Do honorifics pass a market test?

Following on my discussion from the other day, it is worth thinking about whether new institutions or sectors work very hard to set up a lot of honorific titles.  So many of our standard honorifics come from quite old sectors, such as the military or religion or the nobility.  Are the new sectors seeking to copy those practices?

The world of gaming is quite new, and I do not think it does much to award generalized honorific titles per se, noting that naming competition winners as victors is a fundamentally different practice.

The world of tech is (mostly) pretty new, and it too does not rely much on titles.  Stock options are more important!  Of course you might call someone “employee #37,” but do they go around referring to “Programmer Smith”?  Yes Smith deserves “respect,” but somehow they don’t take it in that direction.

If honorific titles are so wonderful, why do most new institutions seem to be honorific-shy?  Surely a lot of the benefit from such honorific titles ought to be internal to the organization.

(As an aside, I think of women as being treated much better in think tanks and research centers than in academia, and in relative terms having superior opportunities.  And yet there are no formal honorific titles such as “Professor” in the former institutions.  I am not suggesting causality here, but still it seems that the more informal systems are hardly a train wreck for women as a whole.)

Clearly, titles do benefit particular individuals, such as those who are currently not receiving enough respect in their jobs.  But for larger groups as a whole, does it make sense to double down on the honorifics strategy?  In a world where say YouTube stars have more and more influence each year?  Where actual performance in most sectors is easy to measure than ever before?  Is it really so great to so validate the notion of “having done all your homework”?  Honorifics impose lots of costs on the broader group by formalizing hierarchies and making them based on the achievement of arbitrary credentialized plateaus, such as receiving a Ph.D.  Would you really want to invest in the group that wanted to move in the honorifics direction?  Or would you instead think of them as fighting yesterday’s war of ideas?

Can you think of significant new sectors that are investing in honorific titles?  If not, what should you infer from that?  You might claim that titles in the military are tried, true, and tested, and you would be right.  But at the margin should we have greater or less emphasis on titled honorifics as the world changes moving forward?  What are the market data telling us right now?

You already know what I think.

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