http://www.capitalismv3.com/index.php/2011/08/whether-or-not-to-pay-for-free-museum-entry-as-an-example-of-status-acqusition/Understanding Status as similar to Prices in producing incentives, and relating it to current political trends – I respond to Felix Salmon via Adam Ozimek
Source date (UTC): 2011-08-19 09:19:00 UTC
We have over 300 international studies that show that women are more violent, more often, in relationships than men. The evidence is overwhelming. (Why I have had to train every woman not to hit me has always surprised me.) Children imitate violence no matter which gender starts it.
Source date (UTC): 2011-08-12 04:22:00 UTC
http://www.capitalismv3.com/?p=3186A warning to economists: Humans seek status, not money.
Source date (UTC): 2011-07-10 00:19:00 UTC
People do not choose their values so much as they choose those values that help them create a world view that requires the least amount of problem-solving, and returns the highest self perceived social status from the values available to them.
Source date (UTC): 2011-07-05 12:19:00 UTC
http://www.capitalismv3.com/?p=2786Emotions are reactions to changes in property?
Source date (UTC): 2011-05-28 12:49:00 UTC
To be happy, people desire access to new stimuli – ‘relishes’ as Aristotle put it, or ‘new experiences’ as we put it today. People prefer working on optimistic ends. They prefer to work successfully to accumulate new stimuli, rather than at planning to prevent negative stimuli, or at planning to conserve resources so that they can preserve the current stimuli. And they enjoy operating at the maximun that their abilities allow while still succeeding in their plans. The human mind craves something to do. It just wants to do something it can succeed at doing. Throughout history, any number of people have tried to take ownership of the term ‘happiness’ and to define it according to their preferences. Usually, someone picks a point on the temporal spectrum and claims that ‘true happiness’ comes from either pleasure, freedom from stress, or a life that is retrospectively well lived. Temporal priority is an important attribute of happiness, because Time Bias (Time Preference) or the tendency for people to pursue outcomes of shorter or longer distance in the future is correlative with social status. These terms below use the temporal spectrum to accommodate the most common priorities.
Happiness is both a reward for our anticipation of the opportunity for stimulation, and our reward for the exercise of good judgement in obtaining that stimuli. The priority that each of us give to these different properties of Prospective and Retrospective Happiness are different, and dependent upon a combination of our abilities and skill at forecasting, planning, succeeding, obtaining group membership, and avoiding stress. We would all be happier amidst the plenty in the Garden of Eden wherein our basic wants and needs were fully and freely satisfied, and there was little else to do but enjoy one another’s company. At least, we would, until our biological Alphas decided that hoarding the best resources and controlling access to mates was more entertaining than communalism. But in our real world, we are somewhat challenged in achieving happiness because of the unresolveable conundrum of living not in the garden of eden – which is a place of plenty – but in a universe of scarcity. And having to transform the scarce resources of the real world into increasingly complex products and services through a division of labor and knowledge in which many hands may indeed make light work, but which, because of the many hands, requires cooperation among people of different ages and abilities and interests to make that work light. To coordinate people within such a complex system, we must rely upon the information provided by an uncaring and anonymous pricing system rather than our natural empathy, observable interactions, personal commitments and habituated relationships that constitute the much more limited information system inherited from our tribal biology. And it is the conflict between our a) tribal instincts and sentiments, the need for belonging to a group, the status signals that come from that membership, and b) the anonymity and confusion that come from our dependence upon the pricing system, that make our prosperity and freedom from the vicissitudes of nature possible. This conflict appears to be an unresolvable conflict that satisfies our pleasures, but limits our happiness. Never in history have so many people had it so well, but claimed so little happiness – except perhaps since the first invasion of north america by modern man. But it need not be an unresolvable conflict if we separate thinking and acting locally as if we are in a tribe governed by our instincts, from thinking and acting socially and politically as if we are in a market, governed by prices. Unless we understand that difference, happiness will be elusive. You cannot be happy if want the impossible. That runs contrary to our biological want to have our plans succeed rather than fail.
http://www.capitalismv3.com/?p=2491Unresolvable Conflict: Prospective and Retrospective Happiness in the anonymity of the market society.
Source date (UTC): 2011-04-12 23:50:00 UTC
[P]areto, in his study of society, and Haight in his study of emotions, and perhaps Axelrod as well in his study of human cooperation, do not attribute to Status Signaling the importance which it deserves. Haight is far too interested in the egalitarian assumption. Pareto, in his analysis of Sentiments, misses status signals almost entirely.
Humans attempt to acquire and maintain status at all costs. We are acquisitive — in stimulation, experience and knowledge, in security and relationships, in opportunity, in mates and in Status. Because status increases the opportunity for mates, opportunities, security and relationships, stimulation, experience and knowledge.
