Status Competition, Virtue Signals and Moral Markets (preview post)
What if status competitions are everywhere?
Society for example promotes rankings. Children are a ranked academically world wide. Beauty is ranked in pageants. Intelligence is ranked in IQ tests. Goodness and badness are ranked according to popular sentiment of the behavior of the individual being reviewed.
The concept of social desirability is the idea that most people want to be liked. People tend to want to be socially desirable.
People also tend to want to be physically beautiful for the same reason. To be physically beautiful makes a person socially desirable.
Behaviors adjust to make a person more socially desirable but these behaviors are the result of environmental stimulus.
These environmental stimulus seem to resemble markets. In other words rewards, punishments, signals, costs vs benefits.
In Moral Markets, the profit seeking motive is adapted to behavioral analysis. In other words if Alice seeks to get the maximum amount of social rewards then she will adapt her behaviors according to how much praise she's getting, what kind of social response she's receiving.
Good or Bad is simply the review of the audience. If the world is a stage and everyone is on it then the reviews whether it be by God, or by the state like with China, or by the markets like in the United States. At the end of the day, in a less private more transparent society, all behavior eventually shall be reviewed, and this will create in my prediction a status competition environment.
Social credit is what China has. In China this social credit is generated by the state to measure the goodness or badness of a citizen.
The United States does not have social credit in from the state but instead has social media. Social media and the market for likes. Likes are currency in the sense that it's used to reward desired behavior. Undesirable behaviors are punished also on social media and elsewhere. So the end result is while the United States does not make it explicit, there is still a system where individually privately or perhaps secretly judge and rank each other and then distribute social consequences to those they think deserve it.
Behavior in society is shaped by the reward or incentive structure. This is true in China, in the US, or anywhere. This is true in human or animal society.
Status competition to produce a status ranking could be simply the competition to see who can be the most physically beautiful in the the community, or the competition to see who can be the most good person in the community. Community standards like beauty standards are what form the basis for judging.
References
Winegard, B. M., Winegard, B. M., Geary, D. C., & Clark, C. J. (2018). The Status Competition Model of Cultural Production.
There was social status and status competition already prior to social media and its rankings and it was not only about physical handsomeness. So it is in fact way more complicated than you describe here.
And I agree I didn't cover every angle. It's a preview post. I'll make a real post when Steemit has enough of a reward mechanism to make it worth the effort. At this point I don't get any real rewards for these posts.
Tell me about it. I also to try to avoid time-consuming work right now.
Of course, but the more connected people are and more transparent the world gets (as privacy is reduced), the more intense the status competition will be.
Agree, but at the same time the people are more "equalized" than in earlier times. Even the "poor" people enter the competition if they are smart or lucky. In the past, if you e.g. couldn´t afford fancy clothing, you couldn´t even enter the interesting places.
How far in the past are you talking about?
I think poor and rich are relative. In The United States it's true that there is a lottery of opportunity which doesn't exist in most other places. Anyone in the USA can win the golden ticket.
But the USA is also much more competitive than other places. In other parts of the world people aren't as intensely competing so there isn't the same urgency to win that golden ticket like there is in the USA.
E.g. 19th century.
If you are talking about in terms of GDP then of course everyone is richer in material ways than they were in the 19th century. That isn't debated. But I do not think people are all richer in social ways. We lost community, we lost purpose, we lost the social fabric. We gained material wealth.
And "we" is subjective. I'm speaking of humanity as a whole, not Americans or Europeans or any specific demographic. While more people have air conditioning and other comforts it is also true that people have smaller families, have to work longer hours, have more complex lives.
Very true.
And then there are upvotes on Steemit... Good? Bad? Nah, it's just money.
I'm not entirely discounting your post here. It's just a cart and horse sort of situation. Let's remember that morality preceded the markets by a long shot. In fact, most human behavior preceded the invention of markets or market logic, especially in the globalized sense; therefore, any attempt to use market logic to explain human behavior is putting the cart before the horse.
I don't think morality preceded markets. I think behavior is the result of incentives in the environment as shown by behaviorism. So this means nature produces markets. For example the competition for attention from the opposite sex is something lifeforms did before humans even existed and these are markets. This means markets exist for non-human animals prior to humans evolving.
You can say what those other animals are doing are not "markets" because they don't call them markets but their behaviors correlate exactly with the behaviors we associate with market behavior.
So I would say humans didn't invent trade, or markets. Humans just invented the language and called it trade and markets. For this reason I think when we saw markets emerge and trade emerge in humans we were seeing a rediscovery of something which existed in nature for hundreds of thousands if not millions of years.
How do you interpret natural selection? You could interpret it such as each individual animal is participating in a market to acquire favorable genetic materials for their offspring.
References