Culture
The Invisible Hierarchies that Rule Our World (with Toby Stuart)
In this episode of Econ Talk, host Russ Roberts engages with Toby Stuart, author of 'Anointed,' to explore the profound impact of social status and hierarchies in our world. The discussion d...
The Invisible Hierarchies that Rule Our World (with Toby Stuart)
Culture •
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Interactive Transcript
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Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics
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and Liberty.
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I'm your host, Russ Roberts of Shalem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover
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Institution.
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Go to econtalk.org where you can subscribe, comment on this episode and find links down
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the information related to today's conversation.
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You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done going back to 2006.
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Our email address is mail at econtalk.org.
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We'd love to hear from you.
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Today is September 3rd, 2025, and my guest is Toby Stewart, the Leo Heelsle Chair in
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Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley.
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Our topic for today is his book, Anointed, the extraordinary effects of social status
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in a winner-take-most world.
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Toby, welcome to econtalk.
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Thanks, Russ.
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Thrilled to be here.
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Really, really excited for our conversation.
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Me too.
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What's the central idea of the book?
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Why'd you call it an anointed?
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Anointed, I have to say, I think I'd probably call it an anointed because it harkens back
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to my Catholic school and these, you know, non-caffeinated.
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In Catholic school, but these biblical references kind of landed with me.
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And then an anointed gets to just a central part of the book, which is this idea about social
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status that it moves around.
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So it moves from actor A to actor B. That is actors that have high status bestow it upon
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others.
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And that happens in the cosmic scheme of things, like an anointment in a biblical sense,
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or anointment in modern life.
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Like we use that word colloquially and we use it often to mean some kind of status event
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that's more of a right-of-passage.
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So you graduate from college or something happens where status is elevated.
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But it also happens, you know, call it micro-annointment or something.
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It happens on a daily basis all the time everywhere.
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And the central idea of it is that status moves around.
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And that transference process, anointments, concentrations, endorsements are vitally important
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to the distribution of opportunity.
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Yeah, you've been anointed as a guest on e-con talk.
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Now, it's a modest return.
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It's a modest investment.
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It's a very modest investment.
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But it's an interesting way to think about the world.
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And you are at times, I think, somewhat positive toward this concept.
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But mostly critical of it.
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But I want to start with some of the positive benefits, which, you know, you can think of them as the benefits of hierarchy.
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A different way to think about anointment is that there's some people at the top.
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And they get up, as you suggested, a minute ago, more opportunity.
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They often get more resources.
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They certainly get more prestige, a non-monitorial, but very quite important benefit.
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So another way to think about this, which you write about is hierarchy.
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hierarchy, despite its non-agallitarian and somewhat negative implications, hierarchy has some benefits.
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What are they?
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Yeah, I mean, so let's just go back to the beginning of that comment and you're too modest.
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I'm genuinely delighted to be here.
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I mean, I'll tell you, I'm doing a bunch of podcast concurrent with the launch of the book.
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And so I've listened to them and I started listening to econ talk.
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And I think I ended up listening to like 10 episodes or something like that, because I just, you know, really enjoyed it.
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Both the interviewer and the interviewer.
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So actually, I feel like I'm thrilled to be here.
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Yeah. So hierarchy is everywhere.
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And, you know, without kind of mincing words like we can hierarchies are true and they exist in pretty much all social scientific disciplines in some form.
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And they exist in nature in all places.
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So this, you know, this hierarchical ordering of human beings or of mammals or of objects or of, you know, universities like we're, we're a couple of academics talking to one another.
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Like talk about a hierarchical world universities in our obsession with ranking and faculty and various forms of rankings.
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These hierarchies are everywhere.
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And when you see something that's everywhere, it's generally that there's a reason for that.
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And so the book dives into a bunch of the reasons for why hierarchies exist.
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But let me, let me make a couple of remarks and then we can jump into whatever, whatever aspect of this scenes most interesting.
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But one is that yes, hierarchies form everywhere.
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Two is that one of their central roles is that they, they tend to dictate how resources are allocated.
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So in the animal world where it all began hierarchies are dominance hierarchies and they dictate who gets the two most important resources, which are, which are, which are nourishment and mates.
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And the distribution of those resources is unequal across the dominance hierarchy, just as the distribution of opportunity is unequal across the status hierarchy.
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And unequal in a way that probably most of us wouldn't think is particularly fair if we understood, you know, kind of the true origin of that, that distribution of opportunity.
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And so, so I think when, when, you know, your sense that I'm critical of the status hierarchy, that's getting into how it impacts who gets what and whether in fact it's a fair way to allocate resources.
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But there are positives, which you start with.
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There are positives and the positives are, you know, it is a way to allocate resources that isn't, we punch one another in the face.
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So, so one is, you know, and let's go all the way back to, you know, Leviathan, which we both probably read in, in graduate school, but, but, but no one likes man in the state of Nate in his state of nature without some sort of social organization to, you know, to keep him in check.
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And the dominance hierarchy is way to do that. So if you're imagining like, you know, go back to hunter gatherer or world where we need to, we need to exist in social groups to have any chance of survival, like we need to work together, we need to build shelter, we need to hunt, we need to do, we need, we need to create an anchor cultural system, we need to do whatever we need to do to acquire the resources for survival.
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Well, to do that, we have to be in a group and if we're in a group and we get resources, we then have to figure out how they're split up.
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And without a system of which a status hierarchy is one for allocating resources, we just dispute.
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Like, you think you deserve it. I think I deserve it. She thinks she deserves it. Everybody thinks they deserve it. And we end, we end up, you know, literally punching one another in the face back in the old days.
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And so the status hierarchy prevents that and that's, you know, much of the origin of it.
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In the modern world, you know, the book argues it does a whole lot more than that. And, you know, the other kind of main function to the status hierarchy is one, it helps us resolve uncertainty and judgment.
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So we rely on it all the time in ways that I think most of us often don't recognize.
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We make status-based decisions just intuitively or reflexively.
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So it helps us very much in deciding what to do.
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It also is very influential behind every scene, so to speak. And that is when we make choices, particularly in the modern world.
