In my opinion, one reason why many people tend to dislike status-based explanations is that these explanations have unpleasant implications because of the fixed-sum nature of status. Status may not be precisely a fixed-sum good, but that does seem to be a very good approximation. Therefore, if the status of a certain individual or group is raised, that usually means that someone else’s status has been lowered as result, and the change that produced this rise in status must have come at someone else’s expense.
It follows that the advocates of some status-altering social change cannot accurately present it as an unalloyed good and a win-win situation for everyone; it is always analogous to redistribution of wealth, rather than everyone becoming richer. Of course, the former is a tougher sell, and makes for a much less convincing case.
Well, of course a lot depends on how much energy and resources are being expended on maintaining the status differential in the first place, and how much opportunity cost is reflected in it, and how many players the world contains.
That is, if we work for the same company and I’m your manager, and I am spending half my time trying to keep you down and you spend half your time trying to sabotage me, a status-altering social change that rendered us peers might turn out to raise both of our statuses relative to other groups, as well as make both of our lives easier and more enjoyable.
But, yes, I agree with you that many people who resist status-altering social changes are thinking in fixed-sum terms.
There are actually two issues there: the distribution of the status itself, and the cost in other goods and resources expended in pursuing and maintaining it. An arms race in pursuing status (e.g. by expensive signaling, or by costly efforts to keep others down) is indeed a problem of collective action that leads to awful negative-sum games, and a social change that prevents this arms race may be beneficial for everyone if it leads to a similar status distribution, only without the cost. But in contrast, it’s unclear whether a Pareto-improvement in status itself is possible.
In the boss-employee example, the change may benefit both parties by eliminating the negative-sum game in which they’re stuck. It may also benefit everyone else by a tiny amount by making the economy slightly more productive. But if both the boss and the worker raise their status in the society at large as a result, that will come at the expense of others’ status—even if it means an infinitesimal reduction of status for each person in a great mass of people who are now below each of them in the status hierarchy, rather than a large reduction for some clearly identifiable party. (It’s roughly analogous to how successfully passing a small amount of perfectly forged money represents an infinitesimal taking from everyone else by making their money slightly less valuable.)
In my opinion, one reason why many people tend to dislike status-based explanations is that these explanations have unpleasant implications because of the fixed-sum nature of status. Status may not be precisely a fixed-sum good, but that does seem to be a very good approximation. Therefore, if the status of a certain individual or group is raised, that usually means that someone else’s status has been lowered as result, and the change that produced this rise in status must have come at someone else’s expense.
It follows that the advocates of some status-altering social change cannot accurately present it as an unalloyed good and a win-win situation for everyone; it is always analogous to redistribution of wealth, rather than everyone becoming richer. Of course, the former is a tougher sell, and makes for a much less convincing case.
Well, of course a lot depends on how much energy and resources are being expended on maintaining the status differential in the first place, and how much opportunity cost is reflected in it, and how many players the world contains.
That is, if we work for the same company and I’m your manager, and I am spending half my time trying to keep you down and you spend half your time trying to sabotage me, a status-altering social change that rendered us peers might turn out to raise both of our statuses relative to other groups, as well as make both of our lives easier and more enjoyable.
But, yes, I agree with you that many people who resist status-altering social changes are thinking in fixed-sum terms.
There are actually two issues there: the distribution of the status itself, and the cost in other goods and resources expended in pursuing and maintaining it. An arms race in pursuing status (e.g. by expensive signaling, or by costly efforts to keep others down) is indeed a problem of collective action that leads to awful negative-sum games, and a social change that prevents this arms race may be beneficial for everyone if it leads to a similar status distribution, only without the cost. But in contrast, it’s unclear whether a Pareto-improvement in status itself is possible.
In the boss-employee example, the change may benefit both parties by eliminating the negative-sum game in which they’re stuck. It may also benefit everyone else by a tiny amount by making the economy slightly more productive. But if both the boss and the worker raise their status in the society at large as a result, that will come at the expense of others’ status—even if it means an infinitesimal reduction of status for each person in a great mass of people who are now below each of them in the status hierarchy, rather than a large reduction for some clearly identifiable party. (It’s roughly analogous to how successfully passing a small amount of perfectly forged money represents an infinitesimal taking from everyone else by making their money slightly less valuable.)