Big racks

& other arms races

Elk skull drawing, wildlife print from The Great and Small Game of India, Burma, & Tibet by Richard Lydekker (1900)

At least three things have prompted me to think about arms races recently. First Barbenheimer and American Prometheus—your quintessential example being nuclear weapons, but also Barbie beauty standards. Then around Labor Day I couldn’t help but notice a lot of new Substacks launching, several by major names; the Guardian starting to recommend them; the jubilation and hand-wringing over all of this. Finally, I read economist Robert H. Frank’s 2016 book Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy, which is largely about taxes and might threaten my promissory uselessness here if it wasn’t so utterly riveting.

A bull walks into a bar

Frank’s book reads the way I wish I sounded in political arguments with libertarians, and his case for replacing income taxation with a progressive consumption tax is grounded in the economic waste inherent to arms races. That is: to positional status games where success is relative. He introduces this concept with a clever Darwinian metaphor:

Consider the antlers in bull elk, which can span four feet and weigh as much as forty pounds. Because those unwieldy appendages impair mobility in wooded areas, they put bulls at greater risk of being surrounded and killed by wolves. So why doesn’t natural selection favor smaller antlers? Darwin’s answer was that large antlers evolved because elk are a polygynous species, meaning that males take more than one mate if they can. But if some take multiple mates, others are left with none. That’s why males fight so bitterly with one another for access to females. Mutations that coded for larger antlers spread quickly because any bull that had them was more likely to win. A bull with smaller antlers would be less vulnerable to predators, but he would also be less likely to pass his genes on to the next generation.

Bulls would be better off as a group if each animal’s antlers were smaller by half. Each fight would be decided in the same way as before, while the elk would all be less vulnerable to predators. The inefficiency in such positional arms races is analogous to the inefficiency in military arms races.

It’s analogous to the inefficiency of escalating beauty standards, too, which underlie my deep ambivalence about how to age and its connection to More Work for Mother. We prefer to think of Botox as a “personal decision,” but rejuvenation is just another positional arms race! And herein lies the central tension of the Barbie movie: it cathartically exposes the hopeless competitive mechanics of a (perfectly toned) arms race by directly escalating it. Barbie is an atomic bomb arguing for nuclear disarmament. It’s the bull-elk with the biggest, ahem, rack showing “we need to scale back” by conspicuously mounting all the cows.

If bulls could somehow agree to scale back all antler racks by half, they’d clearly be better off. This simple point applies not just to antler size but also to the amounts people spend on things whose value is highly context-sensitive. Beyond some point, additional spending on mansions, coming-of-age parties, and many other goods becomes purely positional, meaning that it merely raises the bar that defines adequate.

Emphasis mine—because this line hit me with the same genre if not magnitude of force as, say, the great novelists reveal the imitative nature of desire. It’s the sort of statement more revolutionary to me for its exposition than the idea itself. Success and Luck is to the novel I’m working on largely what Deceit, Desire & the Novel was to The Portrait of a Mirror—“unraveling the layers of my own mind to finally understand the individual knots that connect a familiar tapestry”—with the important difference of discovering it pre-publication, while I’m still drafting. It merely raises the bar that defines adequate unites Oppenheimer’s atomic concerns to economic progressivism to feminine expectations—Ruth Schwartz Cohen’s beef to Greta Getwig’s to mine—to the Veblenite evolution of social media behaviors I wrote about a few months ago:

The ensuing arms race in production quality, aided by ever-improving iPhone cameras and secondary apps like VSCO, manifested in self-conscious self-imposed branded differentiation tactics that themselves became ubiquitous. You’ll surely recall some of these design trends—heavy white borders, vibey filter presets—as well as consistent iconographic motifs like letterboards; they became digital artifacts of honorific waste for Instagram’s leisure class, i.e., influencers, copied by smaller and smaller accounts.

“I have a prestigious blog, sir”

Which brings me to what’s been happening on Substack recently—all the grumbling about big-name writers jumping in and instantly attracting thousands of subscribers. Certainly some portion of these laments are purely positional gripes of envy, prompting genuine, if also positional, words of encouragement:

But some portion are concerns borne out of the Oppenheimer school of disarmament, worried such a rare oasis in the social media waste land is drifting toward the same arms race that’s poisoned all the others. In retrospect, this was the fear I was expressing when Notes first launched:

Even more than Notes, features like badges and follower-counts and (as of today!) “explore” are powerful levers for growth precisely because they’re also structural steps toward the sort of positional arms race that makes everyone miserable—including the big-racked. Back to Frank:

Despite their higher incomes, then, the rich now appear to be worse off on balance. Their higher spending on cars and houses has simply raised the bar that defines adequate in those categories, while the corresponding decline in the quality of public goods has had a significant negative impact.

More directly still, remember Instagram, too, used to be fun pre-2012:

Instagram’s rapidly growing user base and features like the “Explore” tab in 2012 progressively expanded the pool of models for invidious comparison and pecuniary emulation. Alongside the normalization and entrenchment of quantitative, gamified measures of social approval—follows, likes—this created a heightened sense of social competition . . .

