Cultural stasis is not trivial: we measure the health of our civilization through the fecundity and profundity of cultural production. And we rely on stylistic changes to define our particular moment in time and space.

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

Status symbols that lack credible alibis tend to fail:

The literary scholar Raymond Williams called culture “one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language.”

anthropologist A. L. Kroeber notes, “We have no record of cultureless human societies.”

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

Status is a purely social phenomenon; it manifests in the interactions between individuals.

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

Culture is embodied in the products, behaviors, styles, meanings, values, and sensibilities that make up the human experience—and it is status that guides their creation, production, and diffusion.