30 Society & Sociology
The Default Library
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The Pecking Order: Why Every Society Has Hierarchy (and Why Some Have Less)
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Hens rank each other with their beaks. Kalahari hunters mock a good hunter's kill. The question is what humans do with the ape inside us.

Follows: The Veil of Ignorance: John Rawls and the Quest for a Fair Society (Philosophy), The Political Spectrum, Fairly Presented (Politics), and Clase Social y Dinero (Español)
In this deep dive
1. Two ladders to the top: dominance and prestige
2. The band that cut its leaders down to size
3. What changed: storage, inheritance and grain
4. The great argument: did farming really trap us?
5. Rank under the skin: status and health
6. What the research can and can't tell us

In 1921 a Norwegian zoologist still in his twenties, Thorleif Schjelderup-Ebbe, described something any farmer already half knew. A flock of hens is not a crowd. It is a ladder. One hen pecks every other hen and is pecked by none; the next pecks all but the first; and so on down to a bird that everyone pecks. He called it the Hackordnung, and when the idea reached English a few years later it became the "pecking order."
Now picture a scene of the kind anthropologists described in the Kalahari. A hunter brings a large kill back to camp. Nobody cheers. Instead, people find fault with it, as if it were hardly worth carrying home. The anthropologist Richard Lee, who lived with these foragers, recorded the reason: the band runs down a successful hunter's kill to deflate his pride, or, as his hosts put it, to "cool his heart."
Both scenes are about rank. The hens show what happens when rank is left to strength. The hunters show something stranger: a whole community working, deliberately and every day, to stop rank from hardening. Human history sits between those two pictures, and so does every society alive today.
Earlier pieces in this library asked what a fair society would look like (Rawls's veil of ignorance) and how people with different values argue about it (the political spectrum). The Spanish piece Clase Social y Dinero looked at how class feels from the inside. This deep dive goes underneath all of them, to the research on where hierarchy comes from in the first place. It is a field with real findings and live, sometimes bad-tempered, disputes. Both are shown here.
Part 1 — Two ladders to the top: dominance and prestige
For much of the twentieth century, research on hierarchy in animals focused on one thing: dominance. Rank went to whoever could win fights, or make others believe they would. Chimpanzees, baboons and hens all fit that picture, and it was tempting to assume humans did too.
In 2001 the anthropologists Joseph Henrich and Francisco Gil-White argued that this was only half the story. Their paper, "The evolution of prestige," drew a sharp line between two ways of getting others to defer to you:

Dominance is deference extracted by force or the threat of force. People give way to a dominant individual because they're afraid.
Prestige is deference freely conferred. People give way to a prestigious individual because they want something from them: their knowledge, their skill, their good opinion.

Why would anyone hand out deference for free? Henrich and Gil-White's answer was about learning. Humans live by culture, by copying techniques, recipes and know-how from others. A good learner needs to find the best models and get close to them. Flattering, helping and deferring to skilled people buys you time near them, which is time spent learning. Once everyone does this, deference itself becomes a signal: a newcomer can see who others are clustering around and start copying them too.

Dominance
Prestige

What earns it
Strength, intimidation, control of resources
Skill, knowledge, success that others want to learn

Why others defer
Fear
Admiration and the hope of learning

What followers seek
Safety, often by keeping their distance
Closeness, to watch and learn

How others feel about them
Dislike
Liking

Found in
Many social animals
Strongly developed in humans

The theory made testable predictions, and a 2013 study by Joey Cheng, Jessica Tracy, Henrich and colleagues tested some of them. They put strangers into small groups to solve a task, then asked everyone to rate each other. People who used either strategy, bullying or expertise, ended up with more influence, both in others' ratings and in a behavioural measure of who actually changed the group's answers. But the two felt very different: prestigious people were liked, dominant people were not. In a second study, observers watching video of the groups spent more time looking at both the dominant and the prestigious members than at anyone else.

Humans have two ladders to the top. One is climbed by making people afraid of you; the other by making them want to learn from you. Both work. Only one makes you liked.

The two routes also seem to pay off in the oldest currency of all. A 2011 study by Christopher von Rueden, Michael Gurven and Hillard Kaplan in a small-scale Amerindian society found that both dominant men (those likely to win a fight) and prestigious men (those with community-wide influence) had more children, and prestigious men also lost fewer children to early death.
And the hunger for standing appears to be general. A 2015 review in Psychological Bulletin by Cameron Anderson and colleagues, defining status as "the respect, admiration, and voluntary deference individuals are afforded by others," concluded that the desire for it behaves like a fundamental human motive: people monitor it constantly, react strongly when it's threatened, and their well-being and health track it.
What's still argued about. Not everyone accepts that dominance and prestige are cleanly separate in real life. Plenty of leaders combine both, and prestige can harden into control of resources, which is a kind of dominance. And much of the experimental evidence comes from small groups of strangers in a laboratory, which may not capture how rank works across a whole society. The distinction is widely used, but researchers still debate how neatly the world divides along it.
Part 2 — The band that cut its leaders down to size
If people crave status, and some are willing to bully for it, why were so many foraging societies famously egalitarian? This puzzle was the life's work of the American anthropologist Christopher Boehm, who died in 2021.
Boehm's answer, first set out in a 1993 paper in Current Anthropology titled "Egalitarian Behavior and Reverse Dominance Hierarchy," and later in his book Hierarchy in the Forest (1999), was that foragers are not equal because nobody wants to dominate. They are equal despite the fact that some people do, because everyone else gangs up to stop them.
In an ordinary dominance hierarchy, the strong control the weak. In what Boehm called a reverse dominance hierarchy, the many control the would-be strong. The rank-and-file act together, as a kind of coalition, to keep any one person from bossing the rest. Drawing on reports from 48 societies, from small foraging bands to settled chiefdoms, he described a toolkit that turns up again and again:

Public opinion. People talk, and a reputation for arrogance spreads fast.
Criticism and ridicule. The upstart is mocked, sometimes gently, sometimes not.
Disobedience. Orders are simply ignored.
Extreme sanctions. In rare cases, a persistent bully is driven out or even killed.

The Kalahari custom of insulting the meat is one of these levelling habits. Others reported from the same region are just as clever. Credit for a kill can go to the owner of the arrow rather than the hunter, and arrows are lent and swapped, so glory gets spread around. A hunter who has had a run of successes may take time off to avoid other people's envy.

Foragers were not equal because nobody wanted power. They were equal because everyone else was watching.

Boehm drew a large conclusion from this: that for most of the human past, people lived in groups like these, consciously holding down their own primate tendencies toward dominance. The anthropologist James Woodburn had earlier, in 1982, singled out "immediate-return" societies, where people get a direct and immediate return from their work instead of investing it over months, as the clearest egalitarian cases. Leadership in such groups existed, but as influence rather than command.
Two cautions. First, "egalitarian" here means mainly that no one could give orders to other adults. It does not automatically mean equality between men and women or between young and old, which varies from one society to another. Second, the foragers studied in the twentieth century were not fossils. They lived alongside farmers, herders and states, and many scholars warn against treating them as a window onto the Stone Age. Boehm still thought the pattern was too widespread to be an accident.
Notice how this connects to Part 1. Levelling customs target dominance, not prestige. A skilled hunter is still admired and listened to; he just isn't allowed to turn that admiration into orders. Henrich and colleagues have argued exactly this: prestige, which can't easily be stockpiled, survives in egalitarian bands as informal leadership, while the conversion of prestige into lasting power is what the band polices.
Boehm later pushed the argument one step further, in Moral Origins (2012). If bands punished bullies and cheats over a very long stretch of prehistory, he reasoned, then people who could control their own urge to dominate would have done better than people who couldn't. Group policing, in other words, may have shaped human nature itself, favouring a conscience that makes us feel shame before others punish us. He called this process social selection. It remains a hypothesis, hard to test directly, but it offers one explanation for why humans are so sensitive to being thought arrogant.
Part 3 — What changed: storage, inheritance and grain
So how did we get from bands that mocked a good hunter to kings and emperors? The traditional answer, still found in many textbooks, is a sequence formulated by the anthropologist Elman Service in 1962: band → tribe → chiefdom → state. Each step brought larger groups, more inequality, and more permanent leaders. In a tribe, a "big man" could win influence through his own achievements, but his position wasn't inherited. In a chiefdom, rank passed down through families. In a state, a ruling class backed by officials, taxes and soldiers took over.
That ladder is now heavily qualified (see Part 4), but the research of the last twenty years has sharpened the question of why inequality grows, and the answers are more interesting than "farming happened."
Wealth you can pass on. In 2009 a team led by Monique Borgerhoff Mulder and the economist Samuel Bowles studied 21 historical and contemporary small-scale societies. They separated three kinds of wealth: material (land, livestock, stored goods), embodied (strength, health, skill) and relational (networks of allies and partners). What mattered was how much of each could be handed down to children. Among foragers and horticulturalists, wealth passed down only weakly between generations, and inequality stayed low, comparable to the most equal modern countries. Among herders and farmers, whose livelihoods rest on animals and land that can be handed on, transmission was strong, and inequality reached levels comparable to, or even above, the most unequal modern economies.

Way of life
Typical key assets
Wealth passed to children?
Inequality found

Foraging
Skill, health, social ties
Weakly
Low

Horticulture (garden farming)
Skill, labour, ties
Weakly
Low

Pastoralism (herding)
Livestock
Strongly
High

Agriculture
Land
Strongly
High

Summarised from Borgerhoff Mulder et al., Science, 2009.
Wealth you can defend. A 2016 review by Siobhán Mattison and colleagues put it in two words: inequality depends on wealth being defensible and transmissible. A herd or a field can be guarded and inherited; a knack for tracking cannot. They added that this only became a lasting force after the climate stabilised in the Holocene, the warm period that began about 11,700 years ago, when farming started independently in several parts of the world.
Houses as a measuring stick. Inequality in societies without writing is hard to measure, so in 2017 Timothy Kohler and a large team used one consistent proxy: the spread of house sizes, converted into a Gini coefficient (the standard measure, where 0 means everyone has the same and 1 means one household has everything). Wealth gaps generally grew with domestication and with the size of political units. After the Neolithic, though, Eurasia pulled ahead of North America and Mesoamerica. Their explanation: Eurasia had large animals that could be domesticated, which made it profitable to farm much more land (think of ox-drawn ploughs) and eventually produced mounted warrior elites who could build bigger polities.
Grain makes states. The political scientist James C. Scott, in Against the Grain (2017), added a sharper edge. Early states, he argued, grew where people farmed cereals, and not by accident. Only cereals, in his words, "can serve as a basis for taxation: visible, divisible, assessable, storable, transportable." A tax collector can see a wheat field ripen and measure the harvest; he can't easily tax tubers left in the ground. Scott's early states were not gifts of civilisation but coercive machines: hierarchical, beset by malnutrition and disease, and often based on slavery. He also stressed that settled life, farming and towns were all in place long before anything like a state appeared in Mesopotamia.

Inequality didn't arrive with the first seed. It arrived when wealth became something you could fence, store, tax and leave to your children.

Part 4 — The great argument: did farming really trap us?
The story in Part 3 has a familiar shape: equality in the beginning, then a fall into hierarchy that was hard to reverse. Versions of it go back to Rousseau. In 2021 the anthropologist David Graeber and the archaeologist David Wengrow published a 700-page attack on that shape, The Dawn of Everything. Graeber died in September 2020, shortly after they finished it. The book became an international bestseller and set off one of the liveliest academic fights of the decade.
Their case, at its strongest. Graeber and Wengrow argued that the question "what is the origin of inequality?" is itself the problem, because it assumes humans started in one simple condition and then moved along a single track. Instead, they gathered evidence that early humans experimented constantly:

Seasonal politics. Some societies switched between authoritarian and communal arrangements depending on the time of year, gathering for a season under strict leaders and then dispersing into small, looser groups. If people could switch, the authors asked, in what sense were they "stuck" at any stage?
Monuments before farming. Göbekli Tepe, in today's Turkey, was built from around 9500 BCE by hunter-gatherers who supplemented their diet with early domesticated cereals. Large-scale cooperation did not need farms or kings.
Big settlements without obvious rulers. The "mega-sites" of the Cucuteni-Trypillia culture in today's Ukraine, around 4100 to 3500 BCE, held up to about three thousand structures. Graeber and Wengrow present them as early cities with little sign of palaces, temples or a ruling class.
Cities that changed course. At Teotihuacan in Mexico, archaeologists have found no royal palaces or portraits of rulers of the kind that fill Maya and Zapotec sites, and many scholars conclude it had some form of collective government; some read a shift, around 250 to 350 CE, from centralised rule to a more shared one.

From all this, they proposed that what modern people have lost is not an original equality but three basic freedoms: to move away, to disobey, and to reorganise society into a new form. The real question, they suggested, is not how inequality began but how we "got stuck."
The critics' case, at its strongest. Many reviewers praised the book's ambition. Many specialists also attacked its handling of evidence, and the attacks came from serious people:

Critic
Field
Main objection

Walter Scheidel
Ancient historian
Lacks "materialist perspectives," though he found it "timely and stimulating"

Gary Feinman
Archaeologist
Uses "cherry-picked and selectively presented" examples

Michael E. Smith
Archaeologist
Problems of evidence and argument

Kwame Anthony Appiah
Philosopher
"Discordance between what the book says and what its sources say"

Appiah's review in the New York Review of Books gave a concrete example. On the Trypillia mega-sites, he cited the archaeologist John Chapman, who suspects the thousand-odd houses at a site weren't all lived in at the same time, which would make the "city" much smaller. Appiah also argued that tentative suggestions early in the book harden into established facts later, and that the absence of evidence for rulers is not evidence of their absence. Wengrow replied at length, and the exchange is worth reading in full.

The live question is not whether early humans were creative about power. Everyone now agrees they were. It is how often that creativity beat the pressures of scale, storage and war.

Where this leaves the reader. Even several critics granted some of the book's central points; Appiah, for one, called its argument against historical determinism "immensely valuable." Human prehistory looks more varied than the old ladder suggested; large-scale cooperation predates states; and hierarchy was not a single event but something that rose, fell and rose again in different places. Other points remain open: how many large early settlements truly lacked elites, how often seasonal equality was the norm rather than the exception, and whether the material pressures in Part 3 make lasting hierarchy very likely once populations grow. Notice that two of the critics in the table, Feinman and Smith, co-authored the house-size study in Part 3. The fight is not between people who care about evidence and people who don't. It is about how to read thin evidence from the deep past.
Part 5 — Rank under the skin: status and health
A note: this section describes population research on social position and health. It is not medical advice, and an individual's health depends on many things beyond rank.
If hierarchy were only about who gets the best food, it would matter less. The research of the last fifty years suggests something more uncomfortable: where you stand on a social ladder seems to get into your body.
The Whitehall studies. In 1967 researchers began following more than 17,500 male British civil servants aged 20 to 64. Civil service grades are precise, so they could compare administrators at the top with messengers and doorkeepers at the bottom. Over ten years, in a 1984 paper led by Michael Marmot, the men in the lowest grade died at about three times the rate of the administrators, from heart disease, from a range of other causes, and from all causes combined. And it wasn't just the bottom versus the top. Each step down the ladder brought higher risk: a gradient, not a cliff.
The obvious explanations, smoking, blood pressure, cholesterol and exercise, explained only a minority of the gap, roughly a quarter to two-fifths depending on the analysis. A second study, Whitehall II, recruited about 10,300 civil servants, men and women aged 35 to 55, from 1985 to 1988. It found the same gradient for angina, chronic bronchitis and self-rated health, and in a 1997 paper Marmot's team reported that the largest single contributor to the grade gap in new heart disease was low control at work: having little say over what you do and how you do it. Adjusting for job control, standard risk factors and height erased most of the difference. Marmot later called the pattern "the status syndrome."

Whitehall I (men, 10-year follow-up)
Finding

Lowest grade vs. highest grade
About 3× the death rate

Pattern across grades
A steady gradient, each step down worse

Explained by smoking, blood pressure, etc.
Only a minority

Sources: Marmot, Shipley & Rose, Lancet 1984; Marmot et al., Lancet 1991 and 1997.
One worry is reverse causation: maybe sick people drift down the ladder, rather than the ladder making people sick. A 2003 Whitehall II analysis tested this directly over ten years and found little evidence that poor health pushed people down; the effect of position on later health was much larger.
Baboons and macaques. Animal studies let researchers do what they can't do with people. The primatologist Robert Sapolsky has studied wild baboons in Kenya since 1978. His 2005 review in Science made a key point: whether high-ranking or low-ranking animals are more stressed is not fixed. It varies with how the species, and the particular group, is socially organised.
One troop gave him a natural experiment. In the early 1980s some males of "Forest Troop," the ones most involved in dominance fights, took to raiding a tourist lodge's garbage pit. In 1983 tuberculosis from infected meat in the dump broke out, and by 1986 every one of those refuse-eating males was dead: 46 percent of the troop's adult males. The survivors were less aggressive males, and the troop developed what Sapolsky and Lisa Share called a "pacific culture": more grooming, a relaxed hierarchy, and signs of less stress among low-ranking males. A decade later, when none of the males from that time remained, new males who had joined from other troops had adopted the same culture. Hierarchy's harshness, in other words, wasn't fixed by biology; it could be learned and unlearned.
In 2016 Noah Snyder-Mackler and colleagues went further, experimentally rearranging the social ranks of female rhesus macaques. Low rank, imposed this way, changed the activity of immune genes toward a more inflammatory state, and the effects were largely reversible when rank changed. That's about as close to proof as this field gets that low status itself, not just poverty or bad habits, can alter the body.