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And then let's, you know, get into this as we go on, but choice, you know, and I bet I bet you've done, you know, 50 past episodes that touch on this in one one way, shape, perform, but, but, but choices like often near infinite.
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Like there's so much optionality and there's so many things and there's so many options for how for what and how you do and what you consume in the modern world.
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So that all has to get curated and the status hierarchy is just this gigantic behind the scenes curator of whatever gets in front of you in the first place.
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So allocation of resources, reduction of choice, navigation to a choice. Those are three of the key things that it does for us.
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So I really found the idea of it simplifying choice, fascinating. I am not a big fan of the worrisome nature of the so-called paradox of choice. I like lots of choices, but I don't want to pretend when you force me to think about the fact that, you know, I don't try everything.
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And I don't have a perfect system or an algorithm for figuring it out. You're talking about books. Obviously, blurbs quotes from other authors or so-called experts count.
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The answer is, what question is what why should what why is that? And you can give some answers, but a lot of times a well blurbed book is awful.
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There are great books that are unbluirbed or relatively unbluirbed. So this is not a small thing that you're pointing to.
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And ironically, perhaps the past episode that comes to mind first is not what you might have thought about the paradox of choice or utility maximization.
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It was actually episodes we did with Cynthia Haven and Jonathan By and I'm forgetting how to pronounce his name. I apologize. I might be right on René Gerard and the idea of Mimesis.
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This idea of imitation. And as an economist, I mean, imitation is an appalling idea. I mean, we're supposed to maximize utility, optimize according to the homoeconomicus.
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The idea that I would just imitate somebody, copy what they do is deeply disturbing both to my natural instincts as economists and as my perhaps inflated view of myself as a person with agency.
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But the idea of annoying it, excuse me, but the idea of annoying it is there's a lot of that laying around influencing me in ways that I probably don't realize.
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So much in that question, but yeah, so again, I'll go back to the beginning and say, I think unlike you, I've thrown down the white flag.
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Like when it comes to choice, don't give it to me. I mean, I want to curate it.
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So there is, I think, you know, I think a lot of us spend an enormous amount of time working, you know, this is a little bit beside the topic of the book, but thinking about choices that are irrelevant.
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And so if we just made the man got on with it, life would be better for us.
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I mean, I'm at the moment obsessed with the concept of agency, but that's, you know, that's because of AI and maybe we can come back and talk about that later later, but yeah, I mean mimicry.
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So there is so much mimicry and what happens is if you are high status, it's nearly guaranteed that somebody is going to, that many people are going to mimic you and that mimicry is a form of homage, like I mean, you're, you're deeply influenced by somebody or something to the point that, that you mimic them.
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And if you're like them, you know, the hope is often that there's some status based benefit that rubs off on you, right? I mean, and so, you know, in its own way, conspicuous consumption of any form is a type of mimicry.
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Yeah, let's take it to the next level. If I respect a particular person or author and they write a good blurb on a book, I like to think that after reading the book and enjoying it, I think, wow, that I was right to respect that endorsement.
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But it's possible that it colors the way I read the book and I think, well, if so and so liked it, it must be a good book. And afterwards I rave about it, even though again, this is the question of agency and and an actual autonomy.
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There is the possibility. I don't like the idea of it, but there is the possibility that I'm influencing ways I don't appreciate the blurb on the book is this fascinating thing, right? Because it's just a few words.
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It tells you very little how many how me ask you this rest, how many how many lousy blurbs have you ever read like how many times have you ever read on a book on a book cover? This is a horrific.
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This is a terrible book. Don't open it.
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Zero. Yeah. So there's like, you know, there's no real information. So we call any economics selection bias. Yeah.
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It's not a we don't take a random collection of people's impressions of the book.
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Yeah. And and you know, this is true for all reviews, right? And all things, right? Because any, yeah, yeah, reviews I just find so interesting. But let's let's let's leave that for now. So so we're talking the economics world.
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We're talking about signals, but the signals have, you know, they have one valence, which is positive. And so all you can determine based on a blurb is do you recognize the name of, you know, the identity of the person who wrote the blurb?
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But if you think about that, we've just shifted what constitutes a worthwhile book to who blurb that and who the author is versus what's inside of it.
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And, you know, and so books in your field, you're going to make sense of so you will actually be a very good judge of, you know, let's call quality of a book if you read it.
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And you know, not necessarily a universal judge, but from your, from your standpoint, you're going to come to a judgment and you're going to feel probably conviction and a judgment like this was a good use of a day or it was poor use of the day. You learn something you thought it was well written. You thought it was fun or funny or compelling in some way or you didn't you're going to make that judgment.
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And so, you know, make of them what you will. This is neither of our fields, but in the process of writing this I found this, this I thought it was a pretty hilarious FM or I study so functional magnetic resonance. So these are the brain imaging studies where you
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know, neuro psychologist look at look inside of brains in a scanner when we're making decisions and then sort of make attributions about how we feel about things based on what regions of the brain light up and how they they light up as we're making choices. So there's this one study which I found which kind of gets to I think you might call the core thought experiment in the book, which is they
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they take like a bottle of two buck chuck, so really an expensive wine and they serve it up to somebody and who's who's going into a scanner and then they take the same two buck chuck and they put it in a bottle of wine that's a label them that many people would recognize. So it's the same product literally like it is this it's two buck chuck in both its cheap wine and both bottles.
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But it turns out if if I give you cheap wine and an expensive bottle and you're like most of us, you recognize the label on the bottle and you're living to have a different physiological experience to the wine and you're going to believe that you liked it more.
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But you're not going to believe that you didn't like it more because it's different to our better and anyway it's the same wine. Wait, you wait, you're responding to is the identity of the logo and you're making you're reassessing the identical product based on what the label is on the bottle.
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Yeah, I'm somewhat skeptical of those studies partly because selection bias, of course, if you showed that most people loved, loved the didn't love the wine when it was in the fancy bottle anymore than they did when it was in the creamy bottle, you wouldn't get published.
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So there is a little bit of a publication bias there, but I think and I think there's a second question which is spur the moment in an experiment your response is going to be different than if you took it home and you know it happens supposedly in bars right they they re bottle the cheap scotch and put it into the fancy bottle, which you can't observe it's done when the person blows that that in front of you.
