Love And War And Status - by Robin Hanson - Overcoming Bias

“So many social, political, and also economic struggles — no matter what they may appear to be on the surface — are actually about who should rise and fall in status.” - Tyler Cowen

We often work to seem neutral and fair in many areas of life. But when it comes to our most important areas, we usually drop this pretense and switch to acting fully selfish and partisan. That is the meaning of the saying “all is fair in love and war”. It can make sense to try to be “fair” about stuff that doesn’t matter so much, to gain a reputation for being cooperative. But on stuff that really matters, we can’t gain enough by being fair to beat the gains from shamelessly grabbing what we can.

Like love and war, status is an area of life we feel is too important to risk being fair; our instinct is to grab instead. So when the subject comes up of if we are giving status to the right things, few are inclined to offer a neutral fair analysis of the costs and benefits of assigning more or less status to different things. Instead, most everyone grabs, pushing to raise the status of what they have, and to lower the status of stuff their rivals have. (Which is why it seems so unlikely that cultural elites will fairly and rationally evaluate how our culture’s status markers should change.)

For example, in the latest Atlantic cover story, “ How the Ivy League Broke America” David Brooks suggests big changes to our status system. His complaints about status today:

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