Results for “status”
4066 found

How popular music reshaped high school status networks

One side effect of the rise of popular musicians to media stars, and the displacement of couples dancing by musical performance-watching, was to make music concerts into an alternative gathering place to the arenas dominated by the traditional school elites, the jocks and popular party-goers and stars of the dating market.  As popular music consumption became the central identifying point of youth cultures, it also came to support greater pluralism in student status hierarchies, punk and other alternative culture groups acquired their own venues where they could generate their own collective effervescence, dominating in their own emotional attention spaces.  Moshers became the leading edge of punk culture, the attention-getters within their chief cultural rituals and gathering places.  Not surprisingly, there is strong antagonism between moshers and jocks, their chief counterparts in the use of controlled violence in the conventional youth culture.

That is from Randall Collins, Violence: A Micro-sociological Theory.  Here is my previous post on the book.  By the way, if you find questions like this interesting, it is yet another reason to watch the TV show Friday Night Lights.

Status competition, rural Indian style

In rural Hindu villages in India…widows are expected
to be perpetual mourners, austere in their habits, appetites and dress;
even so, they often jockey for position, said Richard A. Shweder, an
anthropologist in the department of comparative human development at
the University of Chicago.

“Many
compete for who is most pure,” Dr. Shweder said.  “They say, ‘I don’t
eat fish, I don’t eat eggs, I don’t even walk into someone’s house who
has eaten meat.’  It’s a natural kind of social comparison.”

The article focuses on the psychology of fame-seeking.

Most status games are positive-sum

Robert Frank complains about status games:

To celebrate their daughter’s 13th birthday, for example, Amber Ridinger’s parents bought her a $27,000 Dolce & Gabbana gown and hired JaRule, Ashanti and other popular entertainers to provide live music at her party in Miami last month.

David H. Brooks, the chief executive of a company that supplies body armor to the American military in Iraq, invited 150 of his daughter’s friends to the Rainbow Room atop Rockefeller Center in Manhattan, where they were serenaded by 50 Cent, Don Henley, Stevie Nicks and other luminaries during a birthday party reported to have cost $10 million.

Although these events have prompted much finger wagging by social critics, the parents involved are not behaving abnormally. They are merely spending their own money in an effort to provide a special occasion for their daughters. For a party to be special, however, it must somehow stand out from other parties that define the norm. Here, too, the problem is that expensive birthday parties have become a growth industry.

Kevin and Danya Mondell, founders of Oogles-n-Googles, a company described as an over-the-top event planner for children’s parties, recently announced their intention to license Oogles-n-Googles franchises. Yet no matter how much parents spend, the number of parties that achieve special status will be no greater than when everyone spent much less.

My take: Can’t every party be memorable in a different way?  Seeing Roger McGuinn perform has not detracted from my memories of seeing Paul McCartney or for that matter seeing Vladimir Horowitz.  Why should parties — or other status objects for that matter — be so different?  In many cases good experiences can even complement each other, rather than detract.  Let us also remember that status games encourage people to earn more income, and thus to partially offset the distortionary effect of taxes on labor supply.

The hum of status

Matt Yglesias quotes Franz de Waal’s new book:

They [people conversing] settle on a single hum, and it is always the lower status person who does the adjusting. This was first demonstrated in an analysis of the Larry King Live television show. The host, Larry King, would adjust his timbre to that of high-ranking guests, like Mike Wallace or Elizabeth Taylor. Low-ranking guests, on the other hand, would adjust their timbre to that of King. The clearest adjustment to King’s voice, indicating lack of confidence, came from former Vice President Dan Quayle.

The same spectral analysis has been applied to televised debates between U.S. presidential candidates. In all eight elections between 1960 and 2000 the popular vote matched the voice analysis: the majority of people voted for the candidate who held his own timbre rather than the one who adjusted.

On another note, Matt wonders whether he has a new worry.

Tantrums as Status Symbols

Once upon a time one’s social status was clearly signaled by so many things: fragile expensive clothes, skin not worn from work, accent, vocabulary, and so on.  As many of these signal have weakened, one remains strong: tantrums.