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I've always been a little skeptical that I have a pretty good palette. I don't have a world class palette. I'm sure, but I'm pretty good at being disappointed in things I paid a lot for expected to be great and finding out that they're bad. The same would be true of blurbs that that are wildly enthusiastic.
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But it's possible I do that in other areas without realizing it and maybe I'm unusual in my ability to I'm a bit of a contrarian, which means that I don't like the whole idea of people telling me what's good and I have a rebellious streak. So I'm open to the possibility that there's more there.
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I mean, I do like to I mean this we can we can move I mean there's like there's hundreds of studies that show this just across you know they're not FMRI studies they just show the water.
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Yeah, I mean you could think of like you know you could think about like the audit studies with resumes as an example of the same thought experiment were basically you know what I what I want to say is that there are many of these experiences.
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Where you take literally is the way the book opens with a bunch of different you know sort of fun stories around this but where you take literally the same object and then you change the identity of the person associated with it or the organization.
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And people completely reassess its value and they're doing that but the only thing you've changed in the experiment is the identity of the person like whatever product we're talking about is like the bottle of wine right.
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But I mean I also have to say that like someone once told me and I believed it ever since repeated at a hundred times that if if you got a PhD in your social scientists you should consider yourself non representative of the general population about nearly everything.
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I mean you know you like an economist walks into you know a grocery store and what happens whatever happens isn't what happens when you know.
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Well that's fair but I also want to raise the possibility that I alluded to earlier which I think is interesting.
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I think that you actually have a different experience it's not just your brain you called it physiological experience I think that's very possible it's.
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And I think we're not very sensitive to it in a book like this makes you at least consider it you know obviously a product that's endorsed by a certain person you could enjoy it more than if it were not endorsed by that person a person you respect admire or revere.
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It's not just that you're fooling yourself you might actually have some kind of emotional connection through that endorsement that it is quote real but it doesn't change your point which is there's a lot of power obviously people with name recognition celebrity status people who are adulated obviously can anoint they're anointed and they can anoint others and products.
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And raise the status of those products let's talk about the counterpoint you can respond to the second but I want to turn to the worker be approach which is a little bit which is an alternative so you can say if you want to respond to that fine but otherwise.
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No no definitely definitely want to say I want to respond to that one because you you actually just got to like I mean there's there is.
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5 or 6 metapoints or whatever like you know I've and you got to you got to one of them but and that is that you actually have a different perception of a product because it's affiliated in some way like it's blurb by somebody you really respect and it's a book and that actually in some way is going to change your perception of of the product.
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And like you know and so my guess is for books like that that is true for a lot of people it's probably not true for you but like if you're not an art of fix you not oh when you when you see a painting and then you figure out who the painter is like if it's some prominent painter you rethink what you're looking at like you just walk by it but now you want to return and you want to see it and it isn't because of the art it's because it was created by the artist and if we go back to the artist.
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So we're going back to wine there are these so there's a market for like empty bottles of the of the premier crew or whatever screen me or whatever and you know of course part of that market is just fraud like somebody's going to refill it and sell it.
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Part of the market is like okay so I put in the two buck chuck but I take it to the restaurant I have it on court and I sit there at you know at like at the big central table and there's this line up of bottles at the end right but I would what I care about is that you know and people do let me remove the eye from that from from that from that comment but people do like there's an actual market for these more so in some cultures than others.
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And and it's the actual affiliation that you get with the high status product that people are interested in versus the product per se.
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Yeah I would just add the example which is in a way unrelated but I think it's a similar might be a similar psychological effect when you buy a souvenir on a vacation and you buy a coffee mug or a coffee mug or a coffee mug or a cup of tea.
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Tea towel or a keychain that reminds you of a trip and it's a pretty cheesy piece of work the way it's been made and you buy it anyway some people do because when they look at it they get a good feeling not because it's aesthetically pleasing in and of itself because it's tied to that experience that vacation which you know I don't I think that's a real effect I don't
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want to suggest it's something wrong or fake about it and similarly you know buying a product that is endorsed by a celebrity using a tennis racket or a baseball bat or some kind of device that's been recommended or endorsed literally is signed by it's so it's George Foreman's coffee cup to mix
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up where may metaphors has an emotional impact on us that I don't think I don't think it's anything wrong with it per se I don't think it's anything irrational per se about that in fact could argue it's it's kind of a cool thing I get a little taste of glory that I can't otherwise have so I don't
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go left homoeconomicus in the you know that I spend like I don't I mean I I have stopped generally comparing things to a rational benchmark though it's like it's it's fine to exercise to do that you know I'm I've kind of you know again like where I spend so much time around behavioral economist and psychologists and social psychologists that that I'm pretty convinced that we're we're very much emotional emotional decisions
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and makers but where where it becomes a central concept in the book is just like so if there is this positive feedback loop whereas like okay so if if a product is appreciated more or admire more like a painting because it was created by a by a prominent prestigious anointed artist right then then we're going to end up in this feed feedback loop where you know the artist is actually
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better because they made a good painting but they made a good painting because they're a good artist but that right and so you you actually can end up in these cycles where you where because you're of high repute what you do is highly regarded and because it's highly regarded you're of even possibly higher repute or you at least reinforce your status and that's this kind of endogenous dynamic that can happen if we make evaluations based on the
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prestige of the identity and we tend and we tend to do that more when there's a lot of ambiguity about how good something is like it's that uncertainty where it's like we're just not really sure like you know if I if I buy an electrolux vacuum cleaner and I take it home and it doesn't pick up dust right I'm not going to say like I just I'm going to elevate the status of the brand like you know that the
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Stewart Martha Stewart endorsed it yeah is it well right I mean so there are these products where and you know weirdly there are products where they're you know and so to get into this a little bit in the book but like if you're a social scientist you just wouldn't expect status dynamics there but they're but they are
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anyways but as a general rule the more ambiguity there is about how we think about something like a book or or a job candidate who we haven't met or you know a piece of art or you know we you know I get into into this a lot because the other part of my life is I live in
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tech and entrepreneurship outside of my academic role that's what I do and I've you know for 20 years run entrepreneurship programs at the elite business school so a start up
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is another thing that is nearly impossible to assess at an early stage and that's one of the ways I got into studying status was in the world of tech and science where I think status dynamics are enormously important.
