Status Anxiety (NON-FICTION)

Rousseau’s argument hung on a thesis about wealth: that wealth does not involve having many things. It involves having what we long for. Wealth is not an absolute. It is relative to desire. Every time we seek something we cannot afford, we grow poorer, whatever our resources. And every time we feel satisfied with what we have, we can be counted as

Napoleon shared Paine’s stance and, early on in his rule, was the first Western leader openly to begin instituting what he was to term a system of ‘carrières ouvertes aux talents’, ‘careers open to talent’. ‘I made most of my generals de la boue,’ he proudly remarked on St Helena at the end of his life. ‘Whenever I found talent, I rewarded it.’ The

In the United States in 1907, a book entitled Three Acres and Liberty seized the imagination of the reading public. The author, Bolton Hall, began by taking for granted the awkwardness of having to work for someone else, and so told readers that they could regain their freedom by leaving their offices and factories and buying three acres of farmlan

Like many nineteenth-century reformers, what Carlyle wanted was not a world in which everyone was financially equal, but one in which both the elite and the poor would merit their inequalities. ‘Europe requires a real aristocracy,’ he wrote, ‘only it must be an aristocracy of talent. False aristocracies are insupportable.’ What Carlyle wanted – tho

The advantages of two thousand years of Western civilization are familiar enough: an extraordinary increase in wealth, in food supply, in scientific knowledge, in consumer goods, in physical security, in life expectancy and economic opportunity.

The rigid hierarchical system that had held in place in almost every Western society until the eighteenth century, and had denied all hope of social movement except in rare cases, the system glorified by John of Salisbury and John Fortescue, was unjust in a thousand all too obvious ways, but it offered those on the lowest rungs one notable freedom:

Mandeville’s thesis shocked his initial audience (as he intended it to), but it went on to convince almost all the great economists and political thinkers of the eighteenth century and beyond. In his essay Of Luxury (1752), Hume repeated the Mandevilleian argument in favour of the pursuit of riches and of expenditure on superfluous goods on the gro

The great ambition of modern societies has been to institute a comprehensive reversal of the equation, to strip away both inherited privilege and inherited under-privilege in order to make rank dependent on individual achievement – which has primarily come to mean financial achievement. Status now rarely depends on an unchangeable identity handed d

The history of the economies of Western nations has, since the early nineteenth century, been one of repeated cycles of growth and recession. Typically, four or five years of expansion have been followed by one or two years of retraction, with occasional massive retrenchments lasting five or six years.