Clever- and it seems like this could plausibly make everyone feel better about themselves (though, of course they’ll still feel bad when they compare themselves to even higher status people). Note though that this is like making someone popular by giving them imaginary friends—it’s not how the word is ordinarily used. But if this is what people have in mind by ‘raising net status’, fine, I don’t see anything implausible about it.
Clever- and it seems like this could plausibly make everyone feel better about themselves (though, of course they’ll still feel bad when they compare themselves to even higher status people). Note though that this is like making someone popular by giving them imaginary friends—it’s not how the word is ordinarily used. But if this is what people have in mind by ‘raising net status’, fine, I don’t see anything implausible about it.