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Okay you were going to go take you back you were about to work or I'm going to push into a different or I would have stay on this topic for a minute because I want to you you've encouraged me to give you a hard time on this what you're suggesting which I think is absolutely true is that anointment and the role of status and hierarchy is more important in products that don't have
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objective measures equality art wine etc and I but is that a good thing and I'll tell me make the case you know there's a there's a famous story which I suspect is true that in his old age and fame Picasso would go into a restaurant and they get the bill and he would make a
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doodle on the bill and sign it and that would be his way of paying because his doodle was a value because he's a public Picasso now I can't do that.
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I'm not I'm an objectively bad artist but it's not is it a bad thing that Picasso who you could debate can still debate whether he's any good there were a lot of people I'm sure of hate Picasso's work but many do seem to love it and I think love it for
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all kinds of reasons that are real the fact that those certain people are given the authority and power to use their blessing in this case a doodle is more than a blessing and actually is could have
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monetary value but I'm talking about now the fact that Picasso picks a young artist and elevates that person reputationally of which in music at art and theater and all literature there are
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all kinds of examples where people emerge from darkness because of the endorsement of of a great artist that seems like a good thing because and the reason I would defend it is that those people who
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who have that power usually have passed some kind of test you could debate it whether it's a vet any value at all because it's so subjective but the Picasso's Picasso now I don't think I'm totally fooled by his
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his the power of his art and so is it really surprising or even bad that that those people have outsized influence on who else I mean it would be sinister if they chose people and then abuse them
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right because they had this power over them that they that they were bribeable and use their endorsement power that way but I don't think that that would
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degrade their reputation of potentially if people didn't like what they what they suggested if you think there's any agency lab but anyway is it really so bad?
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So so much in that one is it is it so bad I mean the so so a lot of the book is and like I don't I don't mean to be making normative judgements about these things in the book so is it so bad
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you know we need so I would argue that that there are like take art like nearly everyone's an artist and then there's a giant number of professional of professional artists like people would actually claim that you know that art is my profession is a giant I L with the number is but there's a giant number of artists but there's a finite amount of wall space
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at the Metropolitan Museum of art like an extremely finite amount of of wall space so or for a space so we have these organizations their organizations where people
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of collectively decided they'll view art right I mean there's public art there's other play you can put art anywhere but they're these places with with a very finite resource which is wall space
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so there's another there's another version of that which comes before the museum which is there are art galleries and there are there's a whole like complete pecking order of prestige and the gallery world and much of the curation happens long before the museum it's you know what artist does Larry gojian decide to put on the walls of his of his gallery
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and and I would make a couple of points one is I think that choice is almost never purely about merit and second there is no concept of merit because if you took a panel of if you had 10 gauras who are all great contemporary art gauras and you had them look at a hundred new artists each I'm not sure
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to be there be overlap in which one they chose to put on on the wall so that's you know that's that's a that's a santi that's before anything happens once once the gojian puts you an artist on the wall it's game over and so and so an ointment in the art world is getting to the gojian wall and if you get to the gojian wall you're then probably going to you know go
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you know slightly downtown to the moma's wall eventually because you know you've been anointed by one of the most influential versions of a critic in in the business so so but but if I think about it from from the standpoint of consumer choice
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like you and I can have this conversation because we both know exactly who Pablo Picasso is so we can even we wouldn't even have the conversation if there wasn't some status process in the art world that decided by who we should be looking at and who we should be talking about and who we should be having the conversation about so
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this is what I mean when I say there's like this status dynamics that sit behind the scenes like you know there's like a million and one things that happened before you ever got to the museum and see and so it was on on the wall but my view is if you rerun history like take the thought experiment where you just rerun the history of art that we would in all times in all cases end up with different artists on the walls of of the
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the the the moma because there wasn't one objectively greater than everybody else artists like we've constructed that story but there was some other immensely creative Picasso that you've never heard of it never well I mean there were probably dozens of other versions of that but like the
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anointment dynamic didn't unfold for them but it did unfold for for Pablo so you know but is it is it normatively bad like it's normatively in my view on fair based on most of our you know fairness is a very funny word like doing
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episode on that one like I you know I once heard a prominent economist actually is a guy called Michael Jensen and I'm in and like I you know I I said I said something's unfair and he said yeah unfair means you don't like it and
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fair means you like it so you know so whatever the definition is a fairness that's its own can of worms but but I think the outcomes that are created by the status process most of us would look at that
spk_0
and say well it's not exactly fair it's a it's a fascinating I love the thought experiment I would just say about the gallery art sequence it reminds me of my experiences and author when I was shopping for agents and at some point I realized the goal was not to convince the agent that your book was worth it was was quality or wonderful it was
spk_0
to convince the agent that an editor would find it worthwhile and because that's what an agent does an agent doesn't decide what's a good book an agent decides what editors think is a good book and it's just it's a small thing but I think it's it's it's true and I also agree
spk_0
that because the subjective nature of reputation you we can debate whether this plays out over time in a different way I mean we recently had the episode on for whom the Bell tolls and Hemingway and you know Hemingway's reputation is went down and it's it's doing pretty well actually it's doing better than theater
spk_0
drives or just for example or other people who as you point out you know we've never heard of who are modest successes in the 1940s and 50s say but I don't think I don't find anything sinister about it I think in what we're talking about it it's
spk_0
inevitable it's not fair we did you told the story about Michael Jensen who I know a little bit I thought you're going to say economists don't do fair that's another standard thing you're
spk_0
here from economists but I don't know whether it's fair or not I there's an there's an inequity or an injustice certainly in the fact it's some wonderfully talented poets composers artists authors don't make it and others do but I don't find it's sinister do you
spk_0
no no not at all and in fact I you know a central central point in the book is that the reason we have a status system is functional like we have we have a curatorial problem right and we just
spk_0
talked about art but we could do the same thing in books like there's this enormous funnel in all the world right and so the curatorial function you know problem in books is that there's also a ton of people who
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consider themselves writers and have written or are writing a book and so you have an enormous amount of content but you're actually a very small amount of shell space and a physical
spk_0
bookstore and we could argue whether Amazon's any different or not but you know the reality of of online anything is that if you have you know whatever three million
spk_0
skews or however many books that book titles are on Amazon might be more than that it's still finite shell space because you're going to have to organize the content in a way where people see some of it and not others of it and so and so there's the collaborative filter and there's you know product placement and all the things that happen when when
spk_0
you're searching online and so we need some way to curate things I mean and then let's go to the modern world which is you know we're talking about sort of cultural content but another form of cultural content is social media and and literally in the span of time that it takes you and I were both a bit verbose it seems but the time it takes for you or I to complete a thought there's more content that's been uploaded to you know take talk Instagram
spk_0
you know Facebook snap and you know and we chat like whatever you know whatever is left like there's more content created in the span of this than I then I could view in my entire lifetime let's throw you to been there literally like if you did the math on it so in that long wind it think hundreds of thousands of videos have been uploaded on the internet right and so and so you have this him just like literally you can't imagine none of us can
spk_0
imagine you know what these petabytes of data like the amount of content that is but you know we sit down in in in front of our phone and we're going to start scrolling and we have to start somewhere and like non random is probably going to be better than random and you know and then lying behind that is some status like process that you know determines what goes viral and what doesn't and what and what gets your attention
spk_0
but it isn't I mean it's not sinister in the sense of like we need some mechanism to to accomplish that feat to take the super wide funnel and winnow it down to and you know a consumable version of a choice that it's just that most of us just accept the choice set as it's given to us and don't really think that much about like how it all got there and and it's really important
spk_0
in terms of like who gets what opportunities to understand the process by which it got there.