Rank is not just where you stand. It is how much control you have over your own day, and the body seems to keep count.

How you see your own rank. In 2000 Nancy Adler and colleagues asked 157 women to rate their own standing in society. That subjective rating was more consistently linked to measures such as self-rated health, heart rate and the stress hormone cortisol than income or education were, and most links held after controlling for them. Feeling low may matter in its own right.
The size of the gap today. A 2016 study by Raj Chetty and colleagues, using 1.4 billion tax records, found that in the United States between 2001 and 2014 the richest 1% of men lived 14.6 years longer than the poorest 1%, and the richest women 10.1 years longer than the poorest.
The live dispute: does inequality itself make a society sicker? Here researchers genuinely disagree. In a 2015 review, Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson, authors of The Spirit Level, argued that the evidence "strongly suggests" wide income gaps damage population health. An earlier systematic review of 98 studies, led by John Lynch in 2004, concluded there was "little support" for income inequality as a major, general cause of health differences between rich countries, while agreeing that raising the incomes of the poorest would improve their health. Both camps accept that being lower on the ladder is bad for you. They disagree about whether a steeper ladder harms everyone on it.
Part 6 — What the research can and can't tell us
Put the pieces together and a picture emerges, with its uncertainties attached.
What the evidence supports fairly well:
- Humans have a deep appetite for status, and at least two routes to it: dominance and prestige.
- Many foraging societies held dominance down deliberately, through ridicule, levelling customs and the threat of collective action.
- Inequality tends to grow when the most important wealth can be stored, defended and inherited, which farming and herding made far more common.
- Position on a social ladder is linked to health along a gradient, and animal experiments show rank itself can change the body.
What remains genuinely open:
- How typical the well-studied foragers were of the deep human past.
- How many early large settlements truly lacked rulers, and how often seasonal or experimental politics were the norm.
- Whether material pressures make lasting hierarchy nearly inevitable once societies grow, or whether people have more room to choose than the old story allowed.
- Whether more unequal societies are less healthy overall, or only harder on those near the bottom.
It's also worth remembering how recent the fully administered state is. James C. Scott argued that until roughly 400 years ago, a large share of the world's people had never seen a routine tax collector, or could still slip out of a state's reach: they lived in mountains, steppes, forests and marshes that states found it impossible or not worth the trouble to rule. For most of history, in other words, a large share of humanity lived beyond the reach of the most formal hierarchies of all.
There's also a lesson that cuts across political lines. If you read this research as proof that hierarchy is "natural" and so unchangeable, you are ignoring the foragers, Forest Troop, and every society that rebuilt its institutions. If you read it as proof that hierarchy is a recent mistake we can simply drop, you are ignoring how widespread status-seeking is and how hard the pressures of scale have pushed. The research supports something more modest and more useful: hierarchy is a constant temptation, but its steepness and its kind vary enormously, and people have shaped both.
That suggests a practical set of questions you can ask of any hierarchy, whether it's a nation, a company, a school or a family group chat:

Question
What it tells you
Where it comes from

Do people defer out of fear or out of respect?
Whether rank rests on dominance or prestige
Henrich and Gil-White

Can those at the bottom leave, refuse or band together?
Whether there's a check on would-be bosses
Boehm; Graeber and Wengrow's three freedoms

Can the advantages be stored and handed down?
Whether today's gap will become tomorrow's inheritance
Borgerhoff Mulder, Mattison

How much control do people lower down have over their own work?
How heavily the ladder may weigh on their health
Marmot and the Whitehall studies

None of these questions tells you what the right answer is. A hospital or an army may need clear lines of command; a band of friends may not. But they turn a vague feeling that something is "unfair" or "just how things are" into something you can look at and argue about.
That is where Rawls's veil of ignorance comes back in. Behind the veil, you don't know whether you'll be the administrator or the doorkeeper. The Whitehall studies suggest that the difference isn't only in pay. It may be years of life. Whether a society should flatten its ladder, keep it but make it easier to climb, or leave it to markets and merit is a values question, and the political spectrum piece lays out the strongest cases on each side. What the science can do is tell you what the ladder is made of. The next two pieces in this series look at the people who tried to describe its rungs, from Marx, Weber and Bourdieu to the elite theorists, and at the long history of castes, estates and classes.

The takeaway
Every human society has hierarchy, but not of one kind. Dominance is rank taken by fear; prestige is rank given for skill. Many foragers kept dominance down by acting together against would-be bosses, and inequality grew most where wealth could be stored, defended and inherited. How far farming "trapped" humanity is a live fight between scholars like Graeber and Wengrow and their critics. Meanwhile, research from the Whitehall studies to rhesus macaques suggests that low rank, and especially low control over one's own life, gets under the skin.
Try this: for one week, notice each time someone in your life defers to someone else, at work, in a family chat, in a meeting. Ask: is this dominance (fear) or prestige (wanting to learn from them)? Then ask the harder question about yourself: when people defer to you, which ladder are they on?

Sources & Further Reading
Sources
- Schjelderup-Ebbe's "pecking order" (1921–22): summarised in Wikipedia's "Pecking order," which cites his 1922 paper.
- Henrich, J. & Gil-White, F. "The evolution of prestige." Evolution and Human Behavior 22(3), 2001. Cheng, J.T., Tracy, J.L., Foulsham, T., Kingstone, A. & Henrich, J. "Two ways to the top." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2013. Henrich, J., Chudek, M. & Boyd, R. "The Big Man Mechanism." Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 2015 (source for the Kalahari levelling customs, citing Lee 1979 and Johnson & Earle 1987).
- von Rueden, C., Gurven, M. & Kaplan, H. "Why do men seek status?" Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 2011. Anderson, C., Hildreth, J.A.D. & Howland, L. "Is the desire for status a fundamental human motive?" Psychological Bulletin, 2015.
- Boehm, C. "Egalitarian Behavior and Reverse Dominance Hierarchy." Current Anthropology 34(3), 1993; Hierarchy in the Forest (1999). Woodburn, J. "Egalitarian Societies." Man 17(3), 1982.
- Borgerhoff Mulder, M. et al. "Intergenerational wealth transmission and the dynamics of inequality in small-scale societies." Science, 2009. Mattison, S.M. et al. "The evolution of inequality." Evolutionary Anthropology, 2016. Kohler, T.A. et al. "Greater post-Neolithic wealth disparities in Eurasia than in North America and Mesoamerica." Nature, 2017. Scott, J.C. Against the Grain (2017). Service's band-tribe-chiefdom-state scheme (1962): summarised in Wikipedia's "Chiefdom."
- Graeber, D. & Wengrow, D. The Dawn of Everything (2021) and its reception; Appiah, K.A. "Digging for Utopia," New York Review of Books, 16 December 2021; Scheidel and Feinman commentaries in Cliodynamics, 2022. Dates for Göbekli Tepe, Çatalhöyük, the Trypillia mega-sites and Teotihuacan: the corresponding Wikipedia entries, used as leads.
- Marmot, M.G., Shipley, M.J. & Rose, G. "Inequalities in death." Lancet, 1984. Marmot, M.G. et al. "Health inequalities among British civil servants: the Whitehall II study." Lancet, 1991; "Contribution of job control and other risk factors to social variations in coronary heart disease incidence." Lancet, 1997. Chandola, T. et al. "Health selection in the Whitehall II study." Social Science & Medicine, 2003.
- Sapolsky, R.M. "The influence of social hierarchy on primate health." Science, 2005. Sapolsky, R.M. & Share, L.J. "A pacific culture among wild baboons." PLoS Biology, 2004. Snyder-Mackler, N. et al. "Social status alters immune regulation and response to infection in macaques." Science, 2016.
- Adler, N.E. et al. "Relationship of subjective and objective social status..." Health Psychology, 2000. Chetty, R. et al. "The Association Between Income and Life Expectancy in the United States, 2001–2014." JAMA, 2016. Pickett, K.E. & Wilkinson, R.G. "Income inequality and health: a causal review." Social Science & Medicine, 2015. Lynch, J. et al. "Is income inequality a determinant of population health?" Milbank Quarterly, 2004.
Go deeper
- 📘 Hierarchy in the Forest — Christopher Boehm (the reverse dominance hierarchy, from the person who named it)
- 📘 The Dawn of Everything — David Graeber & David Wengrow (read it alongside Appiah's review below, and argue with both)
- 🌐 Kwame Anthony Appiah, "Digging for Utopia," New York Review of Books (the sharpest critical review, and a model of how to check a big book against its sources)
- 📘 The Status Syndrome — Michael Marmot (the Whitehall findings, told by the man who led them)
- 📘 Behave — Robert Sapolsky (rank, stress and the body, with the baboons of Part 5)
- 📘 The Secret of Our Success — Joseph Henrich (why prestige and copying made humans what we are)


Class, Status and Power: Marx, Weber and Bourdieu
-------------------------------------------------
Three great thinkers looked at the same ladder and saw different things. Then their critics looked back at them.

Follows: The Pecking Order (Society 1), The Political Spectrum, Fairly Presented (Politics), and Clase Social y Dinero (Español)
In this deep dive
1. Marx: class as your relation to the means of production
2. Weber: class, status and party are three different things
3. Bourdieu: the capital you can't put in a bank
4. The functionalist answer: is inequality useful? (Davis and Moore, and Tumin)
5. Elites: Mills, Michels and Pareto
6. Using the lenses together

Picture three people at a wedding. One owns a chain of car washes and has more money than anyone in the room, but he mispronounces the wine and nobody quite knows where to seat him. One is a university professor on a modest salary who chats easily with the bride's parents about books they've all read. The third is a city councillor: middling income, no special polish, but the person everyone wants a word with, because she sits on the committee that decides planning permits.
Who ranks highest?
If your answer is "it depends what you mean," you've already reached the conclusion that took sociology about a century to work out. The first piece in this series looked at hierarchy in general: why humans seek status, and how foragers, farmers and states differed. This one looks at the thinkers who tried to say what modern rank is actually made of. The Spanish piece Clase Social y Dinero introduced Bourdieu's forms of capital in a few paragraphs. Here they get their full argument, alongside Marx, Weber, the functionalists and the elite theorists, each in their own terms, each with their strongest case and their main critics.
A word on approach. Several of these thinkers became banners for political movements. This piece isn't choosing a side. Each theory is presented as its defenders would recognise it, and each critique as its makers meant it.
Part 1 — Marx: class as your relation to the means of production
Karl Marx (1818–1883) did not invent the idea of class, but he gave it its most famous definition. For Marx, your class isn't your income, your accent or your job title. It's your relationship to the means of production: the land, machines, factories and tools that a society needs to produce what it lives on.
Under capitalism, he argued, that relationship splits people into two great groups:

The bourgeoisie own the means of production. They live on profit.
The proletariat own nothing but their ability to work. They live by selling that ability for wages.

The Communist Manifesto, written with Friedrich Engels and published in 1848, opens with the line that made the idea famous. In Samuel Moore's 1888 translation, which Engels revised:

"The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles."

Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf: every era, the Manifesto says, has had its oppressors and oppressed, and modern society is "splitting up into two great hostile camps." It even predicted that the in-between groups (small shopkeepers, craftsmen, peasants) would "sink gradually into the proletariat," squeezed out by big industry.
Why does this relationship matter so much? Because, Marx argued, the owner's profit comes from the gap between what workers produce and what they are paid. This is the theory of exploitation, and it makes class a relationship of conflict built into the system, not a matter of bad bosses or good ones. It also shapes how people think. In the 1859 Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy: "It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness."
Two refinements show that Marx was subtler than his slogans:

A class "in itself" and "for itself." In The Poverty of Philosophy (1847), he wrote of workers who share a common situation as "already a class as against capital, but not yet for itself." A class only becomes a political force when its members recognise their shared interest and organise.
The sack of potatoes. In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), he described French small farmers as living side by side without real ties, forming a class "much as potatoes in a sack form a sack of potatoes": similar, but unable to act together.

And Marx knew the real world was messier than two camps. In the third volume of Capital, published after his death, the chapter titled "Classes" admits that even in England "middle and intermediate strata even here obliterate lines of demarcation everywhere." He then asks, "What constitutes a class?" and begins to answer. A few paragraphs later the manuscript simply stops. The editor's note reads: "[Here the manuscript breaks off.]"
The strongest case for Marx's view. It explains things other approaches only describe. Why do wages and profits move in opposite directions in some periods? Why do owners and workers so often clash over the same decisions? Why do people's politics track their economic position? Marx's answer is that class is not a ranking but a relationship, and that relationships of ownership shape power, ideas and history. Even many non-Marxist sociologists accept that who owns productive assets, and who must work for others, is a basic fact about any society.
The main critiques.

Critique
Who made it
The point

The middle didn't vanish
Eduard Bernstein, Evolutionary Socialism (1899)
He disputed predictions of capitalism's collapse, the disappearance of the middle class and the growing misery of workers

Authority, not ownership
Ralf Dahrendorf, Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society (1959)
In modern firms, managers who don't own the company give the orders; conflict follows authority

A new ruling class
Milovan Djilas, The New Class (1957)
In communist states, the party bureaucracy became a new "ruling and exploiting class"

Too few categories
Many later sociologists
Two classes can't capture professionals, managers and the self-employed

Marxist sociologists answered some of these. Erik Olin Wright, for instance, developed the idea of contradictory class locations for people like managers who sit between owners and workers. But by the mid-twentieth century most researchers wanted a richer toolkit, and they found one in a German contemporary who had read Marx closely.
Part 2 — Weber: class, status and party are three different things
Max Weber (1864–1920) agreed with Marx that economic position matters enormously. He disagreed that it was the only thing that matters, or that everything else follows from it. In an essay written before the First World War and published after his death in his great work Economy and Society (1922), Weber split social rank into three dimensions. In English it's usually called "Class, Status, Party."
1. Class is about your position in the market. What can you sell (property, skills, labour) and on what terms? Your market situation shapes your life chances: your odds of a decent house, good health, education for your children. This is close to Marx, but broader. A surgeon and a cleaner both sell their work, yet their market situations, and their life chances, are worlds apart.
2. Status (Weber's German word is Stand) is about social honour: how much respect a group's way of life commands. Status groups show themselves in who marries whom, who eats with whom, the conventions they keep, and the opportunities they try to keep for themselves. Weber's key point was that status and wealth can come apart. Mere money, he argued, isn't automatically a recognised basis of honour; the newly rich speculator can be wealthy and still looked down on, while an impoverished aristocrat or a respected cleric keeps standing without much cash.
3. Party is about organised power: groups that set out to win control of an organisation or a state, in order to get things done for their members. A party in Weber's sense can be a political party, but also a lobby, a movement or a faction.

Dimension
Weber's term
Based on
Example of someone high on it, low on others

Economic
Class
Market situation, life chances
The car-wash millionaire at the wedding

Social
Status (Stand)
Honour, lifestyle, respect
The professor; an aristocrat in genteel poverty

Political
Party
Organised power
The councillor on the planning committee

Marx asked who owns what. Weber added two more questions: who is respected, and who is organised to get their way?

The strongest case for Weber's view. It fits a world where people's positions don't line up neatly. Clergy, teachers and nurses often hold more respect than income. Some of the wealthiest people are not the most powerful, and some of the most powerful are not wealthy. Weber also explains why groups fight over respect as fiercely as over money, and why status groups, from medieval guilds to modern professions, work so hard to control who gets in. His categories are the ancestors of most modern ways of measuring class.
Weber's own examples make the point vividly. He observed that the typical American boss, like the big speculator, deliberately gave up claims to social honour: they were rich and powerful, but not respectable in the old sense. The reverse was also common, in groups whose members guarded their standing by controlling marriage, dining and entry into their circle, from old aristocracies to closed professions.
Weber's influence is still visible in how class is measured. The most widely validated British measure, the Nuffield class schema developed in the 1970s and codified in the UK's official National Statistics Socio-Economic Classification, sorts people mainly by the kind of employment relationship they have: routine workers on a "labour contract" on one side, professionals and managers on a "service contract," with career prospects and trust, on the other. That is a question about market situation and life chances, not about ownership.
The main critiques. Marxists answer that Weber describes appearances, but that status and party usually follow economic power in the long run: honour gets bought, and parties get funded. Others say that splitting rank into many dimensions makes it harder to explain anything, because you can always find a dimension that fits. And Weber, like Marx, built his categories from European history; how well they travel to societies organised around caste, kinship or religion is a question the next piece in this series takes up.
Part 3 — Bourdieu: the capital you can't put in a bank
Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002) knew about class from the inside. He grew up in Béarn, a rural corner of southwest France, the son of a postal worker, in a household that spoke Béarnese, the local form of Gascon. He rose through France's most elite schools and later held a chair at the Collège de France. He served in Algeria during its war of independence and stayed on to do fieldwork among the Kabyle people. Much of his work can be read as an attempt to explain the invisible rules he had to learn on the way up.
His most famous book, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1979, English 1984), drew on surveys carried out between 1963 and 1968. In 1998 the International Sociological Association voted it the sixth most important sociology book of the twentieth century.
Forms of capital. Bourdieu's first move was to extend the idea of "capital" beyond money. As the Spanish piece explained, he distinguished:

Economic capital: money, property, assets.
Cultural capital: education, knowledge, ways of speaking, familiarity with "legitimate" culture, credentials.
Social capital: networks of relationships, connections you can call on.
Symbolic capital: prestige and recognition, which the other forms can turn into once others accept them as legitimate.