CEOs throw more tantrums than mailboys.  Similarly movie stars, sports stars, and politicians throw more tantrums than ordinary people  in those industries.  Also famous for their tantrums: spoiled young wives, bigshot patriarchs, elite travelers, and toddlers.

These patterns make sense: after all, beautiful young women and successful older men are at their peak of desirability to the opposite sex.  If you are surprised that toddlers make the list, perhaps you should pay closer attention to the toddler-parent relation.  Parents mostly serve toddlers, not the other way around.

Of course, like a swagger, the signal is not so much the tantum itself as the fact that someone can get away with it.

Addendum: Todd Kendall has a data paper on this for NBA players.

Losing status makes you less productive

“We speculate that high testosterone individuals are comfortable in
a high status position, and able to concentrate on the task at hand,”
Newman said. “In a low status position, however, they appear to be
distracted by their low status, and thus presumably less able to
concentrate on the task at hand.

“They were more impaired
by low status than they were helped by high status,” Newman added. “If
you’re a high testosterone person, it is a really big deal to lose
status, where as to get a high status position is more expected.

Here is the full story.  And thanks to Eloise for the pointer.

Status, Stress and Sex Ratios

The presidents of the United States have had, collectively, almost half again as many sons as daughters ((148 to 102 if I’ve counted correctly). Far more strikingly—because the sample size is so much larger—the people listed in Who’s Who have, collectively, about 15% more sons than daughters. (For the latter statistic, I rely on the testimony of the biologist Robin Baker, writing in his remarkable book Sperm Wars.)

Why do high-status parents have more sons? Presumably because high-status sons can give you lots of grandchildren (Baker points to an ex-emperor of Morocco with 888 children). A daughter is far more likely to give you about the average number of grandchildren. On the other side, low-status boys die childless more often than low-status girls. (On average, boys and girls have the same number of offspring—they must, because each offspring has one mother and one father. But girls are clustered around the average, while boys veer off to both extremes.)

So if you want a lot of grandchildren (and whether you want them or not, your genes do) you’ll want sons if you’re near the top of the status heap and daughters if you’re near the bottom.

Now: What’s the mechanism to accomplish all this? One suggestion from the biologists—and one that makes very good sense to an economist—is that a pregnant woman’s body, in deciding how much to invest in nourishing the embryo, takes account of the parents’ status and the embryos’ sex. High status mothers give more nourishment to male embryos; low status mothers give more nourishment to female embryos; better nourished embryos are more likely to be born alive.

How can a process as involuntary as nourishing an embryo respond to conscious information like the status of the father? Well, how can a process as involuntary as sweating with fear respond to conscious information like the approach of a tiger? Clearly this kind of thing happens all the time. More fundamentally, decisions like how much to nourish your embryo are among the most important economic problems the body ever faces. Is it really plausible that the body would simply throw away highly relevant information when it’s making a decision like that?

Incidentally, this ties into my earlier post about stress and daughters. There is evidence that stressed parents, like low-status parents, have more daughters, presumably for the same reason: stressful circumstances, like low-status parents, tend to depress reproductive success.

Health and Status

A number of studies have shown a startling connection between higher social status and better health, even after controlling for income, education and other factors. Some economists are skeptical, Angus Deaton, for example, suggests reverse causality may be a factor:

The major reason that people retire from the work force is that they’re sick. If you get sick in America, it does terrible things to your social status.

Two remarkable papers by Donald Redelmeier and Sheldon Singh cast some doubt on this explanation. In Survival in Academy Award-Winning Actors and Actresses Redelmeier and Singh compare the longevity of Oscar winners with nominees who did not win. The statistical hypothesis is that all that separates winners and nominees is the random fact of winning (random with respect to other factors influencing health). If winners and nominees are alike but for random factors then any differences in longevity can be causally ascribed to winning the Oscar. R and S find that winners live about 4 years longer than non-winners, a huge difference. The effect does not go away with additional controls.

