Status Anxiety - Alain de Botton
Recently finished the book that is the title of this post. Botton is obviously well-read and a concise writer, yet the book still tends to wander in its overall narrative. All the powerful stuff is in the first few chapters and the rest is historical examples that don't add much insight. You can watch the short version of his ideas here and a bit longer version here.
His main thesis: with greater class mobility comes greater status anxiety. In a caste system people may resent those of higher societal rank, but they don't spend a lot of time envying them. We are much more likely to envy our peers who end up with a better job, house, big-screen tv, etc. In a meritocracy where we ascribe high achievement to the talent and work-ethic of the high achiever, we also tend to feel that the low achiever is deserving of his or her place. A big problem with this perspective is that it ignores the roles of chance and happenstance.
I find the premise that mobility leads to anxiety to be compelling and disturbing. That something as desirable as social mobility could have such an unintended consequence is disappointing. On top of that, high standards of living in general can have deleterious side-effects. In Think Like a Freak, Levitt and Dubner mention how just about the only reliable statistic related to predicting suicide rates is that suicides increase with increasing standards of living. The common explanation is known as "No Other Excuses" and is the idea that if you're depressed and you have a low standard of living, you have something to blame your depression on, but if you're someone like Robin Williams you might not have much in your life to point to as the cause of your sadness.
I remember a while back we had a survey on BVE where most everyone chose a large unequally sliced pie (representing the economy) over a smaller equally sliced one. These ideas make me wonder if there would be more happiness with the latter option. Maybe the pie would still need to be larger than a certain threshold though. On the other hand, Botton's argument that we tend to only have anxiety when comparing ourselves with our peers might mean that the pie slicing doesn't really matter (it's more about the slicing within a slice?).
Maybe the answer is to just individually not care about what others think. Kind of hard though unless you choose to not interact with anyone. Or maybe we just need to equate success with something other than money, despite it being our supposed meritocracy's preferred discriminator.
Comments
One of my theories is that when a person is freed from subsistence living, he has more time to focus on philosophical questions about life's meaning. What makes me happy? What meaning does my life have? Etc. My guess is many people don't find their lives have meaning. When you are working to get by, your life's goal is to get by, or maybe to get to the point where you don't have to do that any more, but can enjoy life's bounty. But when you've reached the point where you should be enjoining it, but aren't, and you can't find any meaning that's as really problem. I guess that's pretty closely related to the "no other excuses" argument. But it goes further than that--the abundance causes the lack of meaning.
I also think it is a sad truth that in capitalist economies, we become so wealthy by historic standards, we begin to believe that the accumulation of things is the ultimate goal, instead of the means to a goal. Capitalism is great a providing more stuff for everyone, but in unequal doses. But I think many people see the more stuff as a an end in itself, instead of a means to an end. Ultimately, I think that people realize the stuff does not provide more happiness.