Capital in his sense is anything that gives you advantage in a particular arena (Bourdieu called these arenas fields), and the forms can be converted into each other, at a cost. Money buys elite schooling, which becomes cultural capital; credentials open doors to networks; networks lead to money.
Habitus. His second move was the concept that makes Bourdieu distinctive. Habitus is the set of "durable, transposable dispositions" that you absorb from your upbringing: how you stand, speak, eat, dress and feel at ease. It's class lodged in the body, a feel for the game you acquired without trying. Someone with the habitus of an elite family walks into an interview, a gallery or a dinner party and simply knows the rules. Someone without it can learn them, but often feels the effort, and others can sense it.

"Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier." — Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction

Taste as a weapon. In Distinction, Bourdieu argued that what we call good taste is not neutral. Preferences in music, food, art and decoration line up with class, and the tastes of the dominant classes are treated as simply better, as natural refinement rather than learned habit. When working-class people accept that their own tastes are inferior, Bourdieu called it symbolic violence: domination that works because the dominated share the dominant group's view of what counts.
The strongest case for Bourdieu's view. It explains what money alone can't: why children of educated parents tend to do well at school even when family income is similar, why first-generation professionals often feel like impostors, and why class persists in societies that have removed formal barriers. Empirical work has repeatedly found links between cultural capital and success. A 1982 study by Paul DiMaggio, for instance, found that American high school students' participation in "status culture" was related to their grades. Bourdieu also influenced how modern class surveys are built. In 2013 Mike Savage and colleagues, analysing the BBC's 2011 Great British Class Survey (161,400 online respondents plus a nationally representative sample), used economic, cultural and social capital together to propose seven British classes, from an "elite" to a "precariat."
The main critiques.

Critique
Who made it
The point

Too deterministic
Richard Jenkins (1982)
The theory is "essentially deterministic and circular": structures produce habits that reproduce structures, leaving little room for change

It's French
Michèle Lamont, Money, Morals and Manners (1992)
Comparing French and American upper-middle classes, she argued Bourdieu misses moral status signals and national differences

Snobs became omnivores
Richard Peterson & Roger Kern (1996)
High-status taste shifted from snobbish exclusivity toward liking a bit of everything

The survey was flawed
Colin Mills (2014)
He called the Great British Class Survey analysis "theory free" data dredging, with an arbitrary result

Bourdieu's defenders reply that "omnivorous" taste can itself be a new form of distinction, since knowing how to enjoy everything in the right way is a skill that takes cultural capital. That argument is still running.
Part 4 — The functionalist answer: is inequality useful?
So far, every thinker has treated inequality as something to be explained, and usually criticised. In 1945 two American sociologists, Kingsley Davis and Wilbert Moore, asked a different question: what if inequality does a job for society?
Their short paper, "Some Principles of Stratification," became the core statement of the functionalist view, associated with Talcott Parsons and his school, which explains social institutions by the functions they perform. Their argument runs roughly like this:

Some positions in any society are more functionally important than others.
Some positions require scarce talent or long and costly training.
To make sure capable people take on the important, demanding positions and perform them well, society must offer bigger rewards: income, prestige, comfort.
So unequal rewards are not a malfunction. They are, in effect, the mechanism that sorts people into the roles society most needs.

Notice the direction of causation. On this view, a job is not important because it is well paid; it is well paid because it is important and the people able to do it are scarce.

Davis and Moore did not say inequality was fair. They said that no complex society had managed without it, and they wanted to know why.

The strongest case. It offers an explanation for why complex societies, including those founded on promises of equality, have kept unequal rewards. It connects to ordinary intuitions: few people would train for a decade to be a surgeon if the pay and respect were the same as for an unskilled job. And it fits the economic logic of incentives that most economists accept.
Tumin's critique. In 1953 Melvin Tumin, a Princeton sociologist, published "Some Principles of Stratification: A Critical Analysis," the most famous reply in the debate. His main points:

Importance can't be measured objectively. Who decides that one role is more "functionally important" than another? A society needs its engineers, but it also needs the people who build what they design.
Talent is not objectively measured either, and its supply is not fixed. Inequality itself limits the pool, because children from poor families never get the chance to show what they can do.
The "sacrifice" of training is overstated. He questioned whether people in long training really make the great sacrifices the theory assumes.
Money is not the only motive. People also work for meaning, duty and the satisfaction of doing a job well.

Davis replied that he was trying to explain inequality, not justify it, and accused Tumin of misreading him. Later critics added a sharper example: if pay tracked functional importance, why would entertainers and star athletes earn many times more than teachers? And many pointed out that inherited wealth and family connections are causes of who gets the top positions, not just results.
Functionalism peaked in the 1940s and 1950s and was in rapid decline in sociology by the 1960s, but the core question never went away. It has even returned through genetics. A 2026 review of the new field of sociogenomics points out that some researchers read genetic influences on education and occupation as a measure of how meritocratic a society has become, an interpretation the authors trace straight back to Davis and Moore's picture of a society sorting people into positions by efficiency and scarce talent. Tumin's objection carries over in modern form: what counts as "talent" depends on what a society chooses to reward, and on who gets the chance to develop it. Every debate about whether high pay for executives or doctors is "deserved," or whether a flatter society would lose its incentives, is a rerun of Davis, Moore and Tumin.
Part 5 — Elites: Mills, Michels and Pareto
Marx, Weber and Bourdieu describe classes, large groups of people. Another tradition asks a more pointed question: who actually rules? Its answer is that, whatever a society's formal rules, a small minority always does.
Pareto: history as a graveyard of aristocracies. The Italian economist and sociologist Vilfredo Pareto (1848–1923), who succeeded Léon Walras in the chair of political economy at Lausanne, argued in his Treatise on General Sociology (1916) that every society is run by an elite, by which he meant, without moral praise, the people who score highest in their field. Elites don't last. They grow complacent or close themselves off, and new talent from below either gets absorbed or overthrows them. History, in his phrase, is "a graveyard of aristocracies." Borrowing from Machiavelli, he divided rulers into foxes, who govern by cunning and deal-making, and lions, who govern by force and conviction; a healthy ruling group needs a mix. Pareto's politics are contested. He welcomed Mussolini's rise and was honoured by the new regime shortly before his death in 1923, but how far he actually endorsed fascism is, as historians put it, a matter of controversy.
Michels: the iron law of oligarchy. Robert Michels (1876–1936), a friend and student of Weber, was an active socialist who studied the very kind of party he belonged to. He had joined Germany's Social Democratic Party and stood, unsuccessfully, for parliament for it in 1903. What he found disturbed him. In Political Parties (1911; English 1915), he argued that any large organisation needs professional leaders, specialists, newspapers and offices. Members are busy and grateful to the people who run things. Leaders gain expertise and control of information, and they come to value their positions. The result, in the 1915 translation by Eden and Cedar Paul:

"It is organization which gives birth to the dominion of the elected over the electors, of the mandataries over the mandators, of the delegates over the delegators. Who says organization, says oligarchy." — Robert Michels, Political Parties, Part VI, ch. 2

His own life added an ironic footnote. After moving to Italy, Michels drifted from socialism through revolutionary syndicalism to fascism, joining Mussolini's party in 1924.
The "iron law" has been tested many times. The best-known exception is the International Typographical Union, which Seymour Martin Lipset and colleagues found had stayed genuinely democratic (Union Democracy, 1956). More recently, researchers have studied whether online volunteer projects escape the law; a 2014 study by Aaron Shaw and Benjamin Mako Hill was titled, tellingly, "Laboratories of Oligarchy? How the Iron Law Extends to Peer Production."
Mills: the power elite. In The Power Elite (1956), the American sociologist C. Wright Mills argued that post-war America was run by the interlocking leaders of three institutions: the giant corporations ("two or three hundred" of them), the federal government, and the military. These people tended to come from the same prep schools and elite universities and belong to the same exclusive clubs, and their decisions affected not only Americans but, as he put it, "the underlying populations of the world." Mills was careful to say this was not a conspiracy; members of the elite might not even see themselves as one. Five years later President Dwight Eisenhower, a former general, used his farewell address on 17 January 1961 to warn Americans against the influence of the "military-industrial complex."
The pluralist reply. The political scientist Robert Dahl answered Mills directly. In a 1958 paper, "A Critique of the Ruling Elite Model," he pointed out that the theory could be cast "in a form that makes it virtually impossible to disprove": if the visible leaders don't look like a ruling elite, one can always claim a hidden elite behind them. In Who Governs? (1961), a study of New Haven, Connecticut, Dahl argued that many interest groups competed for influence and that power was spread among them, with government acting as a broker. Critics of Dahl replied that he only counted the decisions that were openly fought over. Peter Bachrach and Morton Baratz (1962) argued that power also lies in keeping issues off the agenda, and Steven Lukes later added a third face: shaping what people want in the first place.

Thinker
Key idea
What it explains
Main objection

Pareto
Elites rise and fall; foxes and lions
Why revolutions often replace one elite with another
Vague about what counts as an elite

Michels
Organisation breeds oligarchy
Why democratic movements develop entrenched leaders
Some organisations stay democratic (ITU)

Mills
Corporate, political, military elites interlock
Concentration of national power
Hard to test; Dahl's pluralist evidence

The modern evidence. The argument is now fought with data. In 2014 Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page analysed 1,779 US policy issues and concluded that economic elites and business-oriented groups had "substantial independent impacts" on policy, while average citizens had "little or no independent influence." Peter Enns (2015) replied that even when the rich and the middle class disagree, policy tends to end up about where the middle would want, because the two groups usually rank policies in the same order. Both papers are widely cited, and the dispute remains open.
Part 6 — Using the lenses together
Go back to the wedding. Marx would ask who owns productive property: the car-wash owner, clearly, is the only capitalist in the room. Weber would separate the three dimensions: the businessman leads on class, the professor on status, the councillor on party. Bourdieu would notice that the professor's ease with the bride's parents is itself a form of capital, and that the businessman's discomfort shows a habitus formed somewhere else. Davis and Moore would ask whether the rewards each receives reflect the scarcity and importance of what they do. Michels and Mills would want to know whether the councillor's committee answers to voters or to a few insiders.

Lens
Core question
Best at explaining
Tends to miss

Marx
Who owns the means of production?
Conflict between owners and workers; long-run change
Middle classes, status, non-economic power

Weber
What are your class, status and party?
People who rank high on one dimension and low on another
Why the dimensions so often line up

Bourdieu
What capital and habitus do you carry?
How advantage passes on without formal barriers
Change, individual choice, national differences

Davis–Moore
What function does inequality serve?
Why complex societies all have unequal rewards
Inherited advantage, power, unmeasurable "importance"

Elite theory
Who actually decides?
Concentration of power behind formal democracy
Real competition and contestation

Modern sociologists rarely pick just one. Official statistics in the UK, for instance, use a seven-class scheme built from people's occupations and employment conditions; the Great British Class Survey added Bourdieu's capitals; and debates about billionaires and political donations draw on Mills and Michels. The lenses compete, but they also complement each other.
Try them on a figure who didn't exist in any of these thinkers' lifetimes: a driver who works through a ride-hailing app.

Marx would ask who owns the means of production. The driver owns the car, which looks like a small capitalist's asset; the company owns the platform, the data and the pricing algorithm, which is where the real control lies. Is the driver a worker, a tiny business, or one of Wright's contradictory locations?
Weber would separate the dimensions. The driver's market situation (often no guaranteed hours or pension) shapes life chances; the job carries little social honour; and drivers have little "party" power unless they organise.
Bourdieu would look at capital and habitus. A driver with a university degree and fluent local speech is carrying cultural capital that might convert into a different job; one without may find the door narrower.
Davis and Moore would ask whether the rewards reflect how important and how scarce the work is, and Tumin would ask who decided what counts as important.
Michels and Mills would ask who writes the platform's rules, and whether drivers, customers or regulators have any real say.

Each lens shows something real. None shows everything.
A useful habit follows. When you hear someone say that "class" explains an election, a school result or a health statistic, ask which class they mean: ownership (Marx), market situation and honour (Weber), inherited capital and habitus (Bourdieu), or a ranking of rewards (Davis and Moore). Many arguments that seem to be about facts turn out to be about definitions, and the disagreement often dissolves, or sharpens usefully, once that is clear.
There's one more reason to know them all. Each has been used as a weapon: Marx to justify revolutions and regimes that created new elites, functionalism to justify every existing inequality, elite theory by people on the far left and the far right alike. Reading them in their own terms, with their critics alongside, is the best defence against being recruited by any one of them without noticing.

The takeaway
Marx defined class by ownership of the means of production and saw history as class struggle. Weber split rank into class (market position), status (honour) and party (organised power), which can diverge. Bourdieu showed how cultural and social capital, carried in the habitus, pass advantage on without formal barriers. Davis and Moore argued that unequal rewards fill society's most important jobs; Tumin answered that importance and talent can't be measured and inequality limits opportunity. Pareto, Michels and Mills argued that minorities always rule, and pluralists like Dahl pushed back. Each lens sees something the others miss.
Try this: pick someone you know well, or yourself, and score them on Weber's three dimensions (class, status, party) and Bourdieu's four capitals (economic, cultural, social, symbolic). Where are they high, and where low? Then ask which lens explains their life best, and which one they'd be most annoyed to be described by.

Sources & Further Reading
Sources
- Marx & Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), ch. 1, Samuel Moore's 1888 translation; Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy (1847), ch. 2; The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), ch. 7; Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859); Capital, vol. III, ch. 52 "Classes" — all from the Marxists Internet Archive. Dates: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Karl Marx."
- Bernstein (1899), Dahrendorf (1959), Djilas (1957) and Wright's contradictory class locations: the corresponding Wikipedia entries, used as leads.
- Weber, "Class, Status, Party," in Economy and Society (1922): summarised in Wikipedia's "Three-component theory of stratification"; dates from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Max Weber."
- Bourdieu, Distinction (1979; trans. 1984) and biographical details: Wikipedia, "Pierre Bourdieu" and "Distinction (book)." DiMaggio, P. American Sociological Review 47(2), 1982. Jenkins, R. "Pierre Bourdieu and the Reproduction of Determinism." Sociology 16(2), 1982. Lamont, M. Money, Morals, and Manners (1992). Peterson, R. & Kern, R. "Changing Highbrow Taste: From Snob to Omnivore." American Sociological Review 61(5), 1996. Savage, M. et al. "A New Model of Social Class?" Sociology 47(2), 2013. Mills, C. "The Great British Class Fiasco." Sociology 48(3), 2014.
- Davis, K. & Moore, W.E. "Some Principles of Stratification." American Sociological Review 10(2), 1945. Tumin, M. "Some Principles of Stratification: A Critical Analysis." American Sociological Review 18(4), 1953; the debate as summarised in Wikipedia's "Melvin Tumin" and "Structural functionalism."
- Pareto: Wikipedia, "Vilfredo Pareto" and "Circulation of elites." Michels, R. Political Parties, trans. Eden & Cedar Paul (1915), Internet Archive; biography from Wikipedia. Lipset, Trow & Coleman, Union Democracy (1956). Shaw, A. & Hill, B.M. Journal of Communication 64(2), 2014.
- Mills, C.W. The Power Elite (1956). Dahl, R. "A Critique of the Ruling Elite Model." American Political Science Review 52(2), 1958; Who Governs? (1961). Bachrach, P. & Baratz, M. "Two Faces of Power." APSR 56(4), 1962. Gilens, M. & Page, B. "Testing Theories of American Politics." Perspectives on Politics 12(3), 2014. Enns, P. "Relative Policy Support and Coincidental Representation." Perspectives on Politics 13(4), 2015.
Go deeper
- 🌐 The Communist Manifesto, chapter 1, at the Marxists Internet Archive (short, vivid and worth reading in the original, whatever you think of it)
- 🌐 Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — Max Weber (a careful guide to Weber's method and his worries about bureaucracy)
- 📘 Distinction — Pierre Bourdieu (dense but rewarding; start with the introduction and the chapters on taste)
- 📘 Social Class in the 21st Century — Mike Savage and colleagues (Bourdieu's capitals applied to modern Britain, by the Great British Class Survey team)
- 📘 The Power Elite — C. Wright Mills (still readable and still argued about seventy years on)
- 📘 Political Parties — Robert Michels (the iron law, from a disillusioned insider; the 1915 translation is in the public domain)


Castes, Estates and Classes: How Societies Have Ranked People Through History
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For most of history, the question wasn't how far you could rise. It was what you had been born as. A tour of the ranking systems humans have built, and the one we live in now.

