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

The thing we call culture is always an aggregation of individual human behaviors, and if taste were the mere product of random idiosyncrasies and irrational psychologies, culture would display no patterns, only noise. The fact that preferences in these disparate fields follow a similar rhythm of change suggests there must be universal principles of

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

Status symbols that lack credible alibis tend to fail:

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

economist Anthony Heath’s assertion: “The fact that there is a social norm does not . . . automatically entail that it will be obeyed. Everyone has his price: the benefits of conformity must be compared with the benefits to be obtained elsewhere, and there is bound to be some level of alternative benefits that will successfully tempt the individual

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.

Meanwhile, the fragmentation of culture into the “long tail” has diluted the power of taste to serve as an effective means of social exclusion.

anthropologist Clifford Geertz’s description of culture as “best seen not as complexes of concrete behavior patterns—customs, usages, traditions, habit clusters” but instead as “a set of control mechanisms—plans, recipes, rules, instructions—for the governing of behavior.” Conventions create habits and patterns of behavior through carrots of social

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.