Status (part 3)

elephant hunting & egalitarian opulence

Hello! This is an unplanned third installment to (what is now) a little series on status. Here’s the first, and the second:

X. Honest deception

Could art’s deceptive honesty spring directly from the mirror nature of our minds? Our evolutionary tendency to self-deceive is the titular elephant of Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson’s The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life.

Simler and Hanson’s key insight sits on the back of a few familiar ones. They cite Veblen; they cite

Paul Bloom

; they cite Mlodinow (whose Subliminal I really should have included in The Portrait of a Mirror’s “Anxieties of Influence”). More coincidentally, they cite “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren,” the Keynes essay grounding Abigail’s talk in The Guest Lecture. And not coincidentally at all: their “parable of the redwoods” illustrates the exact same type of inefficient positional arms race as Robert H. Frank’s big racks.

But where Frank’s focus is on how we humans fail to account for positional status…