In essence, (some) media is insulting your own personal status rankings all the time. You might even say the media is insulting you. Indeed that is why other people enjoy those media sources, because they take pleasure in your status, and the status of your allies, being lowered. It’s like they get to throw a media pie in your face.
With material goods, we can play a positive-sum game. With status goods, the game is zero-sum. In a footrace, someone finishes first, someone finishes second, and so on. If I move up, someone else must move down.
Political power tends to act like a positional good.
If beach volleyball is made an Olympic sport, does that lower the status of Usain Bolt? No probably not, but it does raise the status of beach volleyballers. What evidence is there that status is zero sum?
Yes, it does. Though Usain Bolt is such a big star, it doesn’t matter much. But an ordinary winner of the Olympic 100 meters matters less than he did fifty years ago.
And the winner of the Olympic heavyweight boxing gold doesn’t matter much at all, unlike 60s winners like Cassius Clay and George Foreman. (And, yes, I realize that the decline of boxing is caused by a number of other things, too.)
Let’s say you wanted to tax status, what would be a good proxy? Actual plus imputed consumption captures only part of it.
education.
The best proxy for “status” is “attention”.
We pay attention to those with status. Those we pay attention to, gain status — partly because of the attention we pay. (Payment!)
The media pie in the face is an easy way to increase attention of two groups: those who favor the throwers AND those outraged because they favor the receivers.
Attention, like life span, is limited — and zero sum. Paying attention to one channel means less attention on everything else. Boxing is now competing with WWE (the Rock!), kick boxing, full contact marital arts … even chess-boxing (still haven’t seen a match yet, tho it’s now on my list. Blog reading & writing has crowded it out so far).
Material goods are subject to crowding out in stores in terms of being available, but the positive sum nature has been less publicized than is optimal.