Status and power

Gertjan Steede writes,

status is, first and foremost, something that we claim, give and receive in everyday interaction. As a result, a status hierarchy develops in society and in every group within society. Depending on the group’s activities, that hierarchy could be more or less obvious. It will simultaneously be expressed in all kinds of currency: kindness, power, beauty, skill, daring, money – to name a few. I am claiming status by writing this blog, and if you read it to the end, you are giving me status.

While status is about voluntary acts, power is about everything that people coerce one another into. We use power when we receive status insults, or if we have learned that this is a good way of obtaining what we want.

. . .In fact, we people play the status-power game all our lives. If something “gives us energy”, it means it gives us status. We like those whom we can count on to give status to us. In contrast, we long to give status to those we love. We claim status, by being nice or showing off. The status-power game is our life. We do nothing else.

Read the whole post. I think his concepts of status and power map to the distinction between a prestige hierarchy and a dominance hierarchy that I learned from Joseph Henrich.

The post also supports my intuition that people turn to dominance moves when they cannot attain status through prestige. Regulating other people’s speech is an example.

4 thoughts on “Status and power

  1. Interesting but I had a problem with Steede’s logic.

    “Status and power are opposites.” is followed a paragraph later by, “Oftentimes though, feelings are ambiguous, and status and power are intricately linked.”

    Kind of like saying, “Labor and capital are opposites” and “Human capital is ambiguous.”

    Humans find it easy to think in opposites, and thinkers love to create mutually exclusive categories. But then reality comes along and forces you to blur the boundaries.

  2. Status and power may be the piston and rod of the social engine, but the lubricant that allows the assembly to move is respect. And respect flourishes in authentic democracy. In his 1995 book The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy, Christopher Leach made the case for respect thusly:

    “Populism, as I understand it is unambiguously committed to the principle of respect. It is for this reason, among others, that populism is to be preferred to communitarianism, which is too quick to compromise with the welfare state and to endorse its ideology of compassion. Populism has always rejected both the politics of deference and the politics of pity. It stands for plain manners and plain, straightforward speech. It is unimpressed by titles and other symbols of exalted rank, but it is equally unimpressed by claims of moral superiority advanced in the name of the oppressed. It rejects a ‘preferential option for the poor,’ if that means treating the poor as helpless victims of circumstance, a solving them of accountability, or excusing their derelictions on the grounds that poverty carries with it a presumption of innocence. Populism is the authentic voice of democracy. It assumes that individuals are entitled to respect until they prove themselves unworthy of it, but it insists that they take responsibility for themselves.”

    Without this commitment to respect, the interaction of power and prestige devolves into the anti-populist elite’s dumpster fire of wokism, “intersectional Pokemon points” playing (to use Steve Sailer’s meme), shameless fiscal looting and eco-sadomasochism. Until respect is restored, the friction will only increase until it melt down the engine.

  3. Consider whether ‘attention’ and ‘status’ are the same thing. I’m not sure they are, but they strongly interact.

  4. In the economics literature, especially in game theory and bargaining theory, power derives from actors’ relative preferences for risk taking. This approach rings true in the real world. Political leaders who are willing to take bigger risks tend to have more power than those who don’t, witness many autocrats who gamble with their political capital in many ways. Similarly, investment professionals who are risk-loving are willing to make bigger bets on their ideas and, when they pay off, make lots more money – look at hedge fund managers, private equity investors, etc. To the risk loving go the spoils.

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