Skeptics will posit other mechanisms but R and S have a lesser known but equally important paper on screenwriters who win the Academy Award. Surprisingly, they find that winning screenwriters die about 3 years earlier than non-winning nominees. At first, these two results appear to be quite contradictory suggesting some problem in the studies. But on second look there is a compelling logic to the findings. The difference between actors who win the Oscar and screenwriters is that even winning screenwriters get no respect. Who remembers a screenwriter’s name? I think it’s in the movie Bowfinger that Steve Martin says of the lovely ingenue something to the effect, “She’s so dumb she’s sleeping with the screenwriter to get to the top.” Winning screenwriters have longer and more successful careers (4 star movies) than non-winning writers so income and other material factors would suggest greater longevity but even a winning screenwriter is almost surely destined to have his lines mangled by a lousy but famous actor and perhaps this stress drives them to an early grave.

The importance of status in business

Gregg Easterbrook directs our attention to the following two anecdotes about business, both taken from Art Kleiner’s Who Really Matters:

Why, for example, does Coca-Cola insist on keeping its original formula in a safe-deposit box that only a few top executives are allowed to open when at this point any cola company could reverse-engineer the ingredients? It’s done, Kleiner says, to make the Coke “core group” feel important. Another great anecdote: When former ITT CEO Rand Araskog published an as-told-to book of self-praise in 1989, ITT public relations panicked on learning that almost all copies were going to be remaindered. Araskog would be furious if he walked past the Strand, New York’s famed used book store, and saw his book on sale for $1. So ITT contracted for another company to buy up thousands of copies of the book and quietly destroy them.

Here is a brief review of the Kleiner book, here is Kleiner’s home page. The remainder of Easterbrook’s post contains brief reviews of other recent books of note.

Be careful what you announce about your expected value maximization

That is via Shiraz.  Here is my CWT with Sam Bankman-Fried, here is the key passage:

COWEN: Should a Benthamite be risk-neutral with regard to social welfare?

BANKMAN-FRIED: Yes, that I feel very strongly about.

COWEN: Okay, but let’s say there’s a game: 51 percent, you double the Earth out somewhere else; 49 percent, it all disappears. Would you play that game? And would you keep on playing that, double or nothing?

BANKMAN-FRIED: With one caveat. Let me give the caveat first, just to be a party pooper, which is, I’m assuming these are noninteracting universes. Is that right? Because to the extent they’re in the same universe, then maybe duplicating doesn’t actually double the value because maybe they would have colonized the other one anyway, eventually.

COWEN: But holding all that constant, you’re actually getting two Earths, but you’re risking a 49 percent chance of it all disappearing.

BANKMAN-FRIED: Again, I feel compelled to say caveats here, like, “How do you really know that’s what’s happening?” Blah, blah, blah, whatever. But that aside, take the pure hypothetical.

COWEN: Then you keep on playing the game. So, what’s the chance we’re left with anything? Don’t I just St. Petersburg paradox you into nonexistence?

BANKMAN-FRIED: Well, not necessarily. Maybe you St. Petersburg paradox into an enormously valuable existence. That’s the other option.

COWEN: Are there implications of Benthamite utilitarianism where you yourself feel like that can’t be right; you’re not willing to accept them? What are those limits, if any?

There are other gems, including this one:

COWEN: In which respects have you brought a legal mind to your endeavors?

BANKMAN-FRIED: It’s becoming increasingly important over time…

Recommended.

Tuesday assorted links

1. Autistic 27-year-old Canadian now allowed to end her life.  It’s time to end the Canadian suicide regime as it currently exists: “…the province [Alberta] operates a system where there is no appeal process and no means of reviewing a person’s MAID approval.”

2. Highlights from SF CWT listener meet-up event.

3. “More than 60 percent of Ohio’s driver’s license suspensions do not stem from bad driving; instead, they arise because the driver owes an unpaid debt.

4. Bears take a ride on swan pedalo at Woburn Safari Park.

5. Economics round-up from Zvi.

6. Finding excessive sentencers in the judicial system.

7. On the Bach cello suites.

Saturday assorted links

1. 101 things Leila would tell her past self.

2. “The colonel was then carried to the Dotonbori river and tossed into the murky water.

3. Leadership lessons from Shakespeare’s Henriad.

4. Good thread on the Apple case.

5. Where do the major African economies stand? And fellowship in Tanzania.

6. U.S. life expectancy is rising again.

7. First flight of the Boom Supersonic jet.