Prestige hierarchy and dominance hierarchy

Humans have two types of hierarchies–prestige hierarchies and dominance hierarchies. I admit that there are some cases where a hierarchy is not clearly one or the other, but bear with me.

A prestige hierarchy is positive sum. Those at the bottom of, say, the chef hierarchy or the guitarist hierarchy, can learn from those higher up. We get better at doing things by copying what prestigious people do. When we need help, it is useful to have an idea who the real experts are.

A dominance hierarchy is negative sum. The more resources I obtain at gunpoint, the less for you. And the fight to get to the top wastes resources.

The business world has elements of both. Your boss may have prestige but also has the ability to threaten you.

Marxists see capitalism as a dominance hierarchy. Non-Marxists see capitalism differently. A mesh of prestige hierarchies? Or a competition that is not interpretable in terms of hierarchy?

In our Martin Gurri world, some important prestige hierarchies are under stress. Elites don’t enjoy the prestige they once had.

Elites who lose prestige tend to resort to dominance. China in Hong Kong. Journalists who want Internet censorship. But making dominance moves is no way to recover prestige. It does the opposite.

Cancel culture uses dominance moves. From a prestige perspective, it is a poor tactic. As Peggy Noonan wrote,

The past decade saw the rise of the woke progressives who dictate what words can be said and ideas held, thus poisoning and paralyzing American humor, drama, entertainment, culture and journalism. In the coming 10 years someone will effectively stand up to them. They are the most hated people in America

Assuming that our erstwhile elites are not going to recover their prestige, where are we headed? Will a new stable prestige hierarchy emerge? Or will we have to settle for either chaos or a dominance hierarchy?

15 thoughts on “Prestige hierarchy and dominance hierarchy

  1. Humans have two types of hierarchies–prestige hierarchies and dominance hierarchies.

    That sentence holds the promise of an important insight but I kept humming and hawing over the points Kling made as he fleshed out his ideas. For dominance hierarchies, my first thoughts turned to chimpanzees and the positive-sum vs. negative-sum distinction doesn’t feel right. It seems that dominance hierarchies are ultimately backed by a show of force while prestige hierarchies expand the number of tools/tactics used to establish rank. Maybe that distinction is nit-picking but it feels important to me in some way. Chimp vs. bonobo societies seem to make different positive-sum tradeoffs but I’m not sure one is more positive-sum than the other (though modern humans think bonobos are more virtuous) and I’m quite positive that if one species crossed the Congo into the other species territory that I’d place my money on what Richard Wrangham calls the Demonic Males of the common chimp camp.

    I’m not sure why I’m consistently opposed to Martin Gurri’s thesis on elites, but China’s dominance in Hong Kong doesn’t quite fit my understanding of the situation either. Underlying the recent events in Hong Kong is the fear of mainland China’s dominance but this domination feels more theoretical than concrete. I am certainly not a fan of the PRC’s authoritarianism but the ongoing protests feel more like social justice outrage than righteous civil disobedience to me.

    • I’m on the same page. I think the dominance vs prestige distinction is a great insight (are they really the only two kinds, though?), but I’ve got some bones to pick with what Arnold writes after that. I think of Bryan Caplan’s writing on the wasteful signalling aspect of education and can’t reconcile that with the idea that prestige hierarchies are positive sum. Or heck, just think of all the guys toiling away playing minor league baseball games in nearly empty stadiums who will never make it to The Show. It seems clear there are a lot of resources wasted trying to get to the top of prestige hierarchies as well.

      Also, in a (qualified) defense of dominance hierarchies, I think I’d say that one mark in their favor is or at least can be stability. The competition for prestige, because it doesn’t involve physical aggression, can be going on all the time, and if prestige is bestowed by genuine achievement, that would obviously create positive externalities. But it seems like there are a lot of contexts where this is a negative, though. If subordinates are always questioning whether the CEO is really the right person to lead the company, this is probably not going to help the company compete effectively in whatever markets it operates in. Likewise, colonels challenging generals for decision-making authority generally seems not to be a recipe for success in times of war.

      Also, it seems as though prestige isn’t actually granted based on achievement in many contexts. Consider the proliferation of sham scholarship in the humanities and social sciences over the last 30 years and tell me with a straight face that the competition for the dwindling number of tenure track positions in these disciplines is a positive sum game. A meth lab creates fewer negative externalities than the typical ethnic studies department.

      • colonels challenging generals for decision-making authority generally seems not to be a recipe for success in times of war.
        Wasn’t there a general demoted over the Abu Graib Iraq prisoners of war, partly because of a more dominant colonel?
        Female general, tougher?, more bullying? male colonel.