Follows: The Pecking Order and Class, Status and Power (Society 1–2), and El Virreinato: Cómo Se Gobernaba un Imperio (Español)
In this deep dive
1. Born into it: estates, castes, classes, and Europe's three orders
2. Varna and jati: caste in India's history, and an argument about the census
3. Caste in India today
4. Samurai, farmers, artisans, merchants: Tokugawa Japan
5. Ranked by bondage and by "blood": slavery and the casta
6. From birth to merit, and the satire that named it

In 1363 the Parliament of England passed a law about clothes. The Statute Concerning Diet and Apparel set out, rank by rank, what people were allowed to wear. The Black Death had killed so many workers that wages had risen, and some ordinary people could now afford the kind of fine fabrics and furs that had marked out their betters. Parliament's answer was not to celebrate their good fortune. It was to tell them to dress according to their station.
That law sounds absurd today. It made perfect sense to the people who passed it. In their world, your rank was not a result. It was who you were, and it should be visible at a glance.
The earlier pieces in this series looked at why humans form hierarchies and at the thinkers, from Marx to Bourdieu, who tried to describe modern class. This one is a historical tour: medieval Europe's three estates, India's varna and jati, Japan's Tokugawa order, slavery as a status system across cultures, and the casta labels of Spanish America. It ends with the shift to class societies and with a word, "meritocracy," that was coined as a warning.
Two of these systems are not history. Caste is part of daily life for hundreds of millions of people in South Asia, and descendants of Japan's old outcaste communities still face prejudice. Those sections are written descriptively and with the debates among scholars, and among the people concerned, laid out rather than settled.
Part 1 — Born into it: estates, castes, classes, and Europe's three orders
Sociologists distinguish three broad ways of ranking people. Real societies mix them, but the ideal types help.

Estate system
Caste system
Class system

Basis of rank
Legal privileges and duties of an order
Birth into a group, often linked to occupation and ritual status
Economic position: property, occupation, income

Written into law?
Yes: different rights, privileges and taxes
Historically often, through custom and religious law; now usually outlawed as discrimination
Formally no; everyone has equal legal rights

Can you move?
Rarely; through the Church, ennoblement, or wealth over generations
In principle no for individuals; groups have sometimes risen
Yes, in principle; in practice, often slowly

Marriage
Usually within your order
Usually within your group (endogamy)
Free, though people tend to marry similar people

Examples
Medieval and early modern Europe
India's jati, Japan's outcaste groups
Most modern industrial societies

Max Weber, as the previous piece explained, called groups ranked by honour and lifestyle Stände, which is also the German word for estates. That's no coincidence. Translators sometimes leave Stand in German precisely to keep its roots in view: medieval guilds, professions and feudal ranks.
The key difference between the first two columns and the third is what we might call the story a society tells about rank. In an estate or caste system, inequality is supposed to be built into the order of things, often with religious backing: you are where you belong. In a class system, everyone is formally equal and inequality is supposed to come from what people do. Whether that second story is true is one of the oldest arguments in sociology, and one we'll come back to at the end.

In a society of estates, rank is who you are. In a society of classes, rank is supposed to be what you've done. The fights start in the gap between the story and the reality.

Those who pray, those who fight, those who work. Early in the eleventh century, Adalbero, bishop of Laon in northern France, wrote a poem addressed to King Robert II. In it he described society as divided into three orders: oratores, bellatores, laboratores — those who pray, those who fight, and those who work. Each served the others: the clergy prayed for everyone's salvation, the warrior nobility protected everyone, and the labouring majority fed everyone. His phrasing became the classic statement of an idea that would shape Europe for the next seven centuries. The French historian Georges Duby later devoted a whole book, Les trois ordres (1978; in English The Three Orders, 1980), to how this model of society took hold.
Over time, the model hardened into the estates of the realm. In France, which offers the clearest case:

The First Estate was the clergy, from wealthy bishops to poor parish priests.
The Second Estate was the nobility, which included both old warrior families ("nobility of the sword") and families ennobled through royal office and the law courts ("nobility of the robe").
The Third Estate was everyone else: peasants, artisans, merchants, lawyers, bankers.

Membership mattered in law. French nobles were exempt from forced labour on the roads and from most direct taxes, including the taille, the oldest of them, and laws like England's 1363 statute tried to make rank visible. By the eve of the French Revolution, the first two estates together are commonly estimated at about 2 percent of France's population, and the Third Estate at around 98 percent.
The estates were also political bodies. When the French king, desperate for money, summoned the Estates-General in 1789 for the first time since 1614, a bitter dispute broke out over whether votes would be counted by order, one vote per estate, which let the two privileged estates outvote the rest, or by head. That January the clergyman Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès published a pamphlet that became one of the most famous in history. It began with three questions:

"What is the Third Estate? Everything. What has it been hitherto in the political order? Nothing. What does it desire? To become something." — Sieyès, What Is the Third Estate? (1789)

On 17 June 1789 the deputies of the Third Estate broke away and declared themselves a National Assembly. On the night of 4 August, noble members of the Assembly proposed abolishing feudal rights and privileges, and the Assembly agreed. On 26 August, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen set out the principle of a new kind of society. Its first article: "Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions may be founded only upon the general good."
Notice what that sentence does not say. It doesn't say there will be no social distinctions. It says they must be justified by the common good. That idea, that inequality needs a reason, connects the end of the estates directly to the Davis–Moore debate and to Rawls's difference principle, both covered earlier in this library.
Part 2 — Varna and jati: caste in India's history, and an argument about the census
The English word "caste" comes from the Portuguese and Spanish casta, meaning lineage. Europeans applied it to two quite different Indian ideas, and much confusion comes from mixing them up.
Varna is a fourfold scheme found in ancient Sanskrit texts. Its best-known source is a hymn in the Rigveda (10.90), the Purusha Sukta, which describes the cosmos being created from the sacrifice of a primordial being, Purusha. From his mouth, arms, thighs and feet came four groups: Brahmins (priests and scholars), Kshatriyas (rulers and warriors), Vaishyas (traders and farmers) and Shudras (labourers and servants). Scholars generally consider the hymn a relatively late addition to the Rigveda, and it is the only hymn in it to name all four varnas. Later law books, above all the Manusmriti, elaborated the scheme at length, but historians stress that these texts provide "models rather than descriptions" of how society actually worked.
Jati (literally "birth") refers to the actual groups people belong to, of which there are thousands, not four. A jati is typically endogamous (people marry within it), often historically linked to an occupation, and rooted in a region. Jatis are far more varied and flexible than the tidy varna scheme suggests, and the relationship between a given jati and a varna has often been disputed, even by its own members.

Varna
Jati

Number
Four (with groups outside it)
Thousands

Main source
Sanskrit texts (Rigveda, law books)
Lived social practice

Scope
All-India, theoretical
Local and regional

Marriage
No evidence of marriage restrictions in the Vedic period
Usually within the group

Purity, or power? One highly influential account was that of the French anthropologist Louis Dumont, whose Homo Hierarchicus (1966) argued that caste is organised around a religious opposition between purity and pollution. Others countered that caste is a social phenomenon driven by economics, politics and sometimes geography as much as by religion. The Sanskrit scholar Patrick Olivelle has argued that ancient and medieval texts don't support a purity-impurity ranking as the basis of varna, and Dumont himself later acknowledged that ancient varna hierarchy wasn't built on that principle. The Indian sociologist M. N. Srinivas, meanwhile, showed in the 1950s that caste was not static: under what he called Sanskritisation, a lower or middle-ranked group could adopt the customs of high castes and, over generations, claim a higher place.
The census argument. Here is one of the liveliest debates in the field. Under British rule, the decennial census recorded caste for the whole population. The census commissioner Herbert Hope Risley, a believer in the race science of his day (he classified Indians partly by measuring the width of their noses), tried to rank castes within the varna scheme. Groups lobbied to be recorded in a higher varna, and caste associations formed in response. Some historians argue that the censuses of 1901 and 1911 in particular hardened caste identities.
The historian Nicholas Dirks, in Castes of Mind (2001), building on his teacher Bernard Cohn, made the strongest version of this case: that caste as we know it today, as the single, all-defining category of Indian society, was in large part a product of colonial rule. Bayly offered a related point: until well into the colonial period, she wrote, much of the subcontinent was populated by people for whom formal caste distinctions were of only limited importance.
Then genetics entered the argument. A 2013 study led by Priya Moorjani, analysing 73 groups, found that the ancestral populations of India mixed extensively between about 4,200 and 1,900 years ago, and that after this India shifted to a pattern in which mixture "even between closely related groups became rare." A 2016 study dated the shift to endogamy, especially among upper castes, to about 70 generations ago. And a 2017 study of more than 260 South Asian groups found 81 with "founder events" (descent from a small number of ancestors, followed by marrying within the group) stronger than those of Ashkenazi Jews or Finns. The geneticist David Reich has used these results to argue that the colonial-invention thesis is wrong: long-term endogamy is ancient.

The genes say Indians have married within their groups for well over a thousand years. The archives say the colonial state reshaped how those groups were named, ranked and mobilised. Both can be true.

The two findings are not necessarily in conflict. Endogamous groups can be very old, while the colonial state's categories, rankings and record-keeping still changed how caste worked, especially its role in politics. Much of the remaining argument is about how much weight each deserves.
Part 3 — Caste in India today
Modern India's constitution was drafted by a committee chaired by B. R. Ambedkar, a jurist and economist born into a community then treated as "untouchable." In 1936 he had published Annihilation of Caste, a fierce attack on the caste system and its religious justifications. The constitution that came into force in 1950 abolished untouchability: Article 17 forbids its practice "in any form," and it is punishable by law. Nepal legally abolished caste discrimination in 1963.
India also built one of the world's largest systems of affirmative action, called reservation. Places in central government jobs and public higher education are set aside for the groups below, and Scheduled Castes and Tribes also have reserved seats in legislatures:

Group
Share reserved (central level)
Share of population (2011 census)

Scheduled Castes (SC), many of whom call themselves Dalits
15%
16.6%

Scheduled Tribes (ST)
7.5%
8.6%

Other Backward Classes (OBC)
27%
Not counted in the census

Economically Weaker Sections (EWS) of other groups, since 2019
10%
Not applicable

Reservation is debated intensely inside India, and both sides have serious arguments. Supporters say it is a remedy for centuries of exclusion, that it has created Dalit and tribal doctors, officials and legislators who would otherwise not exist, and that formal equality alone cannot undo inherited disadvantage. Critics say benefits flow mostly to the better-off within each group, that selection should rest on individual merit or economic need rather than birth group, and that the system keeps caste identity politically alive. The courts have tried to hold a balance: the Supreme Court has excluded the "creamy layer" of better-off OBC families, and in August 2024 it ruled 6 to 1 that states may create sub-quotas within the SC and ST categories. Mass protests have come from both directions, against reservation in 1990 and 2006, and from groups demanding to be included.
What surveys show. The largest recent survey, by the Pew Research Center, interviewed 29,999 Indian adults face to face between November 2019 and March 2020. It found that nearly all Indians identify with a caste, whatever their religion: caste is shared by Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Christians and others. Thirty percent identified with "General Category" castes; just 4 percent as Brahmin. The results pointed two ways at once:

82% said they had not personally faced caste discrimination in the past year, and most did not feel there was a lot of caste discrimination in India.
Yet 62% said it was very important to stop men in their community from marrying into another caste, and 64% said the same for women. That figure varied hugely by region: about 82% in the Central region, about 35% in the South.

Other data agree that marriage is where caste is most persistent. Analyses of the India Human Development Survey find that only about 5 percent of married women are in inter-caste marriages. A phone survey in several Indian states and cities between 2016 and 2018 found that roughly 70 percent of women and 60 percent of men would object if a relative married a Dalit.
Caste is also back at the centre of national data. India's delayed census includes a question on caste, the first full caste enumeration since 1931. Its first phase, listing every house, ran state by state between April and September 2026; the head count itself, where caste is asked, is due in February 2027 (as of October 2026). It's a hard thing to count. The 2011 census round's attempt at a socio-economic and caste count recorded people's own descriptions, and ended up with hundreds of thousands of caste and sub-caste names. Supporters argue that policy needs accurate numbers; critics worry it will deepen caste politics. Both sides will be arguing over the results for years.
Part 4 — Samurai, farmers, artisans, merchants: Tokugawa Japan
From 1603 to 1868, Japan was ruled by the Tokugawa shoguns, and its society is often summarised by four characters: shi-nō-kō-shō, warriors, farmers, artisans and merchants. The scheme came from Chinese Confucian thought, where the four occupations were scholar-officials, farmers, artisans and merchants, with merchants, in theory, at the bottom. In Japan, the top place went not to scholars but to the hereditary warrior class, the samurai.
The groundwork was laid before the Tokugawa took power. In 1588 the warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi ordered his famous sword hunt, confiscating weapons from commoners. It had several aims at once: to prevent peasant uprisings, to deny weapons to his rivals, and to fix a clear line between the armed warrior class and everyone else. Under the Tokugawa, samurai made up only about 5 percent of the population, while peasants were around 80 percent. Samurai rank was inherited; they were entitled to surnames and swords; and many of them, in two centuries of peace, became salaried administrators rather than fighters.
Here the textbooks have changed. Older accounts presented the four orders as a strict ladder, with merchants at the bottom. Research since about 1995 has found that, below the samurai, farmers, artisans and merchants were not formally ranked against each other in that way, and the old ladder diagram has been removed from Japanese history textbooks. In practice, merchants became creditors to a debt-ridden samurai class, which turned the official order upside down in a very visible way.
Below and outside the four orders were groups treated as outcastes. Those labelled with the slur eta (roughly "abundance of filth") were associated with work considered polluting, such as butchery, tanning and handling the dead; their status was hereditary. Hinin ("non-persons") included beggars, the sick and the destitute; their status was not always hereditary, and some could return to commoner life. Hinin communities often formed near temples and graveyards, under their own leaders, and lived by begging and by duties such as guarding, cleaning temple grounds and even arresting criminals. Both groups were segregated into their own hamlets and neighbourhoods, and the later name for their descendants comes from that separation.
The Meiji government that overthrew the shogunate dismantled the old order quickly. Former court nobles and feudal lords were merged into a new peerage, the kazoku. The samurai became a registered class called shizoku, with no special privileges; their stipends were converted to government bonds, and in March 1876 an edict banned them from wearing swords in public. Everyone else became heimin, commoners. A Liberation Edict in 1871 abolished the outcaste labels. Several samurai rebellions followed. The largest and last, the Satsuma Rebellion led by Saigō Takamori, needed 65,000 imperial troops and eight months to suppress, and its defeat effectively ended the samurai as a class. The shizoku category itself lingered on family registers until 1947.
Legal freedom did not end prejudice. People who wanted to keep the old boundaries invented new labels, such as shin-heimin, "new commoners." From the 1880s, the language of eugenics and public hygiene was turned against buraku communities. Popular myths about the outcastes' supposedly foreign origins were after-the-fact rationalisations: as a whole they are ethnically Japanese. Descendants of the old outcaste communities, now called burakumin (people of the hamlets), continued to face discrimination in marriage and work. Their number today is estimated at between 1.5 and 3 million. They organised early: the National Levellers Association (Suiheisha) in the 1920s and the Buraku Liberation League after the Second World War campaigned for equal treatment, and living conditions in many buraku communities have improved greatly, though discrimination has not disappeared.

Abolishing a status in law takes a day. Removing it from people's minds can take generations.

