Your initial reasoning seems sound, but your proposal seems entirely unrealistic. You can’t control the environment enough to remove sources of status to make this stick. It’s easy to create small places and award status within them, but making that status global is basically impossible unless you can control all aspects of social reality. Otherwise you always have additional avenues along which to gain status since every person is making a choice about how much status they consider a person to have even if it is heavily influenced by information they get from other people about how much status they think people should have. Consider, by way of counter example, that no person today has globally maximal status along all dimensions: there’s just too many dimensions and too many people. Even people with high status along many dimensions, like say the Queen of England, lacks high status along many dimensions where she would be considered low status as an insider, say in playing competitive DOTA 2 or solving open problems in mathematics.
Otherwise you always have additional avenues along which to gain status since every person is making a choice about how much status they consider a person to have even if it is heavily influenced by information they get from other people about how much status they think people should have.
True. But you still seem to implicitly assume people are maximizers, ie that they will capitalize on these opportunities.
But okay, let’s grant that there will be differences. What if we ensured a minimum? Would that be enough?
Here’s one data point: I no longer feel a strong longing for status, implying that there is indeed a threshold beyond which people are mostly fine. This contradicts my assumption that people want the maximum. Maybe they just want to reach an absolute threshold of social capital.
Your initial reasoning seems sound, but your proposal seems entirely unrealistic. You can’t control the environment enough to remove sources of status to make this stick. It’s easy to create small places and award status within them, but making that status global is basically impossible unless you can control all aspects of social reality. Otherwise you always have additional avenues along which to gain status since every person is making a choice about how much status they consider a person to have even if it is heavily influenced by information they get from other people about how much status they think people should have. Consider, by way of counter example, that no person today has globally maximal status along all dimensions: there’s just too many dimensions and too many people. Even people with high status along many dimensions, like say the Queen of England, lacks high status along many dimensions where she would be considered low status as an insider, say in playing competitive DOTA 2 or solving open problems in mathematics.
True. But you still seem to implicitly assume people are maximizers, ie that they will capitalize on these opportunities.
But okay, let’s grant that there will be differences. What if we ensured a minimum? Would that be enough?
Here’s one data point: I no longer feel a strong longing for status, implying that there is indeed a threshold beyond which people are mostly fine. This contradicts my assumption that people want the maximum. Maybe they just want to reach an absolute threshold of social capital.