Status and Culture: How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant Change

As we learned earlier, normal status requires following certain conventions. This means imitating our peers, while distinguishing ourselves from the behaviors of lower-status groups and rivals. Meanwhile, achieving higher status requires distinguishing ourselves from our current status tier and imitating the practices of superiors. The end result i

semantic drift: the slow change in words’ meanings over time. This principle also applies to cultural symbols, which can often come to mean the very opposite.

As much as so-called luxury goods are sold as adornment reserved for the very rich, the major European brands reap great profits from middle-class customers.

Humans have an innate predisposition to imitate, but in modern times we must reconcile this with a moral duty to be distinct. To gain status, then, we must balance four specific requirements of imitation and distinction: To secure normal status, we must imitate group conventions. To avoid low status, we must counterimitate rival conventions. To gai

Intentional distinction from rivals is best described as counterimitation.

Economist Jon Elster notes, “Nothing is so unimpressive as behavior designed to impress.”

Status symbols that lack credible alibis tend to fail:

conventions are the individual units of culture.

Everything we point to as “culture”—customs, traditions, fashions, and fads—exists as conventions.