Status and Culture: How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant Change

Cultural stasis is not trivial: we measure the health of our civilization through the fecundity and profundity of cultural production. And we rely on stylistic changes to define our particular moment in time and space.

Intentional distinction from rivals is best described as counterimitation.

Status symbols that lack credible alibis tend to fail:

Humans have an innate predisposition to imitate, but in modern times we must reconcile this with a moral duty to be distinct. To gain status, then, we must balance four specific requirements of imitation and distinction: To secure normal status, we must imitate group conventions. To avoid low status, we must counterimitate rival conventions. To gai

semantic drift: the slow change in words’ meanings over time. This principle also applies to cultural symbols, which can often come to mean the very opposite.

Economist Jon Elster notes, “Nothing is so unimpressive as behavior designed to impress.”

Everything we point to as “culture”—customs, traditions, fashions, and fads—exists as conventions.

As much as so-called luxury goods are sold as adornment reserved for the very rich, the major European brands reap great profits from middle-class customers.

conventions are the individual units of culture.