spk_0
You have a section on the downside of being annoying it which I found extremely interesting we had Tim Ferris on the program recently and we discussed an essay he wrote some time in the I can't remember when he wrote it.
spk_0
So after he became pretty famous now he's more famous and it was about it was basically be careful what you wish for because his life has some negatives that I couldn't imagine it's that it's a very very powerful essay because when you become famous in the modern era it's has a dark side and you don't go into the full range darkness but you talk about some of the examples.
spk_0
You talk about impostering privilege and less discerning consumers when restaurants get a Michelin star talk about talk about some of those.
spk_0
Yeah I mean let's let's start with a restaurant so I mean that's a fun one so so if you're a foodie then then you definitely pay attention to Michelin ratings right this is super influential ratings and there's a very small number of restaurants in the world that have stars.
spk_0
And so you would think if you're a restaurant tour unambiguously what you want is like the Nobel Prize of restaurants which is you know the Michelin three star and like that's unambiguously what you want but you know your your whole life changes when that happens and so I started to like chase down Michelin star chefs because that that was just for me that was there the book there's a there's a hundred examples of stuff in the book.
spk_0
And you know and they're like the ones I found interesting or fun as I was writing it and so there's it turns out there's this group of chefs and they they they literally handed back their stars.
spk_0
And the story I found that I most like the most was this restaurant in in Spain where you know it was like a kind of a village restaurant where like people would you know come and break bread and you know families would eat there and they'd have conversations and it would be crowded it would be crowded.
spk_0
But casual and then he started experimenting did some inventive things with with the menu Michelin comes along and they star it.
spk_0
Okay, but then when they start you then enter if you're in this world you enter one thing is you you jump on top of a hamster wheel because the star isn't like you have it forever and ever and ever and ever and ever like you know there's certain there's certain if you want to if you're a writer and you win a Pulitzer prize you always carry it around.
spk_0
But the star is one of those those versions of anointment where you have to re-earn it every year because you know they're the the the guide reassesses restaurants and if you think about it like there's I mean I I also spent a lot of time looking into I'm thinking about the process by which we create rankings and ratings like I mean you are absolutely not going to crack open the US News and World Report college rankings.
spk_0
Every year if every year Harvard is one you know Yale is two Princeton is three Stanford is four MIT is five in the University of Chicago is six like if every year those are the top six let's say it's uninteresting right so you have to change the rankings.
spk_0
Like by literally changing the criteria on what you're going to rank so you resort or just you know re re wait so that so that the rankings change so anyways if you're a Michelin star chef there's one there's this enormous amount of pressure to maintain you know the quality and I'm going to put quality in quotes and come back to that in a second but maintain the quality that justifies a Michelin star but the second thing is now all of a sudden
spk_0
like the whole everything that happens in the restaurant changes because it goes from like people driving in from a you know 20 kilometer radius or five kilometer radius or you know whatever like coming to restaurants seeing friends like you you imagine you know some version of cheers but but but but you know Spanish village style but now it's like you know people who are foodies who are coming in from wherever because they have to they have to try the food at this time.
spk_0
Michelin star restaurants the audience completely changes to an audience that's looking for something else right what they want is pictures to put on their Instagram feeds to show the world that they've they've been here or to consume the experience experience and some way that's radically different than the experience that happened before the star so like you know it literally it's one of these things where it changes it changes your world.
spk_0
If you if you generalize a little bit beyond that one is there's a lot of visibility of high status actors like you know we are like think about all of that all of you know the the New York Post and whatever there's like and reddit and like whatever happens like if a celebrity does anything the world pays attention to it so you do lose your privacy but you're also constantly on the stage so managing your managing your business.
spk_0
Brander status becomes a you know a 24 seven job particularly in in the social media world and and so they're just there are lots of things that that change about life if you're if you join the truly anointed set.
spk_0
You know the one the one that I think is most general and most interesting and that people struggle with the most is some version of the imposter so you know we now call the imposter syndrome or some kind of anxiety that you have because usually if you're high status and whatever your your field is does doesn't matter your in front of audiences often and audiences form very high expectations because you know what I mean.
spk_0
They think of you as you know being great at what you do and if in fact you're a little less great than your position in the status hierarchy would suggest that the rational response to that I mean rational in the sense the characteristic response for that that represents the situation you're in I'm walking into a room everybody thinks I'm going to be absolutely amazing I'm less amazing than they think I'm going to disappoint people therefore.
spk_0
There's a lot more imposter syndrome right I mean so or some version of of anxiety that is actually the rational response to a world in which the stat the distribution of status is super right tailed where you have these very very prominent actors but the distribution of marital and is less skewed.
spk_0
Yeah, so if I asked any example and I think about it, I think about it a lot.
spk_0
I think about athletes who are in the top 10th of a percent or whatever it is of their skill
spk_0
set, they get nervous.
