Anu Atluru | Substack
Now, our competitions for prestige often produce positive side effects such as art, science, and technological innovation.16 But the prestige-seeking itself is more nearly a zero-sum game, which helps explain why we sometimes feel pangs of envy at even a close friend’s success.
Robin Hanson • The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life
poverty and wealth are always relative to what other people have in a particular time and place.
Keith Payne • The Broken Ladder: How Inequality Changes the Way We Think, Live and Die
But today, because material goods have become a noisier signal of one’s social position and economic resources, the affluent have decoupled social status from goods, and re-attached it to beliefs.
Rob Henderson • Luxury Beliefs Are Status Symbols