Part 5 — Ranked by bondage and by "blood": slavery and the casta
Slavery as a status. Slavery has existed in societies as different as ancient Athens and Rome, Joseon Korea, the medieval Islamic world and the plantation Americas. The sociologist Orlando Patterson, in Slavery and Social Death (1982), argued that slavery is best defined not by the kind of work the enslaved did, but by three elements: domination backed by violence; natal alienation, being cut off from one's ancestors and descendants, with no recognised claims of kinship; and general dishonour. The enslaved person, in his phrase, suffered a "social death." Slavery, on this view, is the extreme form of status hierarchy: a rank below which no one could fall.
The scale could be enormous. In Joseon Korea, the enslaved nobi made up by some estimates more than 30 percent of the population at their peak. The transatlantic trade carried off an estimated 12.5 million captives from Africa, of whom about 10.7 million survived the voyage. In the Americas, slavery fused with an invented idea of race, so that status was read off the colour of a person's skin and passed on to their children.
But slavery's relation to hierarchy could also be startlingly paradoxical. In parts of the Islamic world, enslaved soldiers called mamluks became an elite. In Egypt and Syria, mamluks ruled their own sultanate from 1250 until the Ottoman conquest of 1517. The Ottoman Empire's devshirme system took Christian boys, aged roughly 7 to 20, from its European provinces, converted and trained them, and sent the most talented into the palace and the highest offices; the system produced a considerable number of grand viziers between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, the most powerful post after the sultan. Here legal unfreedom and great power went together: men taken from their families depended on the sultan alone, and served as a counterweight to the hereditary nobility.
Abolition came slowly and late. Mauritania was the last country to abolish slavery officially, by decree, in 1981, and made it a crime only in 2007. And unfree labour has not vanished. The latest global estimate, from the International Labour Organization and partners, found 50 million people in modern slavery in 2021: 28 million in forced labour and 22 million in forced marriage.
The casta in Spanish America. The library's Spanish piece El Virreinato describes how the Spanish Crown divided its American subjects into a república de indios and a república de españoles, and how eighteenth-century Mexican artists painted the famous cuadros de castas: sets of often sixteen panels, each showing a couple of different origins and their child, labelled with a term for the "mixture." The ideas behind it had roots in Spain's doctrine of limpieza de sangre, "purity of blood," originally a religious test aimed at families descended from converts to Christianity, which travelled to the Americas and came to be applied to ancestry.
The labels had real consequences. Indigenous people paid tribute but were exempt from the Inquisition; Spaniards and mestizos paid no tribute but could be tried by it. People sometimes tried to move into whichever category served them better. That fluidity is the heart of the modern debate. For a long time historians described a rigid "caste system" (sistema de castas). Archival research, as the Spanish piece notes, has shown that individuals were labelled differently in different records and contexts, that economic position mattered as much as origin, and that the word casta was used much less by colonial authorities than the paintings suggest. The anthropologist Joanne Rappaport, in The Disappearing Mestizo (2014), rejects the "caste system" framework for colonial New Granada altogether. Many historians now see the paintings as an elite attempt to impose order on a society that was already very mixed and fluid, rather than a picture of how it worked.
Part 6 — From birth to merit, and the satire that named it
How did class societies replace estates and inherited orders? Not all at once, and not only in Europe.
Exams as an escape from birth. China's imperial examinations, with roots in the Sui dynasty around 605 CE, became the main path to high office by written examination and lasted about 1,300 years, until they were abolished in 1905. The principle was revolutionary: office by tested ability, not by lineage. Europeans noticed. In Britain the Northcote–Trevelyan Report of 1854, influenced by the Chinese example, recommended that entry to the civil service be by competitive examination on merit.
The legal end of the orders. In France the Declaration of the Rights of Man (1789) proclaimed that all citizens are "equally eligible to all dignities and to all public positions and occupations, according to their abilities, and without distinction except that of their virtues and talents." Japan's Meiji reforms, India's constitution, and the abolition of slavery across the Americas did the same work in their own ways. Legal ranks gave way to formal equality, and what was left was class: differences of property, occupation and education that the law no longer recognised but did not erase.
Meritocracy, a word coined as a warning. In 1958 the British sociologist and politician Michael Young published The Rise of the Meritocracy. It is a satire set in a future Britain that has come to be run by the clever. In Young's imagined society, merit is defined as "IQ plus effort," schools sort children ruthlessly, and the old class system is replaced by one in which the winners believe they deserve everything and the losers have no excuse left. The book ends in 2034 with a revolt against the meritocratic elite by "Populists." It was turned down by the Fabian Society and by eleven publishers before it found one.
Young is usually credited with coining "meritocracy," but the sociologist Alan Fox had already used the word, also pejoratively, in the journal Socialist Commentary in 1956. Young popularised it, and to his dismay the word lost its irony. Politicians began to use it as a goal. In 2001 Young wrote in The Guardian, criticising the Labour government's embrace of the idea:

"It is good sense to appoint individual people to jobs on their merit. It is the opposite when those who are judged to have merit of a particular kind harden into a new social class without room in it for others." — Michael Young, "Down with meritocracy," The Guardian, 2001

The modern argument. The debate Young started is now one of the biggest in political philosophy and social science, and it has strong positions on several sides:

Position
Representative work
Core claim

Meritocracy is a liberating force
Adrian Wooldridge, The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World (2021)
Selecting by ability broke the power of birth and patronage and built the modern world

Meritocracy breeds hubris and humiliation
Michael Sandel, The Tyranny of Merit (2020)
It fosters hubris among the winners and demeans those without credentials, polarising society

Meritocracy now drives inequality
Daniel Markovits, The Meritocracy Trap (2019)
Investment in elite human capital breeds inequality and burdens everyone in its orbit, winners included

Mobility is slower than we think
Gregory Clark, The Son Also Rises (2014)
Long-run social mobility is low; status persists across many generations (his methods and conclusions are contested)

The data add complications of their own. In the United States, the share of children who grow up to earn more than their parents fell from about 90 percent for those born in 1940 to about 50 percent for those born in the 1980s, according to a 2017 study led by Raj Chetty. Across rich countries, the economist Miles Corak has documented what's been called the Great Gatsby Curve: countries with more income inequality tend to have less mobility between generations. And a 2019 study by Per Engzell and Felix Tropf found that where mobility between generations is higher, genetic differences account for a larger share of differences in education. That is roughly what Young predicted: in a society that removes barriers of birth, what remains of inequality looks more and more like a judgement on the individual, which is exactly what made his satire so uncomfortable.

Young's warning was not that merit is bad. It was that a society which believes its hierarchy is perfectly deserved will stop asking whether it is fair.

So the long story told in this piece is not a simple march from injustice to justice. Estates and castes justified rank by birth and divine order. Class societies replaced that with formal equality and the promise of rising by talent and work, which has opened doors for vast numbers of people. But they have created their own justification for hierarchy, and their own ways of passing advantage down. The last word belongs to the Declaration of 1789, which has never stopped being a test: social distinctions "may be founded only upon the general good." Every system in this piece, including ours, can be asked whether it meets it.

The takeaway
Societies have ranked people by legal order (Europe's three estates), by birth group (India's jati and Japan's outcaste groups), by bondage (slavery, from Korea's nobi to the Atlantic trade), and by ancestry labels (Spanish America's castas, more fluid in practice than the paintings suggest). Scholars still debate how far the colonial census shaped caste, while genetics shows endogamy in India is ancient. Caste remains part of life for many in South Asia, especially in marriage. Class societies replaced legal rank with formal equality and the promise of merit, a word Michael Young coined as a warning about a new hierarchy that believes it deserves its place.
Try this: list five things that shaped where you stand today: your parents' jobs, where you were born, your schooling, your health, your own effort, a lucky break. For each, ask whether a medieval peasant, a Tokugawa merchant or a citizen of Young's imagined meritocracy would have had it. Then ask the Declaration's question of your own society: which of its distinctions are founded on the general good?

Sources & Further Reading
Sources
- England's 1363 Statute Concerning Diet and Apparel and medieval sumptuary laws: Wikipedia, "Statute Concerning Diet and Apparel 1363" and "Sumptuary law."
- Adalbero of Laon's three orders: Wikipedia, "Adalbero of Laon." Duby, G. Les trois ordres (1978; English, The Three Orders, 1980). French estates and population shares (estimates): Wikipedia, "Estates of the realm" and "Estates General of 1789." Sieyès, What Is the Third Estate? (1789). The night of 4 August: Wikipedia, "Abolition of feudalism in France." Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789), articles 1 and 6, Avalon Project, Yale Law School.
- Varna, jati, the Purusha Sukta, Dumont, Olivelle, Bayly, Risley and the colonial census: Wikipedia, "Caste system in India," "Purusha Sukta," "Homo Hierarchicus," "Sanskritisation," "Castes of Mind." Bayly, S. Caste, Society and Politics in India (1999). Dirks, N. Castes of Mind (2001).
- Moorjani, P. et al. "Genetic evidence for recent population mixture in India." American Journal of Human Genetics, 2013. Basu, A. et al. PNAS, 2016. Nakatsuka, N. et al. "The promise of discovering population-specific disease-associated genes in South Asia." Nature Genetics, 2017.
- Ambedkar, Article 17, reservation shares, the 2019 EWS quota and the 2024 sub-quota ruling: Wikipedia, "B. R. Ambedkar," "Fundamental rights in India," "Reservation in India." SC and ST population shares, 2011 census: Wikipedia, "Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes." 2027 census and caste enumeration: Wikipedia, "2027 census of India" (as edited October 2026); Ministry of Home Affairs schedule (houselisting April–September 2026, caste in the second phase) as reported by Deccan Herald and The Wire.
- Pew Research Center, "Religion in India: Tolerance and Segregation" and "Attitudes about caste," 29 June 2021. Thorat, A. et al. "Persisting Prejudice." CASTE: A Global Journal on Social Exclusion 1(2), 2020 (IHDS and SARI data).
- Tokugawa status order and textbook revisions, the 1588 sword hunt, the 1871 Liberation Edict, shizoku and the 1876 sword ban, and the burakumin: Wikipedia, "Four occupations," "Sword hunt," "Burakumin," "Shizoku," "Haitōrei Edict."
- Patterson, O. Slavery and Social Death (1982). Nobi: Wikipedia, "Nobi." Transatlantic estimates: Wikipedia, "Atlantic slave trade," citing Anderson et al. (2013) and the Slave Voyages database. Mamluks and devshirme: Wikipedia, "Mamluk," "Mamluk Sultanate," "Devshirme." Mauritania: Wikipedia, "Slavery in Mauritania." ILO, Walk Free & IOM, Global Estimates of Modern Slavery (2022), via the ILO news release.
- Casta and casta paintings: Wikipedia, "Casta"; Rappaport, J. The Disappearing Mestizo (2014); Katzew, I. Casta Painting (2004); and this library's El Virreinato.
- Imperial examinations: Wikipedia, "Imperial examination." Northcote–Trevelyan Report (1854): Wikipedia. Young, M. The Rise of the Meritocracy (1958); Alan Fox's 1956 use and Young's 2001 Guardian article: Wikipedia, "Meritocracy" and "The Rise of the Meritocracy." Chetty, R. et al. "The fading American dream." Science, 2017. Corak, M. Journal of Economic Perspectives 27(3), 2013. Engzell, P. & Tropf, F.C. "Heritability of education rises with intergenerational mobility." PNAS, 2019.
Go deeper
- 📘 Annihilation of Caste — B. R. Ambedkar (the classic critique of caste, by the man who chaired the drafting of India's constitution)
- 🌐 Pew Research Center — "Attitudes about caste" (2021) (the best large survey of how Indians themselves experience caste today)
- 📘 Slavery and Social Death — Orlando Patterson (a comparative study of slavery across many societies, and the idea of "social death")
- 📘 The Three Orders — Georges Duby (how medieval Europe imagined its own hierarchy)
- 📘 The Rise of the Meritocracy — Michael Young (short, funny, and more unsettling now than in 1958)
- 📘 The Tyranny of Merit — Michael Sandel, read with The Aristocracy of Talent — Adrian Wooldridge (the case against and the case for, side by side)


Climbing the Ladder: What the Data Says About Social Mobility
-------------------------------------------------------------
Can a child born poor end up comfortable? For a century people argued about it with anecdotes. Then researchers got the tax records.

Follows: Castes, Estates and Classes (Society 3) · Clase Social y Dinero (Español) · The Political Spectrum, Fairly Presented (Politics)

  
    In this deep dive
    
      Two questions that sound like one
      How sticky is the ladder? Measuring the link
      The simulator: how long does advantage last?
      The Great Gatsby curve and its critics
      Place: the neighbourhood as a ladder
      Education: the great equaliser, with an asterisk
      Income is a flow, wealth is a reservoir
      Why? The structural and the individual case
    
  

  Picture two American babies. One is born in 1940, the other in 1984. By the time each turns thirty, what are the odds they earn more than their parents did at the same age, after adjusting for inflation?

  For the 1940 baby, about 90%. For the 1984 baby, about a coin flip. That single comparison, from a 2017 paper by Raj Chetty and colleagues titled "The Fading American Dream", did more to change how people talk about getting ahead than a generation of speeches. It also hides almost everything interesting about the subject, which is what this piece is for.

  Castes, Estates and Classes, the previous piece in this series, ended where modern societies began: legal ranks abolished, the promise of rising by talent, and Michael Young's warning about a meritocracy that believes it deserves its place. It closed with that 90-to-50 headline and a nod to the "Great Gatsby curve". Clase Social y Dinero, in the Spanish library, looked at class as something you feel. This piece opens up the data behind the headline. How much does the family you're born into decide where you end up? How does that differ between countries and neighbourhoods? And why do serious people, looking at the same numbers, still disagree about what they mean?

  Part 1 — Two questions that sound like one

  "Social mobility" is really two different questions, and most arguments about it go wrong by mixing them up.

  Absolute mobility asks: are you better off than your parents were? It's about living standards. If the whole economy grows and the gains are shared, almost everyone can do better than the generation before, even if nobody changes places.

  Relative mobility asks: did you end up in a different position from your parents? If your parents were in the bottom fifth of incomes, where did you land? This is about rank, and it's zero-sum by construction. For one person to climb from the 20th percentile to the 60th, someone else has to slip down. There are only a hundred percentiles to go around.

  The OECD, in its 2018 report A Broken Social Elevator?, uses a neat image: mobility works like a set of escalators. Everybody can be carried upward together (absolute mobility), but some escalators move faster than others, so people's positions relative to each other shift over time (relative mobility).

  Absolute mobility asks whether the escalator is moving. Relative mobility asks whether you can change places on it.

  
    Absolute mobilityRelative mobility
    QuestionDo children live better than their parents?Does where you start predict where you finish?
    Driven byEconomic growth, and how its gains are sharedHow strongly advantage passes from parents to children
    Can everyone win?YesNo: rank is zero-sum
    Typical measureShare of children earning more than their parentsElasticities, rank correlations, transition tables
  

  Back to the two babies. Chetty's team (Hendren, Grusky, Hell, Manduca and Narang, writing in Science) found that absolute mobility in the US fell from about 90% for children born in 1940 to about 50% for those born in the 1980s. Comparing sons to fathers alone, it fell from 95% to 41%. The decline happened across the income distribution and was largest for the middle class.

  The interesting part is the why. Two things could have caused it: slower economic growth, or growth whose gains went disproportionately to the top. The researchers ran two counterfactuals. If the US had grown as fast as it did in the 1940s and 1950s but shared the gains the way it does now, absolute mobility for the 1980s cohort would have reached only about 62%. If the economy had grown at its actual, slower rate but shared the gains the way it did for the 1940 cohort, absolute mobility would have reached about 80%. In other words, more than two-thirds of the fall came from how growth was divided, not from how much there was. The authors estimate that restoring 1940s-style mobility with today's distribution would require sustained real growth above 6% a year.

  That finding gets cited by people across the political spectrum, but for different lessons. Some read it as an argument for redistribution or stronger wage bargaining. Others read it as an argument that growth itself is still the main lever, since no amount of reshuffling makes up for a stagnant economy, and point out that any income-based measure misses some gains, such as non-cash benefits and better products. Both readings take the numbers seriously. They disagree about what to do with them.

  Part 2 — How sticky is the ladder? Measuring the link

  Relative mobility needs a number for "how much of a parent's advantage passes to the child". Economists have three main ways of putting one on it.

  The elasticity

  The oldest is the intergenerational earnings elasticity, usually written as the Greek letter β (beta). It comes from a simple regression of children's log earnings on their parents'. Alan Krueger, chairing the White House Council of Economic Advisers, gave a clean example in 2012: with an elasticity of 0.4, if your parents earned 50% more than average, you would be expected to earn about 20% more than average in your own generation. Some of the advantage survives; most of it washes out. A β of 0 means your parents' income tells us nothing about yours. A β of 1 means the family's position is passed on intact.

  Measuring β well turns out to be hard, and the difficulty is instructive. Any single year's income is noisy: a father might have had an unusually bad or good year. Noise in the parents' income makes the link to the children look weaker than it really is. Bhashkar Mazumder showed this with Social Security earnings records: earlier American studies, which typically averaged fathers' earnings over five years at most, had found elasticities around 0.4. Using many more years of fathers' earnings, Mazumder's estimate rose to around 0.6, implying much less mobility than previously thought. The general lesson: a short snapshot of income mistakes luck for status, and makes societies look more fluid than they are.