SOCIAL STATUS
As acquisitive creatures, humans, like most animals with memories, sense ‘more’. More calories, more opportunities, more information: more anything. The human concept of Beauty is almost synonymous with “plenty bounded by symmetry”. Beauty is “more”. Symmetrical perhaps. But more none the less.
Status is the human accounting system. We many need a vast number of conceptual and physical tools to delve into the sciences, and we need to evolve complex institutions in order to cooperate in large numbers. But every human being regardless of his intelligence is master accountant of the currency of status signals and their measurement. Without that talent we could not survive in society. People may differ in their ability to act on abstract knowledge in real time. however, they differ very little in their ability to detect and measure status signals.
Status signals help us select mates. But, almost as importantly, without status signals we would not know whose behaviors to imitate. For learning creatures, status symbols are an necessary property of knowledge transfer within and across generations.
If the human animal has any innate mastery whatsoever, it is in sensitivity to status signals.
RULES
“If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?”
– Cormac McCarthy, “No Country For Old Men”.
Of course, the answer is, that the rule has one or more uses, and one or more unintended consequences. In the west, the unintended consequences have been rapid change, an unhappy proletariat and class warfare that has led to the abandonment of our society by it’s upper classes, who, if unrewarded with status for their success, can find no reason to engage or acknowledge anyone in society. Therefore they have adopted the strategy that the purpose of attaining wealth is to exit participation in society and it’s market. Having elites abandon society is extremely detrimental for the propagation of knowledge and values. Elites, especially families that persist wealth over generations, are the most important people for the population to learn from in any society.
DIFFERENT INNOVATION INCENTIVES
Each culture uses slightly different techniques of social management. The novelty of the west is that the fraternal model, and jealousy of one’s status and influence, led to the solution to the problem of politics: competition between opposing forces. Politics was not solved in other societies. I suspect that the Asian and Mystical model of hierarchy is the self-limiting barrier that those societies erected when they became large and centralized. And conversely, that the advantage of the western political system which at different times consists of debates, competing manors, feudal alliances, and the competition with the church, and the need to keep the east at bay, allowed the civilization that was actually youngest, to compete more effectively at producing and USING technical innovation to compete with other civilizations.
The West: “Draw Them Up” (Minority, Fraternal, Technical)
Organizing Principle: As a minority we need advanced technology to compete. Advanced technology is expensive. We need to enfranchise the best men and their money in order to compete.
Minority: Westerners are a minority. They combat both eastern decadence and local barbarism.
Fraternal: Men join together to form a fraternity who elects a general, president, king, or leader.
Technical: It is an action-oriented, real world, and technocratic system of utilitarian thought.
Value: It’s predicate is to ‘leave the world better for having altered it for the purpose of man’
The East: “Keep Society Stable” (Majority, Paternal, Equilibrial)
Organizing Principle:
Majority:
Paternal:
Equilibrial:
Value: It’s predicate is ‘stability and conflict avoidance’
The Middle : “Keep Them Down” (Majority, Maternal, Magical)
Majority:
Maternal:
Magical:
It’s predicate is ‘
In the middle east, Magian (mystical) society, what we currently call Islam, one of the precepts is that all men must be treated with dignity. They do not need to learn dignity. THey do not need to demonstrate achievement. They are simply due it. This is a social strategy for downward distribution of, and dtermination of the TERMS by which status is determined and transferred.
CORRUPTION
For any society to create prosperity, the human tendency toward corruption (privatization) must be suppressed and re-channeled into some other behavior. THe division of labor, division of knowledge, and the flucity of knowlege and capital that allow nations to compete on the world stage against other natinos, cannot function without supresssion of corruption.
Property rights train societies in the habits and skills of anti-corruption. Property rights allow the brightest to make best use of resources for the purpose of increasing prodution, and decreasing prices. Property rights allow for the greatest fludity and adaptation. But the abuses of property rights which we call corrption, the abuse of oportunity costs which we also call corruption, and the abuse of foregone opportunity costs, which we faili to call corruption, and even certain social and moral principles which reallocate status without action, are a form of corruption.
KEEPING THE DEMONS IN THE PIT
A Romanian friend of mine tells a parable. In hell, there are demons guarding the pits. In each pit is a nation of people. They demons are standing around the jewish pit. A new demon walks over and says “why aren’t any of you guarding the Romanian pit?” To which the elder demon replies “If one jew gets out, he’ll help another, until very quickly they all escape the pit. If one Romanian tries to get out of the pit, all the others will drag him back down.”
