Inequality, Meritocracy and Status Competition

 

Extracts from Wilkinson & Pickett’s The Inner Level: How More Equal Societies Reduce Stress, Restore Sanity and Improve Everyone’s Well-being

In the notes to my previous post Environmentalism: It’s Complicated..., I mentioned the relationship between inequality and status competition, and here I would like to go into that in a little more depth.

To do so, I will be quoting from Richard Wilkinson & Kate Pickett’s The Inner Level: How More Equal Societies Reduce Stress, Restore Sanity and Improve Everyone’s Well-being. Here we will talk about the interactions between inequality and perceptions of meritocracy, combined with low-social mobility and how they affect our perceptions of status. And we will also brush over how feelings of heightened status competition affect us psychologically and socially. 

Richard Wilkinson & Kate Pickett’s The Inner Level: How More Equal Societies Reduce Stress, Restore Sanity and Improve Everyone’s Well-being

Social Mobility

 

“How everyone understands and experiences their relatively superior or inferior position in society also differs according to whether people normally remain in the class or caste they (and often previous generations of their family) were born into, or whether their social position can change.

This is the distinction between what sociologists call ‘ascribed’ and ‘achieved’ social class. In societies where there is little or no social mobility, class is seen simply as an accident of birth and, although your class or caste may be seen as inferior, there is little sense that you are personally culpable for your low social status: you can’t be blamed for your parentage.

You can't be blamed for the class you were born into.

 

But in societies where people are regarded as moving up or down the social ladder according to individual merit and effort [like ours], status appears much more as a reflection of personal ability or virtue, so making low social status appear as a mark of individual failure.”

In a meritocracy you are held responsible for your position in life.

[So I ask myself: what would this mean in a society that until recent decades was more of a meritocracy with high social mobility, but has very quickly, and only recently – through 40 years of policy guided by neo-classical (mainstream) economics – become less socially mobile and thus less of a meritocracy?

I believe this is a question we should be asking ourselves now: do we any longer live in the just and fair meritocratic society that many of us still believe it to be? Just look at the cost of living, and the property market.]

Is the ladder broken?

“The belief that modern market democracies are ‘meritocratic’, and that class position therefore reflects ability, implies that these societies are in some sense fair: that differences in status are justified.

The result is that low social status appears even more as if it were a mark of personal inadequacy and failure.

It strengthens the wide-spread tendency to assess people’s ability and intelligence on the basis of their social position, so making low social status still more demeaning.

Nor are these tendencies confined to how we judge others. They also raise or lower people’s belief in their own intelligence and ability.”

Do we unfairly judge those who fail to climb the broken ladder of social status?

 

Income Inequality

 

 

“The scale of income and wealth differences in a society is not just an additional element in status and class differentiation; it now provides the main framework or scaffolding on which markers of social status are assembled.

In effect, bigger income differences make the social pyramid taller and steeper. In his book ‘Distinction,’ the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu showed how much we used income to express status – not only through cars, clothing and housing, but also through things which demonstrate ‘taste’, like the books, restaurants and music we choose.

That tendency means obvious status differences. With that goes the tendency for people who are richer to be regarded as superior and to think they are better than other people...Greater inequality makes money more important as a key to social status and a way of expressing your ‘worth’.”

We express our social status through money and consumption.

 

Equality Re-Envisioned

 

 

“Perhaps because people tend to imagine that human beings have always lived in hierarchical societies, we rarely, if ever, stop to imagine what it would be like to belong to a community of near equals, free of the insecurities caused by class and status divisions.

We assume that the only way to regain the confidence and social ease which we lack would be to increase our own status, to be better educated, more affluent or successful, or to live a more interesting and enviable life.

Can you imagine a world full of equals?

 

There are, however, some intriguing indicators that living in much more egalitarian communities may make rather fundamental differences to human relationships and stress levels.

A few recent studies show the physiological effects of ‘modernisation’ - the shift from traditional rural cultures to developed urban societies. For example, it is well known that blood pressure tends to rise among people frequently exposed to stress.

Partly as a consequence of that, it is taken as entirely normal in developed countries for blood pressure to rise as people get older.

However, in tribal societies without settled agriculture, in which people live in non-hierarchical communities, several studies have found that blood pressure shows no tendency to rise with age.”

“[We must] understand the debilitating strength of the heightened social evaluative threat we all face, how it contributes to our present social and psychological problems, and how it can be reduced.

Not only does a larger area of privacy increase the potential for anxieties about what others would think if they knew what was hidden, but, as honesty has always been associated with what is done ‘above board’, ‘out in the open’ and ‘for all to see’, it also gives more scope for mistrust and paranoia.”

Isolationism and rampant self-interest can lead to paranoia

“[It can be shown] that people living in countries with bigger income differences between rich and poor are more prone to status anxiety. Regardless of individual income levels, people in more unequal societies become more worried about how they are seen and judged.

We also outline research which shows that those kinds of anxieties have particularly strong effects on people’s levels of stress hormones. Greater inequality almost inevitably increases the tendency to regard people at the top of society as hugely important and those near the bottom as nearly worthless.

The result is that we judge each other more by status and become more anxious about where other people think we fit in.

 

  

How Do We Respond?

There seem to be two contrasting responses to the way inequality increases the ‘social evaluative threat’.

High levels of social anxiety make some people feel that social life is a constant battle with low self-esteem. Lacking in confidence and overcome by extreme shyness, they tend to withdraw from social life and often become depressed...

...this kind of response is more prevalent in more unequal societies. It also provides evidence that some other common categories of mental illness involving feelings of superiority or inferiority also become more common in societies with bigger income differences.

The other common response is almost the opposite, Instead of withdrawing from social life, we show...that many people respond to the status anxieties and increased worries about how others see them by projecting an exaggeratedly positive view of themselves, apparently to conceal their self-doubt.

Modesty about personal abilities and achievements tends to be replaced by narcissism and a kind of self-enhancement or self-promotion. For most people this second strategy is a matter of putting on a brave face, putting their best foot forward and trying to hide their insecurities.

But there are probably also people with thick skins and apparently impervious egos who feel secure in their inherent superiority...[there is] evidence that narcissism and self-aggrandisement increase with inequality.”
~Richard Wilkinson & Kate Pickett, The Inner Level: How More Equal Societies Reduce Stress, Restore Sanity and Improve Everyone’s Well-being


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_G._Wilkinson

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kate_Pickett