  The rank correlation

  Chetty's group popularised a second measure: compare ranks instead of incomes. Line up all parents from poorest to richest, line up all their grown children the same way, and ask how closely the two rankings match. Using tax records on more than 40 million American children, Chetty, Hendren, Kline and Saez found that a 10-percentile rise in parents' rank is associated, on average, with a 3.4-percentile rise in the child's rank. The rank measure has a practical virtue: it isn't affected by how far apart the rungs are. The elasticity mixes two things together, how often families change rungs and how far apart the rungs are. The rank measure isolates the first.

  The transition table

  The third way is the most intuitive: a table of where children from each fifth (or tenth) of the parental distribution end up. It shows something averages hide, which is that mobility can differ enormously at the top and bottom. Miles Corak compared the US and Canada this way. America's elasticity, about 0.5 in his comparable estimates, was roughly twice Canada's, yet in the broad middle both countries looked fairly mobile. The difference was at the edges. More than half of American sons raised by top-tenth fathers stayed in the top three tenths, and about half of those raised by bottom-tenth fathers rose no higher than the third tenth. Canada had less stickiness at both ends.

  A short snapshot of income mistakes luck for status, and makes a society look more fluid than it really is.

  Krueger offered a memorable way to feel the size of these numbers. A reasonable summary of the US research, he said, was a parent-child income correlation of around 0.5, close to the correlation Francis Galton found between parents' and children's heights more than a century ago. So the chance of a child born in the bottom 10% reaching the top 10% is roughly the chance of a 5'6" father (168 cm) having a son who grows to over 6'1" (185 cm). It happens. Not often.

  One caveat runs through this whole literature: the classic comparisons are of fathers and sons, because women's paid work changed so much over the twentieth century that mother-daughter comparisons are harder to interpret. Newer tax-record studies use household income and include daughters, but cross-country tables often still rest on fathers and sons.

  Part 3 — The simulator: how long does advantage last?

  Here is the elasticity put to work. If each generation keeps a share β of the previous generation's gap from the average (measured in proportional, log terms), then a family's disadvantage shrinks like compound interest in reverse: after one generation β of the gap is left, after two β × β, and so on. This is the logic behind the OECD's famous estimate of how many generations it takes a poor family to reach the average.

  
    Mobility simulator
    Choose how sticky incomes are (β) and how far below average the family starts. The blue line is the typical descendant. Turn on luck to see what real families look like.

    
      Stickiness, β (intergenerational elasticity)0.38
      
    
    Country presets (OECD 2018 father–son elasticities):
    

    
      Family starts at this share of average income29%
      
    

    
    typical descendant average income five families with luck

    
      Add luck
      Roll again
    

    
      62%children
      83%grandchildren
      4generations to within 5% of average
      ~120years (at ~30 a generation)
    
    
    How it works: the typical descendant's income is average × (start ÷ average)βn after n generations. "Luck" adds a random shock each generation, sized so that overall inequality stays constant (an illustrative standard deviation of 0.6 in log income). The model holds β fixed, which real societies don't, and ignores grandparents' direct influence. It is a teaching toy, not a forecast.
  

  Play with it for a minute and three things stand out.

  First, small differences in β compound. Using the OECD's own average inputs (an elasticity of 0.38, and a bottom-tenth family on a little under a third of mean income, a ratio of 1 to 3.5), the typical descendant reaches 62% of average in one generation, 83% in two, 93% in three and 97% in four. That's the source of the OECD's headline: in a typical member country it takes "around four to five generations" for children from the bottom tenth to reach mean earnings. Slide β to Denmark's 0.12 and the gap is nearly gone in two. Slide it to Colombia's 0.76 and you are counting in centuries.

  Second, the averages hide the families. Switch on luck. With β around 0.4, parental income explains only a modest share of the spread in children's incomes (in this simple model, β squared, about 16%). Most of what happens to any one family is everything else: talent, health, choices, timing, the local job market, plain chance. Mobility statistics describe the odds, not anyone's fate.

  Third, the start matters as well as the speed. In more unequal countries the bottom tenth starts further below the average, so even at the same β the climb takes longer. This double penalty is part of what the next section is about.

  
    CountryFather–son elasticityGenerations to reach mean (OECD)
    Denmark0.122
    Norway · Finland · Sweden0.16 · 0.19 · 0.263
    Spain · Japan · Australia0.28 · 0.35 · 0.354
    United States · United Kingdom0.41 · 0.445
    France · Germany · Chile0.53 · 0.55 · 0.536
    India · China0.55 · 0.567
    Brazil · South Africa0.66 · 0.689
    Colombia0.7611
    OECD average0.384.5
  
  Source: OECD, A Broken Social Elevator? (2018), Figures 1.3, 1.5 and 1.13 (data files). The OECD calls its generation counts "simulation-based and intended to be illustrative", following Bowles and Gintis (2002). They use each country's own income gap, so the simulator above, which holds the gap fixed, can differ by a generation or so.

  A dissent: maybe advantage lasts much longer

  The simple model has a well-known weakness. It assumes that only your parents matter, so a family's advantage decays smoothly. The economic historian Gregory Clark has argued, in The Son Also Rises (2014) and papers with Neil Cummins, that this badly underestimates persistence. Tracking rare surnames among Oxford and Cambridge students in England from 1170 to 2012, they estimate an underlying status correlation of 0.70 to 0.90, "unchanged over centuries", and conclude that social mobility in England in 2012 was little greater than in preindustrial times. If that is right, the simulator's β should be set near the top of its range, and policy matters less than people hope.

  Critics reply that surname averages measure something different. Florencia Torche and Alejandro Corvalan showed that group-level persistence can't be compared with individual persistence, because a surname group's average income blends individual and group factors that can't be separated without more information. On the other hand, studies that follow real families for longer do find more persistence than the simple model predicts. Using Swedish records linking three generations' lifetime earnings and four generations' education, Mats Lindahl, Mårten Palme and colleagues found that two-generation estimates "severely under-predict" persistence over three generations. That supports part of Clark's point, though not his near-total immobility. The honest summary: two-generation numbers probably understate how long advantage lasts, and nobody yet agrees by how much.

  Part 4 — The Great Gatsby curve and its critics

  On 12 January 2012, Alan Krueger gave a speech at the Center for American Progress in Washington. He showed a scatter plot: countries' income inequality in the mid-1980s on one axis, their intergenerational earnings elasticity on the other. The dots climbed from bottom left to top right. More unequal countries had stickier ladders. Krueger gave it a name: "I call this the 'Great Gatsby Curve'", after F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel about a self-made man who could never quite buy his way into old money.

  The data underneath came from Miles Corak, who has said the curve had been drawn in various forms by several researchers before Krueger named it. Krueger used it to make a forecast. Because US inequality had risen sharply since the 1980s, he projected that the American elasticity would rise from 0.47 to 0.56 for the next generation, meaning the persistence of advantage would grow by about a quarter.

  
    CountryInequality (Gini, mid-1980s)Father–son elasticity
    Sweden0.200.26
    Finland0.210.19
    Denmark0.220.12
    Norway0.230.16
    Germany0.260.55
    France0.290.53
    United Kingdom0.330.44
    United States0.350.41
    Chile0.520.53
    Colombia0.550.76
    Brazil0.600.66
    South Africa0.610.68
  
  Source: OECD (2018), Figure 1.13 data (Gini coefficients for the mid-1980s/early 1990s; elasticity = 1 minus the OECD's mobility index). Note Germany and France: low inequality, sticky ladders.

  The pattern is real and has been reproduced. The OECD's 2018 report found that across generations, "earnings mobility prospects tend to be usually weaker in countries where income inequality is high", and found "no evidence that greater inequality would bring higher income mobility". What the curve means is where the argument starts.

  
    The causal reading
      Inequality raises the stakes. When the rungs are far apart, well-off parents have both more money to invest in their children and more reason to, because falling is costlier. Gary Solon proposed a mechanism through the returns to education, and Corak's data fit it: countries with a bigger college pay premium tend to be less mobile. The US premium was about 70% against about 30% in Canada. Over time, as the American return to college rose from about 9% to about 13% between 1980 and 2000, the US father–son elasticity rose too, from 0.38 to about 0.55, in estimates by Aaronson and Mazumder.
    
    The sceptical reading
      A cross-country correlation among a couple of dozen nations is not proof of cause. Something else may drive both. Corak himself notes that if societies differ in demographic diversity, and family traits valued by labour markets are passed on, the curve could slope upward "even if all societies are equally meritocratic", an interpretation he attributes to Gary Becker and John Roemer. He warns the curve is not "a recipe for changing outcomes", and that small, relatively homogeneous Denmark may not be a template for the United States. And there are awkward exceptions: Austria, France, Germany and Hungary combine low inequality with low mobility.
    
  

  Then came the test of time. In 2014, Chetty and colleagues used tax records to track Americans born from 1971 to 1993, the very cohorts who grew up as inequality rose. They found that rank-based mobility had stayed essentially unchanged. A child born into the bottom fifth in the 1990s had about the same chance of climbing, relative to others, as one born in the 1970s (for the youngest cohorts, measured by the chance of going to college). That looks like a point against the causal reading.

  But the same paper added a sting. Because the rungs had moved further apart, the consequences of where you start had grown even if the odds of changing places hadn't. In the authors' words, the "birth lottery" now matters more. Defenders of the curve also point out that the children of the most unequal decades are still too young to measure fully; the forecast may not yet have had time to come true. This is a live debate, and both sides have serious economists in it.

  The odds of changing places held steady. But because the rungs moved further apart, the place you start mattered more.

  Part 5 — Place: the neighbourhood as a ladder

  If you want to see how much geography matters, look inside a single country. In "Where Is the Land of Opportunity?" (2014), Chetty, Hendren, Kline and Saez mapped upward mobility across the US. A child from the bottom fifth had a 4.4% chance of reaching the top fifth in Charlotte, North Carolina, and a 12.9% chance in San Jose, California: almost three times the odds in the same country, under the same federal laws.

  High-mobility areas shared five traits: less residential segregation, less income inequality, better primary schools, more social capital and more stable families. The authors were careful to say this was descriptive. It could be that places shape people, or that different kinds of families live in different places.

  Is it the place, or the people?

  To separate the two, Chetty and Nathaniel Hendren studied more than seven million families who moved. The trick is to compare siblings who moved at different ages. If places matter, the younger sibling, who spends more of childhood in the new area, should look more like the area's native children. That's what they found: children's outcomes converged towards those of the new area at about 4% per year of childhood spent there. Neighbourhoods mattered in proportion to exposure.

  The strongest evidence comes from a real experiment. Between 1994 and 1998, the US Moving to Opportunity programme randomly offered about 4,600 low-income families in high-poverty public housing, in five cities, a housing voucher that could be used only in a low-poverty area. For years the results looked disappointing. Early studies found adults' health improved, but not their earnings.

  Then Chetty, Hendren and Lawrence Katz looked at the children once they were grown. Those who moved before age 13 earned about 31% more in their mid-twenties than the control group, were more likely to go to college, less likely to become single parents, and lived in better neighbourhoods as adults themselves. They estimated the gain at about $302,000 over a lifetime for a child who moved at around eight. Children who moved as teenagers gained nothing, and possibly lost, perhaps because of the disruption. The lesson for research is as important as the lesson for policy: the effect was there all along, in a group nobody had yet been able to measure.

  Who your friends are

  Why do places matter? One answer came in 2022 from a study in Nature using 21 billion Facebook friendships. Its key measure, economic connectedness, is the share of a lower-income person's friends who are higher-income. It turned out to be among the strongest predictors of upward mobility yet found. If children from low-income families grew up in counties as connected as the average higher-income child's, their adult incomes would be about 20% higher, the authors estimated. Other kinds of social capital, such as how tight-knit a community is, were not strongly linked to mobility. Whom you know across class lines seems to matter more than how many you know.

  Some barriers turn out to be surprisingly practical. In Seattle, an experiment called Creating Moves to Opportunity gave voucher families information, short-term financial help, a navigator for the housing search and introductions to landlords. The share moving to high-mobility areas rose from 15% in the control group to 53%. The researchers argued that the main obstacles were in the search process itself, not a preference for staying put.

  Race shows how place and history interact. In a large study of US tax data, Chetty, Hendren, Maggie Jones and Sonya Porter found that among children from families with the same income, Black boys grew up to earn less than white boys in 99% of Census tracts. Parental marriage, education and wealth explained little of the gap. The few areas where the gap was small had low poverty, less racial bias among white residents and more Black fathers present in the community, and fewer than 5% of Black children grew up in them.

  Most of this neighbourhood evidence is American, because the US tax data made it possible. Whether the same patterns hold elsewhere, and how strongly, is still being studied.

  Part 6 — Education: the great equaliser, with an asterisk

  Education is the ladder most societies officially rely on, and it does a great deal of lifting. It also carries more family advantage than its reputation suggests.

  Start with the floors. Across OECD countries, four in ten people whose parents had little education end up with only lower-secondary education themselves, and only about twelve in a hundred earn a university degree, compared with roughly two-thirds of children of highly educated parents. Adults whose parents had higher socio-economic status score almost 20% higher in numeracy, the equivalent of more than three extra years of schooling.

  In poorer countries the stakes are starker. The World Bank's 2018 report Fair Progress?, built on a database covering 96% of the world's population, found that developing economies make up 46 of the 50 worst performers for educational mobility from the bottom to the top. In some low-income or fragile African countries, only 12% of young adults born in the 1980s had more education than their parents. The report also found reasons for hope: rising school enrolment in Africa and South Asia over the last two decades, and girls overtaking boys in tertiary education in high-income countries, with the developing world moving the same way.

  The view from the top colleges

  American tax-record research gives a precise picture of elite universities. A 2017 "mobility report card" study found that children from the top 1% of families were 77 times more likely to attend an Ivy League college than children from the bottom fifth. Yet once there, low-income and high-income students went on to earn similar amounts. Elite colleges work as ladders; very few low-income students get to stand on them. The highest rates of bottom-to-top mobility were at some mid-tier public universities, which combine decent outcomes with real access.

  A 2023 study by Chetty, David Deming and John Friedman went further. At "Ivy-Plus" colleges, children from the top 1% were more than twice as likely to attend as middle-class children with the same SAT or ACT scores. About two-thirds of that gap came from higher admission rates, and the advantage traced to three things: preferences for alumni children, weight on non-academic ratings, and athletic recruitment. None of the three predicted better outcomes after college, while test scores did. And attending such a college instead of an average state flagship mattered: it raised the chance of reaching the top 1% of earners by about half, nearly doubled the chance of attending an elite graduate school, and almost tripled the chance of working at a prestigious firm.

  Elite colleges work as ladders. The problem is how few people get to stand on the bottom rung.

  The asterisk

  There are two limits on education as an equaliser. The first is that expanding education is mostly absolute mobility. When everyone's education rises, children can out-learn their parents without anyone changing rank, and credentials begin to work like a queue: what counts is having more than the next applicant. (Piece 6 in this series returns to this idea of "positional goods".)

  The second is the Solon–Corak mechanism from Part 4. When the pay gap between graduates and non-graduates is wide, families with money invest more heavily in their children's schooling, from tutoring to the right neighbourhood. Education can carry advantage forward as easily as it can break it. That's why the OECD's recommendations put heavy weight on things that reach children early and broadly: high-quality early childhood education and care, preventing school drop-out, and targeting spending on disadvantaged pupils rather than simply spending more overall.

  Part 7 — Income is a flow, wealth is a reservoir

  Almost all of the numbers so far are about income: what people earn in a year. But the family advantage that people feel most sharply is often wealth: the house, the savings, the parent who can lend the deposit or cover a gap year. Income is a flow; wealth is a reservoir.

  The World Inequality Lab, which runs the World Inequality Database, published its World Inequality Report 2026 in 2025. Its global estimates for 2025:

  
    Group (world)Share of incomeShare of wealth
    Top 10%53%75%
    Bottom 50%8%2%
  
  Source: World Inequality Report 2026, Executive Summary, Figure 1 (income before taxes and transfers; wealth = net personal wealth, at 2025 purchasing-power parity).

  The report finds the same pattern in every region: "wealth is much more concentrated at the top than income". At the very top it has grown. The share of global wealth held by the richest 0.001% of adults, fewer than 60,000 people, rose from about 3.8% in 1995 to about 6.1% in 2025. (These estimates combine tax records, surveys and national accounts, and their methods are argued over; in the US, for example, economists Gerald Auten and David Splinter dispute the size of the rise in top income shares estimated by Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, with unreported income the biggest point of disagreement.)

  Why does wealth matter so much for mobility? Because it is insurance and launch fuel at once. A family with savings can absorb a job loss without a crisis, move to the high-opportunity neighbourhood from Part 5, pay for an unpaid internship, or let a child take a risk on a business. Mazumder found that the earnings elasticity was higher for families with low net worth, which is what you would expect if poorer families can't borrow to invest in their children. The OECD found that having grown up in a family with little or no wealth is one of the two main predictors of poor health in adulthood, alongside parents' poor health.