Specifically: positional social competition with purely relative rewards exerting Cold War-like pressure even among the winners. The deluge of Instagram influencer meltdowns circa 2017 prompted genuine, if positional, words of encouragement notably akin to Tilghman’s above. Substack has some structural advantages by way of its business model—and I gladly invested in the fundraising round open to writers a few months ago—but that doesn’t mean it’s immune from devolving into a positional arms race, a mimetic crisis, wasteful in the least-relaxing sort of way.

“The problem with incentives . . .”

. . . is still, if you’ll forgive a nod to Portrait, “that they work too well.” But arms-racey incentives are doubly tricky because they so often set rational individual and collective behavior diametrically at odds. And while there is theoretically an inflection point where the collective overpowers the individual—antlers so huge, for instance, that the threat of wolf predation poses a bigger threat than intra-species competition—this point may well flirt with extinction, as it does in our own case with nuclear weapons and climate change.

And then the definitions of “individual” and “collective” are themselves relative. In nuclear arms races, the “individuals” tend to be the same sovereign nations comprising the “collective” when considering tax policy. (The Girardian idea of internal vs. external mediation seems related here.) Still, the prioritization and balancing of collective vs. individual incentives is arguably the ideological divide between liberal and conservative political philosophies, and you can see it hold across global, national, state, and local arms races: liberals hewing to globalism yet strong federal government and local communities, while conservatives respectively favor America on the global stage yet states’ rights and personal property domestically.

Some good luck

Books as radically insightful as Success and Luck often tend to end either delusionally (as I would argue Deceit, Desire & the Novel does with its Catholic panacea) or depressingly (like, say, Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism), “but because the profoundly wasteful spending patterns that result from these framing effects could be changed by a simple revision in the tax code, we’re in luck.” Frank explains:

Here’s how it would work: People would report their incomes as they do now, and also their annual savings, as many already do for tax-exempt retirement accounts. Their income minus their savings is their annual consumption, and that amount less a large standard deduction would be their taxable consumption. For instance, a family that earned $100,000 and saved $20,000 in a tax year would have an annual consumption of $80,000. If the standard deduction were $30,000, this family’s taxable consumption would be $50,000.

The tax rate would start out low and would then rise steadily as taxable consumption increased.

He offers a litany of strong reasons for adoption, but the most compelling in my mind lies in its appeal beyond the liberal-collectivists who naturally tend to favor mitigating inequality to the rational self-interest of society’s most fortunate individuals—those who wield disproportionate power to enact change:

[A]s we’ve seen, what happens when everyone spends less is very different from what happens when any single individual spends less. [. . .] No change in rules or tax policy could ever extinguish the human impulse to get ahead. But getting ahead is an almost purely relative concept. It means doing better than one’s rivals, and a progressive consumption tax wouldn’t alter the fact that those who earn more can also spend more. [. . .] There are only so many penthouse apartments in New York City with sweeping views of Central Park, and although a progressive consumption tax would reduce what people could bid for those apartments, it would not change the identities of the winning bidders.

Neutralizing the material arms race of consumption would, moreover, neutralize some of the digital one that often reflects it. The problem with social media has never been its lack of humanity, but its ultra-humanity, its über-humanity; the way it recursively accelerates the incentive structures and behaviors we see in the real world. Scaling back the mansions, coming-of-age parties, cosmetic procedures etc. would inevitably mean scaling back their almost infinitely reproducible simulacra online that have so vexingly expanded the boundaries of internal mediation—as well as, say, the number of paid subscribers people who make their living on Substack would need in order to live relatively well. The pools of comparison would become less misery-making for everyone without anyone giving up their relative position in them.

Some . . . not so good luck

If progressive income taxation is truly beneficial to everyone, why hasn’t it already been adopted? Frank offers a number of hypotheses here, too, alluding to without totally spelling out the frontrunner in my mind: it is very hard for humans—and especially us “egalitarian” Americans—to admit we’re motivated by positional status in the first place. It is too deeply at odds with our political-cultural mythology, with “all men are created equal,” etc., even as our historical reality brims with hierarchy, oligarchy, monopoly, and aristocracy in all but name. And so we disguise our motivations, even (especially?) from ourselves in taste and self-care and, as Frank illustrates, quality:

We then discussed what a formal mathematical model of the demand for automobile quality might look like, agreeing that any reasonable one would incorporate a comparison of the car’s features with the corresponding features of other cars in the same local environment. Cars that scored positively in such comparisons would be seen as having high quality, for which consumers would be willing to pay a premium. I then pointed out that this model would be essentially identical to one based on a desire, not to own quality for its own sake, but rather to outdo, or avoid being outdone by, one’s friends and neighbors.

Yet the subjective impressions conveyed by these two descriptions could hardly be more different. To demand quality for its own sake is to be a discerning buyer. But to wish to outdo one’s friends and neighbors is to be a jackass.

Until we can admit that we’re all fucking jackasses who just want the biggest rack, positional dynamics can’t even enter the calculus by which we design structural incentives. I’d argue this holds true at any organizational level: geopolitical, national, state, local; in non-profits and in corporations.

Frank doesn’t have a solution here, and neither do I. Success and Luck has like a thousand Goodreads ratings in seven years, which would surprise me more if I didn’t already know how many people emphatically do not want to look in the mirror! Substack isn’t going to feature this essay, and Instagram won’t show my story linking to it even to most of the people who follow me. And so I’m afraid it’s up to you, dear reader, to read it for yourself, and—if you dare—share it with your braver friends!

Bon chance,

ANJ

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