Urban Black culture, and to some degree Hispanic culture, has an aspect of “keeping others in the pit”.
The purpose of islam is to keep everyone on earth in the pit.
That is the unintended consequence of Islam’s concept of dignity.
I am not really sure that I should talk about theses biases as a hierarchy, because I think that the different cognitive biases we rely upon to make our multitudinous decisions every day is actually a map: an unordered but weighted network of relations. But if we express them as a spectrum from the most fundamental and physical, to the most social, to the most abstract, we end up with a hierarchy of increasing complexity. The HIERARCHY OF COGNITIVE BIASES :
All these cognitive functions work with us every day, and the only tools that we have to manage them with are LAW, CREDIT POLICY, and PUBLIC RHETORIC. All of which are weak pressures against the cognitive tidal wave of cognitive biases. If I were not such a busy man I would hire a dozen grad students to put some math together on this for me. I hope this is useful to someone other than me. It is the catalog of expressions of the fractal mathematics of human behavior. Curt Doolittle.
I read and commented on a piece recently that lamented the rise in rhinoplasty (nose jobs) among Iranian women, seeking smaller more feminine noses. But I am not sure it’s a reason for lament. SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC STATUS Self modification is partly popular because it is expensive and demonstrates that you have joined the market-participating (middle) classes. So, partly, this is about status seeking. Status seeking is important because it controls access to mates. It is not as important for men as women. Women are more status conscious of men, and men more beauty conscious of women. In reality this is a pretty successful algorithm for a population to follow. It increases everything good, and causes rotation of elites and genes. INTERNATIONAL STATUS AND POWER Aside from local trends, people also adopt status signals based upon which culture has ‘power’. As the west rose, western dress and ‘looks’ increased in status. As the west declines in power, regional preferences are becoming favored. (We see this in the returning preference for paternalism in china for example.) So STATUS properties are plastic and to some degree — they are a ‘fashion’.
[callout]Think of it as part of ‘globalization’: symmetry across all human forms.[/callout]
UNIVERSAL SYMBOLS OF BEAUTY Conversely, there are certain properties of beauty that are universal, such as health, waist-hip ratio, height weight proportionality, long legs, and hemispheric symmetry. It turns out that, “on the whole” people view large noses as asymmetric now that they have exposure to enough human variety to see them as a asymmetric. Therefore, regional “racial” symbols of attraction are subject to change because of exposure to a large number of different faces, with different status attributes. THE CONCEPT OF PHYSICAL SYMMETRY UNDER GLOBALIZATION Think of it as part of ‘globalization’: symmetry across all human forms. Although across all cultures, there appears to be a universally attractive look, and this look is associated with being ‘white’ the truth is that it’s just the greatest symmetry that can be obtained in the human form as we currently undertand it. (This is an interesting area of research.) But it is not whiteness. It’s symmetry on the one hand and ‘feminine fineness’ over masculine mass that determines beauty (in women). So this tendency is a mathematical expression. (I read recently that prettier women have more children so that it’s likely that the process will improve, but then there are gene-pool collisions that simply haven’t worked themselves out in every region.) COUNTERACTING TRENDS It might be useful to note that people will not likely adopt asymmetric modifications (enlarged noses) in order to achieve status. People will tend to increase their appreciation for local asymmetry (traits dominant in their local group) if it is associated with greater status – such as nationalistic or racial traits. Therefore the fashionability of nose modification will drop even if the permanent attraction of smaller noses as more attractive doesn’t. In other words, the priority of these different status symbols can change over time. We see racial feature preferences in Jewish, African American, Greek and Italian populations. It has gone out of fashion and become impolitic for white northern europeans to classify themselves racially beautiful examples, and instead they simply refer to more general ‘beauty’. Despite that other racial groups do maintain their preferences. ITS AFFECTING ‘WHITE’ PEOPLE AS WELL It may be interesting to note that white women currently envy african buttocks and east asian body weight distribution, rather than traditional fertility-driven ‘curviness” — so feature-envy it works both ways. It may also be interesting to note that ‘white’ skin color is a fashion, not an absolute. Skin clarity demonstrates health, and lighter appears to be more attractive than darker, no matter what race you’re in. But It appears we like ‘very light coffee colored’ as the ultimate symbol of health, because ‘very white’ that borders on translucent is also now associated with lack of skin plasticity (aging badly). So, we are ‘learning’ some things that are meaningful as well. BEAUTY IS A COMPLEX NETWORK So, beauty is determined by a number of properties: International cultural power status. Local Economic Status, symmetry, femininity, healthiness, and “globalization” – exposure to greater choice. We can all feel equally inadequate. (Spoken as a small nosed, short, northern european.)