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For all kinds of reasons, part of it is simply disappointing their fans.
spk_0
It's nice to be anointed in a field where it's easier to keep quality constant.
spk_0
I would suggest a singer has a certain advantage, but of course, singers get colds and their
spk_0
voices aren't quite up to what they want and they have that anxiety.
spk_0
I'm sure even without that.
spk_0
So it's probably a myth that there's some fields where people don't have in post or
spk_0
syndrome.
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But I think when we look at those people, we think, well, they're so talented or they're
spk_0
so this or that.
spk_0
That's not the way we see ourselves often in those settings.
spk_0
It's fascinating.
spk_0
Do you think anointing is less important than it was 50 years ago and maybe less important
spk_0
than it will be in 50 years because of what I would call the death of expertise or
spk_0
is it just that being anointed is more democratic than it used to be.
spk_0
Obviously there are influencers on Instagram and TikTok who weren't anointed by anybody.
spk_0
They just caught fire for reasons that have nothing to do with their status ex-anti.
spk_0
Now they have some status.
spk_0
They can bestow goodies on folks if they want.
spk_0
But I wonder about this.
spk_0
It seems to me the world's a little less hierarchical than it used to be.
spk_0
Do you agree?
spk_0
So the last statement I unambiguously agree with in at least a grander historical time
spk_0
frame.
spk_0
So let's come back to 50 years.
spk_0
Like the last 50 years are really interesting.
spk_0
And the next five are going to be wild in my opinion, but the last 50 are interesting.
spk_0
So in the grand scheme of things, we never got back to work or be.
spk_0
So can I take you back there for a minute?
spk_0
So in the book, I argue there's like three and a half sources of status.
spk_0
The one that we're talking about with expertise and the one that I think most of us just
spk_0
can just sort of conceptually think of would be a fair source of status is some version
spk_0
of merit.
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Now merit alone is a problematic idea.
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So the idea would be people with a lot of merit who do things that are really good, are
spk_0
really valuable, are really high quality are the ones that should have high status.
spk_0
So status is a reward for being really, really, really good at something.
spk_0
Now, the way status works in reality is like, we often think about global status.
spk_0
We'll have this conversation about a tenth of a percent, a thousandth of a percent.
spk_0
The most recognized artist or the athletes we watch on television or whatever.
spk_0
But every social group has a status hierarchy.
spk_0
Like your work group in the office does.
spk_0
I mean, weirdly, you go into a yoga class and there's a status hierarchy.
spk_0
There's the one who can bend in that way.
spk_0
I mean, I long go, those up.
spk_0
But you, so there are status hierarchies everywhere and what constitutes merit-based contributions
spk_0
to a group is very different across every version of the groups that we have.
spk_0
But one source of status is absolutely, it's given to the people who are the best at doing
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whatever is valued in that context.
spk_0
So there are, I think, quality differences among writers and they're actually like the quality
spk_0
of the writing.
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And that affects, to some extent, the prestige of the writer.
spk_0
The second thing is, and that's what the book calls work or be status.
spk_0
You earn it.
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You work for it.
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The second thing is all societies at all times and all places, allocates status differently
spk_0
to what sociologists call ascribed characteristics.
spk_0
And the way you think about it and ascribed characteristic is there's a whole bunch of characteristics
spk_0
that you have that were just kind of, you know, for, for, is it awkward way to say it,
spk_0
but we're assigned to you at birth.
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Like, you were born to a, you know, you were born into a religion, into, into a skin color.
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You were born male or female.
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Like, you had, you know, the SRI gene or whatever it is or you didn't.
spk_0
You were born, like, you're probably going to be tall or you're going to be short.
spk_0
You were born, you were born, you know, also all the characteristics that are
spk_0
just given to you.
spk_0
Like, you didn't choose them.
spk_0
You chose none of those.
spk_0
And if everything was redone, I mean, if there is a, you, you would get different characteristics.
spk_0
But we order those.
spk_0
Like they all have status consequences.
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And in past versions of society, there's no mobility out of them.
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That is whatever you were born into is where you end up.
spk_0
And, you know, that's kind of the iron rule of law.
spk_0
So if you think about like a rigid caste system or a feudal system, like, you know, in a feudal system,
spk_0
you don't go ask the kid who's working in the field, but, you know, what they want to do when they finish college, right?
spk_0
You know, they're going to work in the field, like, you know, like their father did and like their, their children will.
spk_0
That's the system.
spk_0
Like, there is no mobility.
spk_0
And so, but we get status from these described characteristics.
spk_0
And we're all dealt to different hand there, depending on, you know, where we are and what, what we got.
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And then the third place where we get status is its kinetic.
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It's you get anointed.
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That is the high stat, the people who have status in the system, move it around by choosing who to affiliate with or not.
spk_0
And that happens everywhere all the time.
spk_0
So, you know, every university has an admissions committee and decides who to let, you know, through the campus gates.
spk_0
And who not to let through the campus gates and from, you know, from the bottom of the pecking order all the way up to the elite universities,
spk_0
these are status conferring, conferring institutions, right?
spk_0
And when they confer status, they do.
spk_0
But that happens in all, in all walks of life everywhere.
spk_0
So, we have these like three ways in which we create status.
spk_0
Now, let's come back to the question of whether it's more important now than it was 50 years ago.
spk_0
I mean, I don't, I think first and purically, there isn't a way to do that study or answer that question.
spk_0
But, but conceptually, what's happened is there is now this, this complete change and what I would call the scale or the geography of status that's created by the internet, the smartphone, the global platforms with four billion users or whatever the numbers are.
spk_0
And we're at for the biggest global platforms now, you know, north of half a billion, but all the way up to, you know, something like three or four billion people in one place.
spk_0
And what that allows somebody to do is have global recognition.