  Wealth also makes positions sticky within a lifetime. Over a four-year period in OECD countries, about 60% of people in the bottom fifth of incomes stay there, while at the top 70% remain. And the middle is more exposed than it feels: about one in seven middle-income households slides into the bottom fifth over four years, a risk the OECD links to events such as unemployment or divorce.

  Part 8 — Why? The structural and the individual case

  Everyone in this debate agrees that family background matters. The disagreement is about how it matters, and so about what, if anything, should change. Here are the two broad explanations, each at its strongest.

  
    The structural case
      Opportunity is shaped by things children don't choose. Moving to Opportunity shows, by random assignment, that neighbourhood alone changes adult earnings. Economic connectedness shows that cross-class friendships predict mobility. Admissions studies show legacy and athletic preferences tilt elite college places to the rich at equal scores. Race gaps persist among boys from same-income families, and family structure, education and wealth explain little of them.
      Richard Reeves, in Dream Hoarders (2017), argues that America's upper middle class, the top fifth, "hoards" opportunity through exclusionary zoning, school boundaries, occupational licensing, legacy admissions and informally allocated internships. Corak found that about four in ten young Canadian men had at some point worked for an employer that had also employed their father, rising to almost seven in ten among sons of top-1% fathers. As the OECD puts it, there is "nothing inevitable" about advantage being passed on: countries differ too much for it to be fate.
    
    The individual and family case
      Choices and habits matter within any structure. Ron Haskins of the Brookings Institution summarised research showing that Americans who finish high school, work full-time and wait until 21 to marry and have children have about a 2% chance of being poor and roughly a three-in-four chance of reaching the middle class. Family stability was one of the five traits most associated with upward mobility in Chetty's own map.
      Some persistence isn't privilege at all. In five studies of more than 20,000 people in the US, Britain and New Zealand, Daniel Belsky and colleagues found that people with higher education-linked polygenic scores were upwardly mobile relative to their parents, even when comparing siblings. An adoption study by Bruce Sacerdote found a college-educated mother raised a biological child's odds of graduating from college by 26 points but an adopted child's by 7, suggesting part of what parents pass on is inherited. If traits that help in the labour market run in families, some stickiness will survive even perfectly fair institutions, as Clark argues.
    
  

  Each side has answers to the other. Structuralists note that the "success sequence" describes the people who managed to follow it, and that finding stable full-time work, or a partner who has it, is itself much easier in some places than others. Individualists note that a voucher helped young children but not teenagers, and that no policy has made Denmark-style mobility appear in a large, diverse country. Even the genetics evidence cuts both ways: Belsky's team also found that people with higher scores tended to come from better-off families, and that a mother's genes predicted her child's attainment beyond the child's own, which suggests genetic and environmental advantage travel together.

  Family background shapes the odds. Nobody serious disputes that. The argument is over which parts of it are unfair, and which can be changed.

  What people believe about mobility is tangled up with politics, too. Alberto Alesina, Stefanie Stantcheva and Edoardo Teso surveyed people in France, Italy, Sweden, the UK and the US, and found Americans more optimistic about mobility than Europeans. When the researchers showed people pessimistic information about mobility, left-leaning respondents became more supportive of redistribution, especially policies aimed at equal opportunity. Right-leaning respondents didn't change their views, which the authors suggest may reflect a belief that government is the problem rather than the solution. Both groups were reacting to the same facts through different values, which is exactly the pattern described in The Political Spectrum, Fairly Presented.

  Underneath sits a question that data can't settle. If a society removed every unfair barrier and children still tended to land near their parents because talents and temperaments run in families, would that be a fair society? Some say yes: equal rules are what fairness requires. Others, following John Rawls (see The Veil of Ignorance in Philosophy), say that nobody deserves the talents they were born with either, so a fair society arranges its rewards to benefit the least advantaged. Others again think the goal should be a decent floor and real absolute mobility, with rank mattering less. The numbers in this piece can tell you how sticky the ladder is. They can't tell you how sticky it ought to be.

  
    The takeaway
    "Social mobility" is two questions: whether children live better than their parents (absolute) and whether they can change places (relative). In the US the first fell from about 90% to about 50% between the 1940 and 1980s cohorts, mostly because growth was shared less evenly. On the second, advantage fades quickly in the Nordic countries and slowly in much of Latin America and Africa, and more unequal countries tend to be less mobile, though what causes that link is disputed. Neighbourhoods, cross-class friendships, admissions rules and wealth all demonstrably shape the odds; so do family stability, inherited traits and luck. The data describe the odds well. What counts as a fair amount of stickiness is a question of values.
    Try this: look up where you grew up in the free Opportunity Atlas (link below) and see how children from low-income families there have fared as adults. Then write down three things that helped you or held you back, and sort them into structure, choice and luck. Most people find all three columns filled.
  

  
    Sources & Further Reading
    Sources.
    
      Chetty, R., Grusky, D., Hell, M., Hendren, N., Manduca, R. & Narang, J. (2017). The fading American dream: trends in absolute income mobility since 1940. Science, 356(6336), 398–406.
      OECD (2018). A Broken Social Elevator? How to Promote Social Mobility. OECD Publishing, Paris; overview and StatLink data for Figures 1.3, 1.5, 1.7 and 1.13.
      Krueger, A.B. (2012). "The Rise and Consequences of Inequality in the United States", remarks at the Center for American Progress, 12 January 2012.
      Corak, M. (2013). Income inequality, equality of opportunity, and intergenerational mobility. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 27(3), 79–102 (IZA DP 7520 version).
      Mazumder, B. (2005). Fortunate sons: new estimates of intergenerational mobility in the United States using Social Security earnings data. Review of Economics and Statistics, 87(2).
      Chetty, R., Hendren, N., Kline, P. & Saez, E. (2014). Where is the land of opportunity? Quarterly Journal of Economics (NBER w19843); and Chetty, Hendren, Kline, Saez & Turner (2014), Is the United States still a land of opportunity? (NBER w19844).
      Chetty, R. & Hendren, N. (2018). The impacts of neighborhoods on intergenerational mobility I: childhood exposure effects (NBER w23001).
      Chetty, R., Hendren, N. & Katz, L. (2016). The effects of exposure to better neighborhoods on children: new evidence from the Moving to Opportunity experiment. American Economic Review, 106(4), 855–902.
      Chetty, R., Jackson, M.O., Kuchler, T., Stroebel, J. et al. (2022). Social capital I: measurement and associations with economic mobility. Nature, 608, 108–121.
      Bergman, P., Chetty, R., DeLuca, S., Hendren, N., Katz, L. & Palmer, C. (2019). Creating moves to opportunity (NBER w26164).
      Chetty, R., Hendren, N., Jones, M.R. & Porter, S.R. (2018). Race and economic opportunity in the United States (NBER w24441).
      Chetty, R., Friedman, J., Saez, E., Turner, N. & Yagan, D. (2017). Mobility report cards (NBER w23618). Chetty, R., Deming, D. & Friedman, J. (2023). Diversifying society's leaders? (NBER w31492).
      Narayan, A., Van der Weide, R. et al. (2018). Fair Progress? Economic Mobility across Generations around the World. World Bank.
      Chancel, L., Gómez-Carrera, R., Moshrif, R., Piketty, T. et al. (2025). World Inequality Report 2026, World Inequality Lab. Auten, G. & Splinter, D. (2024). Journal of Political Economy, 132(7).
      Clark, G. & Cummins, N. (2014). Surnames and social mobility in England, 1170–2012. Human Nature, 25(4), 517–537. Torche, F. & Corvalan, A. (2016). Estimating intergenerational mobility with grouped data. Sociological Methods & Research. Lindahl, M., Palme, M., Sandgren Massih, S. & Sjögren, A. (2015). Long-term intergenerational persistence of human capital: an empirical analysis of four generations. Journal of Human Resources, 50(1).
      Belsky, D.W. et al. (2018). Genetic analysis of social-class mobility in five longitudinal studies. PNAS, 115(31), E7275–E7284. Sacerdote, B. (2007). How large are the effects from changes in family environment? Quarterly Journal of Economics, 122(1) (NBER w10894).
      Haskins, R. (2013). Three simple rules poor teens should follow to join the middle class. Brookings Institution. Reeves, R.V. (2017). Dream Hoarders. Brookings Institution Press.
      Alesina, A., Stantcheva, S. & Teso, E. (2018). Intergenerational mobility and preferences for redistribution. American Economic Review (NBER w23027).
    
    Go deeper.
    
      🌐 The Opportunity Atlas — the interactive US map behind Part 5. Type in any neighbourhood and see how children who grew up there fared, by parental income, race and gender.
      🌐 OECD, A Broken Social Elevator? (2018) — the best single international comparison, with country notes. Start with Chapter 1.
      ▶️ Raj Chetty, "Using Big Data to Solve Economic and Social Problems" — a free, recorded Harvard course that walks through most of the US research here, lecture by lecture.
      🌐 Miles Corak, "Income Inequality, Equality of Opportunity, and Intergenerational Mobility" — the readable academic case for the Great Gatsby curve, including its own caveats.
      📘 Dream Hoarders — Richard V. Reeves (2017). A short, pointed argument that the top fifth, not just the top 1%, is where mobility gets blocked.
      📘 The Son Also Rises — Gregory Clark (2014). The strongest case that status is far stickier than standard estimates suggest. Read it next to the critics in Part 3.
      🌐 World Inequality Report 2026 — free, chart-heavy, and the source for Part 7's income and wealth shares.
      🌐 Companion pieces in this library: Castes, Estates and Classes (Society 3), Clase Social y Dinero (Spanish), The Political Spectrum, Fairly Presented, The Veil of Ignorance, and, next in this series, Institutions: The Invisible Rules That Shape Us.


Institutions: The Invisible Rules That Shape Us
-----------------------------------------------
You didn't invent the language you think in, the money in your pocket or the queue you joined this morning. Sociology starts with the strange fact that these things push back.

Follows: Class, Status and Power (Society 2) · Climbing the Ladder (Society 4) · How Government Actually Works and Rights, Constitutions & the Rule of Law (Politics)
In this deep dive
1. What an institution is
2. Durkheim: social facts, and the shock of Suicide
3. Weber: the machine that runs the modern world
4. Tocqueville: the art of association
5. Bowling Alone and its critics
6. Norms and conformity: what Asch really found
7. Inclusive and extractive: the 2024 Nobel and the argument about it
8. Seeing the rules

Try an experiment next time you're in a supermarket queue. Step out of line, walk to the front and stand there quietly, as if you'd always been there. You probably won't do it. If you did, you'd feel the room change: the stares, the throat-clearing, someone saying "Excuse me, there's a queue." No law forbids it. No police officer would come. And yet the rule is so strong that most people would rather wait twenty minutes than break it once.
That rule is an institution. So is the handshake, the wedding, the price tag, the exam, the passport and the five-day week. Nobody you know invented them, almost nobody voted for them, and they shape nearly everything you do.
The earlier pieces in this series were about ranking: hierarchy, class, caste, mobility. Climbing the Ladder ended with a question about which parts of family advantage could be changed. This piece is about the thing that would have to change: the rules, written and unwritten, that make up a society. It goes through the classic thinkers who first tried to study those rules scientifically, the modern research that tested them, and one of the biggest arguments in economics about whether rules explain why some countries are rich.
Part 1 — What an institution is
In everyday speech an "institution" is a big building with a name: a hospital, a university, a central bank. Social scientists mean something broader. The economic historian Douglass North, accepting the Nobel prize in economics in 1993, put it in a sentence that is still the standard starting point: "Institutions are the humanly devised constraints that structure human interaction."
North split them into three parts:

Part
What it is
Examples

Formal rules
Written, enforced by an authority
Constitutions, laws, contracts, exam regulations

Informal constraints
Norms, conventions, codes of conduct
Queueing, tipping, dress codes, "don't talk about salary"

Enforcement
How breaking the rule gets punished
Courts and fines; also gossip, shame and exclusion

He also drew a distinction that clears up a lot of confusion. "If institutions are the rules of the game," North said, "organizations and their entrepreneurs are the players." A hospital is an organisation; the rules of medical licensing, patient consent and who pays the bill are institutions. A football club is an organisation; the offside rule is an institution.

Institutions are the rules of the game. Organisations are the teams. Most of what feels like "the way things are" is the rules.

Why does this matter? Because once you see institutions as rules, you see that they could be different, and that they do work. A rule that everyone follows saves everyone from negotiating from scratch. You don't haggle over the price of milk, check that a banknote is real, or fight for your place at the bus stop. The cost of that convenience is that rules also lock people in, and some rules serve some people far better than others. That double nature, rules as both scaffold and cage, runs through every thinker in this piece.
Part 2 — Durkheim: social facts, and the shock of Suicide
A note before this part: it discusses suicide as a subject of research. If you're struggling or thinking about ending your life, please talk to someone now. In the US you can call or text 988 (the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline); in the UK and Ireland, Samaritans answer on 116 123; elsewhere, contact your local emergency or crisis service.
Émile Durkheim wanted sociology to be a real science, with its own subject matter that couldn't be reduced to psychology or biology. In The Rules of Sociological Method (1895) he named that subject matter: social facts.
A social fact, he wrote (the translations here are mine), is any way of acting "capable of exercising an external constraint on the individual", or that is general across a society while having an existence of its own, independent of any one person's version of it. His examples were deliberately ordinary. The system of signs I use to express my thoughts, the currency I use to pay my debts, the credit instruments I use in business, the practices of my profession: all of these, he observed, "function independently of the use I make of them." I was born into them. They were there before me and will outlast me.
From this came his most famous and most argued-over rule: "The first and most fundamental rule is to consider social facts as things." Not as ideas in people's heads, but as realities you can observe and measure from the outside, the way a physicist treats gravity.
The test case
Two years later, in Suicide (1897), Durkheim set out to prove the method on the hardest case he could think of. What could be more individual, more private, than the decision to end one's own life? If even that had a social pattern, then sociology was real.
His key observation was that national suicide rates were remarkably stable from year to year, and differed consistently between countries and groups. Individuals came and went, but the rate held. "Each society," he wrote, "is predisposed to produce a definite quota of voluntary deaths." The rate was a social fact.
He then compared groups: Protestants and Catholics, married and unmarried people, people with and without children, regions, professions, times of peace and war. From these comparisons he drew a general law: suicide "varies inversely with the degree of integration of the social groups of which the individual forms a part." Where people are tightly bound into religious communities, families or political life, the rate is lower.
Durkheim then sorted his explanations into types:

Type
The social cause
Durkheim's examples

Egoistic
Too little integration; the individual is cut loose from the group
Higher rates among Protestants than Catholics, unmarried than married

Altruistic
Too much integration; the self matters little next to the group
Customs in some traditional societies; elevated rates among soldiers

Anomic
Too little regulation; the rules that limit desires break down
Rates rising in economic crises, including booms

Fatalistic
Too much regulation; a future "pitilessly walled in"
Mentioned only in a footnote, as "of so little importance today"

The anomic type has had the longest afterlife. Anomie means normlessness: a condition in which the rules that tell people what to want, and how much is enough, have broken down. Durkheim's most surprising finding was that it isn't poverty that does the damage. Even "happy crises", sudden surges in a country's prosperity, raised suicide rates in his data just as economic disasters did. His example was Italy after unification in 1870, when commerce and industry boomed. The cause, he argued, was the disturbance itself: any sharp break in the collective order, "even when it results in greater ease", loosens the rules that hold desires in check.

Durkheim's most surprising claim: it isn't hardship alone that unsettles people. It's the collapse of the rules that tell them what to want.

What survived and what didn't
Suicide is still taught as a model of method, and still argued over. Three criticisms matter most.
The ecological fallacy. Durkheim mostly compared rates across regions and countries. But a pattern among groups doesn't prove a pattern among individuals. If Protestant regions have higher rates, that doesn't show it's the Protestants in them who are dying. The statistician W. S. Robinson named this trap in 1950: the "ecological fallacy".
The statistics themselves. Whether a death gets recorded as suicide depends on doctors, coroners, families and stigma. If Catholic families and officials were more reluctant to record a death as suicide, part of the Protestant–Catholic gap could be a recording gap rather than a real one.
Mental illness. Psychiatry now treats depression and other conditions as central to suicide risk, which Durkheim's framework largely set aside.
And yet the core idea has proved surprisingly hardy. In a 2018 study the economists Sascha Becker and Ludger Woessmann built a dataset of 452 Prussian counties in 1816–21 and 1869–71, when religion still shaped daily life. Using the fact that Protestantism spread outward in rings from Wittenberg, where Luther started, as a kind of natural experiment, they found that Protestantism had "a substantial positive effect on suicide", after checking for misreporting, mental illness and other biases. Their tests suggested that the social channel, the community cohesion Durkheim emphasised, mattered more than the theological one.
Readers of Durkheim also hear an echo in modern findings. In 2015, Anne Case and Angus Deaton documented a rise in deaths among middle-aged white Americans between 1999 and 2013, driven largely by drug and alcohol poisonings, suicide and liver disease, and concentrated among those with less education. No other rich country saw a similar reversal. Case and Deaton's own explanation centres on economic and social change rather than on Durkheim, but the shape of the finding, deaths tracking the weakening of work, family and community, is close to what he described.
Part 3 — Weber: the machine that runs the modern world
If Durkheim asked what holds societies together, Max Weber asked what makes the modern one different. His answer, in a word, was rationalisation: the spread of calculation, rules and method into every corner of life. And its purest form was bureaucracy.
Class, Status and Power introduced Weber's three kinds of rank. Here the focus is his account of how modern organisations work. In the writings published after his death as Economy and Society (1921–22), Weber laid out the features of a fully developed bureaucracy, which in plain terms are:

Fixed areas of responsibility, set by rules: each office has defined duties and defined powers.
A hierarchy of offices, with higher ones supervising lower ones, and a regulated right to appeal upward.
Written files, kept and passed on, so that the office remembers even when people change.
Separation of office and home: the official's private money and property are kept apart from the office's.
Trained, qualified staff, appointed for expertise and working at it as a full-time career.
General rules, applied to cases impersonally.

