Status Anxiety (NON-FICTION)

Most of us, after all, are obsessed with other people’s opinions of us: We work hard, first to win the admiration of other people and then to avoid losing it. One way to overcome this obsession, the Stoics think, is to realize that in order to win the admiration of other people, we will have to adopt their values. More precisely, we will have to li

However, even if Rousseau disagreed with Hume and Mandeville, he did not seek to deny the basic premise behind their analyses: it truly appeared to be a choice between decadent consumption and wealth on the one hand, and virtuous restraint and poverty on the other. It was simply that Rousseau – unusually – preferred virtue to wealth.

there is one important move we can make that might take start to reduce some of the sting of inequality. For this, we need to begin by asking what might sound like an offensively obvious question: why is financial inequality a problem? There are two very different answers. One kind of harm is material: not being able to get a decent house, quality

what really makes societies tick, now and in the future, is not just the surface facts of GDP, institutions or law, though these are important. Instead, a subtler mix of norms, dispositions and cultures, in their widest sense, helps people and places to make sense of their world and how to solve their problems. These can be thought of as an equival