spk_0
Whereas 50 years ago, that was a much harder task, right?
spk_0
We lived in a more local world.
spk_0
And if you go back, and if you go back 50 years before that, like before anything was digitized, we lived in a way more local world.
spk_0
And there, you know, status is still super important, but nobody can, nobody can achieve true global status because there's no way to get the distribution where you're in front of, you know, the kind of the population of the planet.
spk_0
Now you can get that distribution.
spk_0
So the scale of the anointment dynamic, I think, has changed with the global distribution of content.
spk_0
But I don't think there's even a way to think about or know whether it's more important or not.
spk_0
And it's just that point about scale.
spk_0
It's, you know, it's true of any economic activity.
spk_0
It's part of the reason we get to a world where the rewards are so disproportionate.
spk_0
And if you can appeal to an international audience, I'm watching Crash Landing on You, which is a Korean show very much focused on North and South Korean differences, which I'm sure I do not fully appreciate.
spk_0
It's in Korean. I watch it with subtitles and I love it.
spk_0
And of course, that's a very different world where I have to go to North Korea or South Korea and watch a play with 100 people that's held in the daytime because there's no lighting for for evening performances.
spk_0
So the world has changed tremendously in the rewards.
spk_0
Obviously for athletes and performers who can have international appeal, show high on Tonys, an obvious example on baseball.
spk_0
Michael Jordan was that person, Muhammad Ali was that person Adele is that person.
spk_0
And these folks have wildly enormously greater rewards than the, as you point out, the second best or whatever further down the scale.
spk_0
The rewards are very skewed.
spk_0
I mean, I'm just sorry to interrupt, but you have me now thinking about Korea.
spk_0
And like, you know, and so like take K-pop, like where K-pop song, whatever, whatever, whoever, you know, I'm outside of my bailowick.
spk_0
You know, his K-pop songs go like global and you know, they create global mega stars.
spk_0
50 years ago, that couldn't happen. There's no way to happen.
spk_0
And then a Korean film, I guess, has been this series of Korean films that, you know, went best picture at the Academy Awards.
spk_0
And that's a modern world phenomenon where if you create content, it's possible to distribute it to global audiences and get this just vastly greater benefit from whatever recognition you have.
spk_0
I mean, so you know, and Beyonce issues your next song, like it's not just going to be us here in, you know, we Americans listening to this, like it's going to be everywhere all at once.
spk_0
Nice. I do want to add that he can talk has heard in 200 countries, but I don't want to get you too excited about that to me.
spk_0
Some of those are quite small.
spk_0
That's amazing.
spk_0
I didn't know there were 200 countries I was shocked to discover this.
spk_0
There's more than 200, but we're about in every one of them at least they get measured by an IP address.
spk_0
Let's close with talking about AI.
spk_0
You alluded to it earlier.
spk_0
We don't know at this moment how important AI will be in our lives.
spk_0
Six weeks ago, I was pretty sure it was going to be enormous.
spk_0
I'm sorry to wonder maybe it's not as important as I thought.
spk_0
We'll see, but it will affect status and it will affect anointing.
spk_0
What are your thoughts?
spk_0
Yeah, so I'm going to, I mean, I know a little bit about what you think about it because one of the episodes I listen to was your door cash.
spk_0
That was a week ago.
spk_0
I think I've gone out, moved on from there.
spk_0
Yeah, I mean, well, okay, but I, you know, my guess is to work cash hasn't moved on.
spk_0
I'll throw that out there.
spk_0
I mean, if what you're thinking about is some kind of, you know, disappointment with GPT-5 or whatever.
spk_0
So I think, so I literally think if you stopped AI today, which you, which you will not because, you know, one of the things that's gone on, I'm sure you're aware of this is the,
spk_0
there are four companies that this here will spend more on investments than AI.
spk_0
Then they, then NASA spent to send a man to the moon over a 14 year period.
spk_0
Like this is in like 20, 25 cat-backs alone is, you know, that number looks to be north of 300 billion dollars spent by four companies.
spk_0
Like there's never in human history been an investment at the scale of this.
spk_0
And that investment is going to pay dividends or, or, you know, extract a toll of epic proportion.
spk_0
I don't know how to think about that.
spk_0
I am 100% convinced positive that that that AI is going to change most things about nearly everything.
spk_0
So I think it's just the most profound change in human history.
spk_0
But coming back from that, let's talk about the status system.
spk_0
So the first thing, so, you know, and I've been trying to editorialize on this, the lead and the limited time I've had in the last couple of weeks.
spk_0
So the first thing I think it's going to do is reinforce the prestige hierarchy.
spk_0
Like we are going to pay, I think that the net effect of AI right now and I, you know, my, you know, so my little research group is spinning up, you know, we work on mainly like computational social science kinds of projects.
spk_0
So we work on very large data sets and, and look for, look, look, look at things.
spk_0
So I'm doing a ton of things on the job market right now.
spk_0
But I'm also starting up a set of projects that are going to look at whether we are in the short term more heavily relying on pedigree than we have in the past.
spk_0
And the argument for that is that, like, take, you know, the most important argument for that is take writing.
spk_0
So I think for all of human history, I mean, since we invented, you know, the written word, language and instruments to communicate, we have made assessments of people based on writing.
spk_0
So we do that when you apply for a job, you write a, you know, historically, you write a cover letter and you write a resume.
spk_0
We do it when you apply to, to go to a college and we do it when, you know, when you're grading anything at any point in life, like you write something and then it's graded.
spk_0
And so writing has been this thing and, and it's everywhere, by the way, and I'm looking at us and I'm thinking for some reason, like, and then there's your blurb on your dating site profile, like it's used to evaluate you everywhere.
spk_0
But writing high quality content just got to be, you know, nearly universally available and basically free.
spk_0
So there's not a person in the United States with access to a state of the art AI system that can prompt a very good college admissions essay.
spk_0
I mean, far better than the average one, like, if you could took, if you took the history of college essays and assembled them all and compared them to a bunch of prompted essays, I guarantee you that with today's models, I guarantee you the average quality, which you just prompted as far above.
