—observable packages of signals, taste, sensibility, immutable characteristics, and cues absorbed from our upbringing and background. Others use this persona to determine our identity. At the same time, we have a self within our minds, known only to us.
At a cosmic level, we all enjoy an absolute identity—a grand totality of distinguishing differences, including unique DNA sequences and an unrepeatable series of life experiences. Every single person on earth is different. When we ask “Who am I?” then, the question is simply whether others effectively acknowledge the distinctiveness of our existence. Before modern times, personal identity was simply a role and status: membership in a clan, tribe, and caste, as well as the specific position within that community. We now seek an individual identity that transcends demographic categories and
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Jean-Paul Sartre concluded, “Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself,” to which the philosopher Michel Foucault raised the stakes: “We have to create ourselves as a work of art.”
The very top elites must pursue extreme distinction, and they enjoy enough deference to break conventions. Individual distinctions thus play a larger part in their personas. Middle-status individuals, on the other hand, tend to be conservative and follow conventions more closely. Those at the bottom may also make distinctive choices out of disregard for social protocols, but their distinctions are seen as regrettable transgressions.
Modernity has democratized the aristocratic propensity toward individual distinction. But uniqueness remains an easier action for those at the top, which means that the easiest way to resolve the fundamental tension between being original and getting along in society is to acquire high status.
This is the logic behind identity politics, where individuals sharing demographic characteristics unite to raise the status levels associated with their defining trait.
Receiving an identity requires being identified by others. Why are others identifying us? The most immediate reason for their attention is status appraisal.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau complained about the dreaded “social man” who “knows how to live only in the opinion of others, it is, so to speak, from their judgment alone that he derives the sense of his own existence.”
In hoping to deny the influence of status, however, our brains rationalize the attraction to status value using palatable alibis, such as the pursuit of high quality and beauty. In doing so we interpret inauthentic external desires as authentic demands from our heart.
This isn’t to say that humans are victims of status—just that we are inherently social creatures who, as sociologist Georg Simmel writes, “consist of interactions with others”
We all compete for status, whether we like it or not. We can at least better explain the rules to make it a fairer fight.
individuals’ self-interested pursuit of status leads to the mysterious commonalities of behaviors we interpret as culture.
Status Strategy #3: Change the status criteria in your favor.
Artists, prophets, and philosophers have succeeded in expanding society’s natural focus on money and power toward more intellectual attributes like creativity.
“The hard way of doing better than others is to improve one’s own performance. The easy way is to trip up the competition.”
Status Strategy #4: Form a new status group.
A banjo player facing disrespect in a punk music world can move over to the Dixieland jazz circuit.
Individuals born into a certain socioeconomic class share a foundational set of unconscious conventions—i.e., the same habitus. This manifests in communal beliefs, concrete lifestyle differences, and distinct taste worlds.
New Money status symbols thus have very low symbolic complexity: they make sense as signals to everyone, including members of a parvenu’s low-status community of birth.
This quiet shabbiness among the very richest can appear illogical to the uninitiated, especially New Money individuals. But as we’ll learn, musty Old Money aesthetics are an equally rational signaling strategy as New Money’s money-drenched boasting.
New Money signals with economic capital. Old Money, on the other hand, has an advantage in the longevity of their status superiority, which can be demonstrated through social capital (strong relationships with other rich families) and cultural capital (knowing how to behave at the very top of society).
As The Bluffer’s Guide to British Class jokes, “Taste is entirely a Middle Class concern. The Lower Class don’t have it and the Upper Class don’t need it.”
By competing on taste, they can best rivals in their own ranks, impress Old Money, and embarrass New Money.
The Condé Nast magazine empire—from Vogue and GQ to The New Yorker—was built upon teaching the latest high-status conventions to the professional classes, many of whom didn’t live in New York to observe the trends themselves.
Due to the inherent elitism in most cultural criticism, “kitsch” is a pejorative term. But we should think about kitsch in a value-neutral way—as a specific type of commercial product that copies the format of high culture (books, music, films, clothing, interior goods) but removes its artistic aspirations.
Kitsch feels good immediately, whereas avant-garde art intentionally breaks the very conventions responsible for delivering pleasurable experiences. To someone who hasn’t learned the right conventions, Arnold Schoenberg’s jarring twelve-tone compositions just sound like dissonant noise. For those with the right knowledge, such as Old Money and the professional class, kitsch is loathsome.
An advantage in signaling requires standing out. This encourages a flash sensibility—bright and showy aesthetics, usually achieved through the purchase of low-level luxury goods. Standing out through personal appearance is important for those who have fewer opportunities to signal educational attainment, career progression, and home ownership.
New Money’s use of economic capital in signaling spurs the creation of expensive luxury goods such as sports cars, limousines, mansions, yachts, summer homes, designer clothes, and furniture. Old Money’s countersignaling and focus on patina and cultural capital incentivize companies to make classic, modest goods with a functional appeal. The professional class’s signaling through information creates a market for middlebrow mass media/consumer guides, functional goods, artisanal goods, and copies of Old Money lifestyles. Underprivileged individuals’ desire to take part in culture and outdo
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These effects of class on consumer choice challenge the idea that taste could be based on universal standards of beauty. In particular, the oft celebrated “elegance of simplicity” isn’t an innate human preference but arises from a countersignaling strategy.
Subcultures are a clear example of the alternative status groups introduced in chapter 1: collections of individuals lacking global status who form new hierarchies around status beliefs other than capital and mainstream virtues.
“It took courage for the first pioneers to strut through their working-class neighbourhoods dressed like upper-class dandies, while most other youths wore their dads’ uniform of ‘demob’ suits or baggy flannel trousers.” The media hype further raised the social costs. Teds lost job opportunities and were denied entry at their favorite dance halls, cinemas, and bars. This calculus—enduring massive global status losses for gains in local status—made sense only for particularly disadvantaged teens who desired new sources of esteem and had little to lose.
Writer Tom Wolfe explains, “For the first time in the history of man, young people had the money, the personal freedom and the free time to build monuments and pleasure palaces to their own tastes.”
In the 1960s, middle-class youth felt their own spirit of rebellion and abandoned their parents’ staid customs to form alternative status groups known as countercultures. Compared with subcultures, countercultures tend to embrace explicit ideologies, which members uphold as superior to traditional norms.
And just as in the case of teens joining a subculture, open membership in certain hobbyist groups can result in low global status. But once inside the group, members enjoy the social approval of their peers.
“No one, not a soul, cares what your class is, or what your race is, or what your income is, or if you’re a boy or girl or bent or versatile or what you are—so long as you dig the scene and can behave yourself and have left all that crap behind you when you come in the jazz club door.”
Not unlike cycling
In 1967 George Harrison of the Beatles visited the Haight-Ashbury area of San Francisco and recoiled at its deterioration: “I went there expecting it to be a brilliant place, with groovy gypsy people making works of art and painting and carvings in little workshops. But it was filled with horrible spotty drop-out kids on drugs.”
And every alternative status group creates binaries that highlight its own special criteria. “One is Hip or one is Square,” famously wrote Norman Mailer of American subculture in his controversial essay “The White Negro”; “one is a rebel or one conforms, one is a frontiersman in the Wild West of American nightlife, or else a Square cell, trapped in the totalitarian tissues of American society, doomed willy-nilly to conform if one is to succeed.”