    • I’d like to say that I don’t find “prestige” to be an especially useful analytical notion here and I suggest replacing it with “competence.” Gaining competence is something that can be done one day at a time in small increments. We tend to pay for goods and services in the marketplace because the producers are competent, not prestigious.

      At the very least, consider competence. Competence is boring but we pay for it. I want a competent auto mechanic and a competent physician. Prestige is irrelevant in many circumstances.

      Perhaps I’m blowing this out of proportion. Prestige is about wide recognition. Most people never achieve wide recognition. To me it just feels like a word with the wrong connotation and even the wrong denotation.

      Also, our society is obsessed with prestige because we are increasingly told to be interested in the famous. Let me end with an apercu from the late historian John Lukacs. He said that in the Renaissance people were intensely interested in honor. It was a core virtue a life could be rebuilt around after things had gone wrong. Lukacs asserted that a sign of America’s decline in the 20th century was the decreased interest in honor and an increased interest in fame. His phrasing was far more terse and elegant. Probably in _Outgrowing Democracy), 1984.

      We may aspire to be prestigious macro-economists at MIT or Caltech, or rock stars, or world famous YouTubers. Our society functions on the basis of competent registered nurses and CPAs from the state university with habits of honesty and diligence.

      • Yeah, prestige is probably a bad word, because of all the connotations. I suspect Arnold is coming to it from Joseph Henrich’s The Secret of Our Success and Kevin Laland’s Darwin’s Unfinished Symphony. Both think that what is special about humans is that we learn from, and want to learn from, more successful humans. In many ways, we admire them and want to be more like them. Laland and Henrich call this prestige but evolutionarily, it probably started as competence.

        If the successful are more competent, it makes evolutionary sense to try to be more like them. And indeed, it seems to be part of human psychology to try to be like the winners. There are enough examples throughout history of people who did terrible things because that was what worked.

  2. “Will a new stable prestige hierarchy emerge? Or will we have to settle for either chaos or a dominance hierarchy?”

    Or will multiple new prestige hierarchies emerge? Or will prestige hierarchies merely flatten as expertise is democratized, gains dynamism, is expanded, and many more individuals using the greater access to specialized information that is now available to everyone emerge to contest received wisdom and the status quo? Why must the choice be chaos or dominance? Sounds like Manichaeism. Why not embrace dynamic prestige hierarchies?

  3. You have to distinguish between prestige hierarchies based on real, observable, or otherwise demonstrably productive output vs. those that are purely driven by elite tastes. If a hierarchy is too subjective, as with fashion or large parts of academia, especially the traditional humanities, then it becomes not only a zero-sum but often a negative sum game as the most successful chase after bad things that just dissipate rents.

    Take the USSR, by banning markets and promoting nominal equality status competition, the result was competition in the form of being good at the arts or playing chess well. Good for those special spheres but wasteful in terms of directing excess effort to those areas instead of humanly demanded or needed production like new cars, phones, better consumer goods, etc.

    • +1

      I’d like to see disambiguation between

      1. prestige
      2. competence
      3. success
      4. fame
      5. reknown

      Rick James was a successful entertainer. He was famous. He was renowned. Probably he was competent in his field–His music is still played and some is instantly recognizable. You can get the riff from “Super Freak” as a ringtone!

      Was he prestigious?

      (I like to use the late Rick James for certain examples because he was the sort of artist for whom all publicity was good publicity)

      • I think a useful comparison here is sex. Evolutionarily, sexual attraction/the desire for sex exists because humans with it mated and had children who carried those genes. However, that means that it is very possible for humans to like and seek out sex even if it does not result in reproduction. In fact, humans may try to get sex that does not involve reproduction. That may turn out to be the kind that many people want. Sex without reproduction results in more sex (no pregnancies), less work afterwards, more money for hedonic things, etc. For a woman, it means not “losing my figure”. So ironically, genes that exist for having many offspring result in having few offspring in the very different circumstances of today.

        The propensity to look up to “prestigious” people began as a way of getting people to learn from and imitate people who were more competent. But now, because a lot of prestige is Rick Jamesian, it can lead to doing less competent things. To a significant extent, human psychology conflates “prestige, competence, success, fame, renown”.

        • Sexual behavior as the key distinguishing feature of bonobo society (vs. common chimp society) is something that I fleshed out (no pun intended) in my reply to the “References…” post (stuck in moderation).

          The key lesson, for me, is that any ranking heuristic based on a variable other than strength/size results in non-dominance hierarchies. Hominids introduce a myriad of candidate variables that can augment or displace strength/size. Prestige covers several possible measures but you (Roger), Charles, and Ivar seem to be enumerating some of these alternate variables more carefully. As the bonobo example demonstrates, these variables don’t have to be about prestige but they often are.

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