spk_0
And so that's the history of the college essay sample, but you just took a signal about that we've long used to make assessments of people and you've occluded it.
spk_0
And now we're back to where the conversation started, right, we used to have this pretty easy way to assess someone and now it's gone.
spk_0
So now we've taken sort of the written word and, you know, the same goes for skills assessment, like there's all of these you can't, you know, if you want to, if you want to figure out how good a coder is, you know, you need to now take them into a room.
spk_0
Disconnect the internet, watch them right code because you can't rely on anything else, not to get a repository, not a not an online examination like it's a wonky world where we go back to this you can't judge quality, right, because we don't know whether the content was created by the person or the machine or like a collaboration of the person and the machine and when you can't judge quality.
spk_0
That's precisely the time in which you rely on pedigree.
spk_0
So like if you're a college admissions officer take that problem at a place where a lot of people want to go, you can't figure out, you know, it's very hard not to read an essay and say, I'm admitting them because this is an outstanding essay if that ever happened.
spk_0
But what you can do is you can say like I've heard of the high school or you know there's some other status marker on the background and so I'm going to overweight that relative to information that formally was a signal but now it's just noise.
spk_0
Yeah, it's a fascinating thing and I'm I'm I'm not 100% sure is going to change everything about everything I just I felt that way about three months ago I am a little little more skeptical but it clearly has changed I would say has changed the ability to write a mediocre pretty good essay.
spk_0
I think people will still compete at prompts which is really a thin read to lean on for a lot of people into college or a job it's going to be a very a very different world just just for that like you say if it doesn't even if it doesn't advance in the next 18 months and I do suspect it will.
spk_0
And if it advances will see.
spk_0
I mean we had a little hope that prompt engineering was going to be a thing but then came the reasoning models and it's not really a thing anymore so I mean there's complex prompting to generate you know a agenda AI systems but you know but I think I think we already are at the point where it's a very good writer and and there's new approaches to how it's being trained to become an excellent.
spk_0
I'm not a writer and so but I mean the thing you have to keep in mind when you look at it is like you're looking at this like think about what it's learned between model you know between Gemini 1.5 and Gemini 2.5 or GPT 4 and GPT 5 like it's immensely better at stuff but it's learned all that and you know what four months six months like whatever the time interval is between major model introductions.
spk_0
It's learned at a rate that you know it took us humans like a century to learn that right I mean it's it's just astonishing what's happening but you know but I don't think we know yet how how it's going to affect things I think short run we see a heavy reliance on pedigree longer run I think it actually could really uproot the whole system right because now let's go back to to where we opened and and and I said I've given up.
spk_0
I'm not on choice and you said you'll never give up on choice but one of the ways I've given up on choice is I now routinely say like you know I mean I I bought I won't say what but I bought I bought I bought I like a beard clipper on Amazon a couple of weeks ago and like that's been normally the kind of decision I hate to make.
spk_0
Like I get on to Amazon and there's like you know a thousand of the damn things and I can't tell you're all right well I'll have like you know they're between the three yeah they don't mean anything but they're all between 4.4 and 4.6 or whatever you know there's no information in the ratings like you know I can like look at which ones I like aesthetically you know I will sit and think there would be like some irrelevant price difference to me and I'll sit and think about like do I want to pay that so instead I took an AI system and I am.
spk_0
I'm not here to prompt and I made it my agent I said I want you to choose one.
spk_0
Like I wanted to be between these two price points I could care less about the brand you go read the reviews you go do the work you bring me back you bring me back one not to one and so it eliminated the choice for me and I am going to use that all the time and it made you know by any standard.
spk_0
We have to figure out what it does when it processes information but I think by any standard of rationality it made a more rational choice than I would have done and a certainly more expeditious one from from my standpoint let's close with the personal reflection.
spk_0
You've been writing about this to write the book you thought about it a lot before that you've been studying it has it affected your own human craving for status do you think.
spk_0
So no one's asked me that question I mean I think I don't you know I don't know if it's because of the book or not but I think about status in some ways my own status much less than I used to.
spk_0
So like much less so I've had this you know kind of interesting academic trajectory where you you might argue that I've migrated downwards by choice and in the status hierarchy I mean and you know also like confectoring in the the job offers I've had I mean Berkeley's an amazing university so so it's totally you know it's great.
spk_0
You're not I'm not slumman you know but you know but I did move from Harvard to Berkeley and and that's not like it's not a common move that that people make but I think you know from from my own you know status like I think mostly about professional status but that's because I'm a workaholic so I spend so much time working and then you know doing like that is the vast majority of the time that I spend I work.
spk_0
So I think much less about it but I think that's like age and career stage and where I am in life like I have I have what what I need for sure but what I will say is that the book got me to be very reflective about how people respond to status and for me that was the most personal and the most interesting probably chapter to write was how if you have high status you respond and I think that's the most important thing.
spk_0
And the cost of having low status which I've thought a lot about over over my career but maybe in a sort of more objective kind of academic way because I've worked a lot on you know on status differences based on a scribe characteristics and what that does to to equitable opportunity that's been like you know the sort of peer reviewed research lots of it so so I thought a lot about that and you know
spk_0
but then when you when I wrote the book I just thought a lot more about like the human reaction the emotional reaction what this all means for people's sort of internal states versus the you know that this sort of more external stuff and all of that absolutely does you know change you in ways that probably are hard to put your your finger on but but I think you know anyone who writes a book like it is a bit of a personal journey almost no matter what what the topic is.
spk_0
Because it has you know even more than I think usual and the academic world it sort of it it assigns you to a quiet place right I mean you are going to spend a lot of time you know probably sitting alone thinking writing researching reading stuff and so it's a reflective undertaking I think no matter what but you know this
spk_0
topic for me very very much so my guest today has been Toby Stewart his book is anointed Toby thanks for being part of e-con talk.
spk_0
Love the conversation thanks for having me rest.
spk_0
This is e-con talk part of the Library of Economics and Liberty for more e-con talk go to e-contalk.org where you can also comment on today's podcast and find links and readings related to today's conversation.
spk_0
The Sound Engineer for e-con talk is Rich Goyette I'm your host Russ Roberts thanks for listening talk to you on Monday.