Weber was clear about why this form had conquered the world. The decisive reason, he argued, was its purely technical superiority over any other form of organisation. He compared a fully developed bureaucracy with older forms the way you'd compare a machine with hand production, and listed its virtues: precision, speed, clarity, knowledge of the files, continuity, discretion, unity, strict subordination, fewer frictions and lower costs.
Impersonal is not the same as heartless
It's easy to hear "bureaucracy" as an insult. Weber's point was subtler. The ideal official works, as he put it in Latin, sine ira et studio: without anger or partiality. That impersonality is exactly what protects you. A clerk who processes your passport application by the rules, without caring whether you're rich, related to someone important, or able to pay a bribe, is giving you something most humans in history didn't have. "Without regard for persons" is the watchword of the rule of law, and it is also, Weber noted, the watchword of the market.
The cage
The darker side appears at the end of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904–05), in some of the most famous lines in social science. Weber argued that a religious ethic of disciplined work in a "calling" had helped create modern capitalism, and that the system no longer needed the faith that built it. In Talcott Parsons' 1930 translation: "The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so." The economic order now determines the lives of everyone born into it, "perhaps … until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt." The Puritan writer Richard Baxter had said that concern for worldly goods should lie on the saint's shoulders "like a light cloak", but, Weber wrote, "fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage."
Then the bleakest line of all, a guess about the people who might live at the end of this development: "Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart."

The cloak became a cage. Weber's fear was not that rules would fail, but that they would work so well we'd forget they were ever chosen.

There is a footnote to the footnote. "Iron cage" is Parsons' phrase, not quite Weber's. The German is stahlhartes Gehäuse, literally something like a "steel-hard casing" or "shell". The sociologist Peter Baehr has argued that Weber's image is richer than a cage: steel, unlike iron, is man-made, and a shell is something that becomes part of the creature inside it, suggesting that modern capitalism doesn't just confine people but reshapes what kind of people they are. Parsons' phrase has nonetheless become one of the most travelled ideas in sociology.
Weber today
The argument Weber started is still running, in two directions. One side worries about the cage: forms, metrics and compliance rules that grow faster than anyone can justify them, and the frustration of dealing with a system in which nobody seems to be responsible. The other worries about the opposite failure: states that are too weak, too personal or too corrupt, where getting anything done depends on whom you know. Most of the world's people live under the second problem, not the first. Weber's insight is that both are about the same thing: whether rules, rather than persons, govern public life.
Part 4 — Tocqueville: the art of association
In 1831 a young French magistrate, Alexis de Tocqueville, travelled to the United States with his friend Gustave de Beaumont, on a government mission to study its prisons and penitentiaries. He came back with something much bigger. Democracy in America (two volumes, 1835 and 1840) is still read as one of the sharpest outsider's accounts of any society.
One thing amazed him above all. "Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all dispositions, constantly form associations," he wrote (in Henry Reeve's translation, Volume 2, Part 2, chapter 5). Not just businesses but "associations of a thousand other kinds—religious, moral, serious, futile, extensive, or restricted, enormous or diminutive." Americans formed associations to give entertainments, found schools, build inns, construct churches, distribute books and send missionaries. Where in France you'd find the government at the head of a new undertaking, and in England a lord, "in the United States you will be sure to find an association."
Why should this matter for democracy? Tocqueville's argument runs through the chapters before. Democracy, by making people equal, also makes each of them weak on their own. In an aristocracy, a few powerful families can get things done singly. In a democracy, nobody can, unless they learn to combine with others. And equality brings a new temptation, which he called individualism: "a mature and calm feeling, which disposes each member of the community to sever himself from the mass of his fellow-creatures; and to draw apart with his family and his friends." Left alone, individualism hands public life over to the state, and to whoever controls it.
Associations are the antidote. They are where citizens learn the habit of cooperation, practise running things, and build power that doesn't depend on government. Tocqueville's conclusion was almost a law of social physics: "In democratic countries the science of association is the mother of science; the progress of all the rest depends upon the progress it has made."

Equality makes each person weak alone. Tocqueville's remedy was the club, the committee and the church supper.

A fair reading should add that Tocqueville was describing a society that excluded enslaved people, Native Americans and women from much of the civic life he admired, and he wrote about that too, at length, in the first volume. His point about associations was about a mechanism, not a claim that America was a just society.
Part 5 — Bowling Alone and its critics
A century and a half later, the political scientist Robert Putnam asked whether Tocqueville's America was disappearing. His 1995 essay "Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social Capital", in the Journal of Democracy, became one of the most discussed academic articles of the decade, and grew into a book in 2000.
Putnam's key term was social capital: "features of social organization such as networks, norms, and social trust that facilitate coordination and cooperation for mutual benefit." Like physical capital (tools) and human capital (skills), it makes people more productive, but it lives in the connections between them.
His evidence was a long run of declines:

Indicator
Putnam's figures (1995 essay)

Union share of non-farm workers
32.5% (1953) → 15.8% (1992)

Parent-teacher association membership
over 12 million (1964) → barely 5 million (1982) → about 7 million (early 1990s)

Bowling
total bowlers up 10%, league bowling down 40% (1980–1993)

The bowling statistic gave the essay its title and its sting. More Americans were bowling than ever, but fewer were doing it in leagues, with the weekly beer, chat and politics that came with them. Putnam noted that nearly 80 million Americans went bowling at least once in 1993, nearly a third more than voted in the 1994 congressional elections.
What about the big new organisations, like environmental groups and the American Association of Retired Persons, which grew from 400,000 members in 1960 to 33 million in 1993? Putnam called these "tertiary associations": for most members, belonging means writing a cheque and perhaps reading a newsletter. The bond between two Sierra Club members, he wrote, is less like the bond between two members of a gardening club and more like the bond between two Red Sox fans: they root for the same team but don't know each other exists. Among the possible causes of the decline, he singled out television as "probably the most powerful" force making leisure private. In the book, he put the greatest weight on generational replacement: older, more civic generations being succeeded by younger, less joining ones.
The critics
Bowling Alone was influential and contested in equal measure. The sociologist Claude Fischer, in a careful 2005 review, called the book "a 10-pin strike" and summed up the state of the argument:

After Putnam's first articles, many scholars returned "a verdict of 'case not proven'". With the wealth of data in the book, Fischer judged, the burden of proof had shifted to the critics.
But several analysts found that membership declines were concentrated in a few kinds of organisation, notably unions, veterans' groups and church groups, rather than across the board. Pamela Paxton's 1999 multiple-indicator study is among those Fischer cites.
Volunteering was up, or at least steady, over the same period.
Personal sociability showed weak and mixed trends: less entertaining at home, but more phone calls. Dora Costa and Matthew Kahn, using the same kinds of data, attributed the drop in home entertaining largely to women's rising hours in paid work.
The sociologist Robert Wuthnow argued that civic life had changed form rather than declined: from standing organisations like the Rotary Club towards ad hoc, specialised participation such as a charity walk or a beach clean-up. Fischer noted that this argument, while plausible, still awaited good empirical support.

A different criticism came from the political scientist Theda Skocpol, whose book Diminished Democracy (2003) carries its argument in its subtitle: From Membership to Management in American Civic Life. In her account the problem wasn't simply that individual Americans stopped caring. It was a shift in how civic organisations themselves work: from groups that members joined and ran, towards groups run by professional managers. That is a change in institutions, not just in habits.

The real argument about Bowling Alone was never whether America had changed. It was whether it had lost something, or swapped it for something new.

Putnam, for his part, kept going. The Upswing (2020), written with Shaylyn Romney Garrett, argued, as its subtitle puts it, that America "came together a century ago", moving from an age of "I" to one of "we" after an era much like our own, and that it can do so again.
One modern twist connects back to Climbing the Ladder. The 2022 study of 21 billion Facebook friendships found that "economic connectedness", how many of a low-income person's friends are higher-income, strongly predicted upward mobility, while other kinds of social capital, such as how tightly knit a community is, did not. Social capital, it seems, is not one thing. Bonds within a group and bridges between groups do different work.
Part 6 — Norms and conformity: what Asch really found
Institutions run on norms, and norms run on people's willingness to go along. In the early 1950s the psychologist Solomon Asch designed one of the most famous experiments in psychology to measure that willingness.
The set-up was simple. A volunteer sat at a table with several other people and was shown a card with a line on it, then a second card with three lines of clearly different lengths. The task: say aloud which of the three matched the first. The catch: everyone else at the table was working for the experimenter, and on certain "critical" trials they all gave the same wrong answer before the volunteer spoke.
The numbers
Asch's best-known report, published in 1956, studied 123 genuine volunteers. On the critical trials they went along with the wrong majority 36.8% of the time. About three-quarters conformed at least once, which means about a quarter never did.
Asch also varied the set-up, and the variations are as important as the headline:

Size: a majority of three was enough to produce the full effect. Bigger groups didn't add much.
Unanimity: the effect depended on the majority being unanimous. With a majority of six, a single dissenter who gave the right answer cut conformity from about 33% to about 5%.

That second finding is the most hopeful result in the whole literature. You don't need to be a hero to resist group pressure. You need one ally.
How the textbook story bends it
Notice what the numbers also say: on nearly two-thirds of the critical trials, people gave the correct answer in the face of a unanimous group. Asch himself framed his research as being about both independence and conformity; his 1956 monograph was titled "Studies of independence and conformity". Popular retellings tend to keep only the conformity.
Does it replicate?
Unlike many famous psychology findings, this one largely does, with some movement over time and place.

Meta-analysis. Rod Bond and Peter Smith, in 1996, pooled 133 studies from 17 countries. They found conformity higher in more collectivist cultures than in individualist ones, and found that cultural values mattered more than situational factors such as majority size. Their 44 strictest replications averaged an error rate of about 25%, lower than Asch's original.
A modern replication. In 2023, Axel Franzen and Sebastian Mader at the University of Bern ran the experiment again with 210 participants. They found an error rate of 33%, statistically indistinguishable from Asch's. Paying people a small reward for correct answers lowered it to 25% but didn't eliminate it. On political statements, the conformity rate was 38%. Of the personality traits they measured, only openness was convincingly related to resisting the group.

So the effect is real, sizeable and durable: decades later, in a different country, people still say the wrong line when everyone else does. But it's also bounded. Most answers stay correct, a large minority never yields at all, and one dissenting voice changes everything.

Asch's experiment is usually told as a story about sheep. Its data tell a story about how much one dissenter matters.

What does this have to do with institutions? Norms are self-enforcing in exactly this way. Most people follow a norm partly because they believe in it and partly because everyone else visibly does. That is why norms can be remarkably stable, and also why they sometimes collapse suddenly: once enough people visibly break ranks, the unanimity that held everyone else in place is gone.
Part 7 — Inclusive and extractive: the 2024 Nobel and the argument about it
Stand at the border fence in Nogales. Look north, and you see Nogales, Arizona: residents relatively well off, long average lifespans, most children finishing high school, secure property rights, free elections. Look south, and you see Nogales, Sonora, in a relatively prosperous part of Mexico, but where residents are on average considerably poorer, organised crime makes running a business risky, and corrupt politicians have been hard to remove.
The two halves share a climate, a landscape and much of a history (the northern side was once part of Mexico, and long-term residents have common ancestors). People eat similar food and listen to similar music. What differs is the set of rules they live under.
That image opens the most influential recent argument about institutions. On 14 October 2024, Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson won the Nobel prize in economics "for studies of how institutions are formed and affect prosperity." Acemoglu and Robinson had popularised the argument in Why Nations Fail (2012).
The argument
Inclusive institutions protect property rights broadly, enforce contracts impartially, and let large numbers of people take part in economic life and in political decisions. Extractive institutions concentrate power and income in a narrow elite, which uses its control to take from everyone else. Over the long run, inclusive institutions produce prosperity, because people invest and innovate when they expect to keep the rewards. Extractive ones don't.
The prize committee's summary puts the gap at stake bluntly: today the richest 20% of countries are around 30 times richer than the poorest 20%.
The hard part is showing that institutions cause prosperity rather than the other way round. The laureates' famous approach used European colonisation as a vast, unintended experiment. Where Europeans faced deadly diseases and could not settle in large numbers, they tended to set up extractive systems to take resources from indigenous populations. Where they could settle, they built more inclusive systems for themselves. Using historical death rates among early European settlers to predict which kind of institutions a colony got, they found those institutions strongly predicted prosperity centuries later.
They also documented a reversal of fortune: among former colonies, places that were relatively prosperous before colonisation tend to be poorer today. The explanation they offer is that rich, densely populated places were where colonisers found it most profitable to impose extractive institutions.
Their theory of why bad institutions persist is about trust. Elites who benefit from extractive rules can promise reform, but as long as they keep power, nobody can believe them. Under the threat of revolution, the only credible promise may be to hand over power itself. That, they argue, is one route by which democracy arrives.

In Nogales, the climate is the same on both sides of the fence, and so is the food. The rules are not.

The argument about the argument
The ideas won a Nobel prize, and they also have serious critics, some of whom the prize committee itself acknowledged.
Is it institutions or people? Edward Glaeser, Rafael La Porta, Florencio Lopez-de-Silanes and Andrei Shleifer argued in 2004 that settlers didn't only bring institutions; they brought themselves, with their education and skills. If human capital came first and institutions followed, the causal story runs the other way. The Nobel committee's scientific background treats this seriously, noting that human capital and institutions are both drivers of growth and that it is "very hard" to separate the two, so the headline estimate "should thus be taken with a grain of salt".
Is the data good enough? The economist David Albouy challenged the historical settler-mortality figures in 2012. The committee notes that the core results survive when the most disputed (African) cases are dropped and extreme mortality figures are capped.
Is geography really secondary? In The New York Review of Books, the geographer Jared Diamond argued that Why Nations Fail dismisses geographic disadvantages too quickly, from tropical diseases to poor soils to being landlocked, and that good institutions "did not crop up randomly" but grew out of deeper differences in history and environment.
Are the categories too broad? The political scientist Francis Fukuyama, broadly sympathetic, argued that "inclusive" and "extractive" are "way too broad", that almost every real society mixes both, which makes the historical claims "hard to falsify", and that a capable state and the rule of law matter more for growth than democracy as such.
What about China? This is the hardest case. China grew at extraordinary speed for four decades under a one-party state. Acemoglu and Robinson's answer is that China's growth came from more inclusive economic policies under Deng Xiaoping, and that growth under extractive political institutions will eventually stall. Fukuyama's reply was that a theory which predicts China's eventual crash but can't explain "the most remarkable growth story of our time" is weaker for it. Who is right is partly a question about the future.

Debate
The institutional view
The challenge

Colonial origins
Settler conditions shaped institutions, which shaped prosperity
Settlers also brought skills; the two are hard to separate

Evidence
Robust to dropping disputed cases
Old mortality data are rough

Geography
Nogales shows rules beat climate
Disease, soils and access to the sea still matter

Concepts
Inclusive vs extractive explains long-run patterns
Too broad to test; states and law matter more than voting

China
Growth will stall without political opening
It hasn't yet; the theory struggles to explain it

Few economists now deny that institutions matter a great deal. The argument is over how much, compared with what, and what that means for countries trying to change.
Part 8 — Seeing the rules
Put the thinkers side by side and they turn out to be describing one thing from different angles.

Thinker
What institutions do
What can go wrong

Durkheim
Bind us to groups and set limits to our wants
Too little integration or regulation (and, more rarely, too much)

Weber
Make modern life predictable, fair and efficient
The rules outgrow their purpose: the iron cage

Tocqueville
Teach free people to act together
Individualism hands public life to the state

Putnam
Build trust and reciprocity
Connections thin out, or turn into chequebook membership

Asch
Norms coordinate behaviour almost automatically
Unanimity silences doubt; one dissenter breaks it

Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson
Inclusive rules let many people share the gains
Extractive rules lock in the elite and the poverty

There are two easy mistakes when you start seeing institutions everywhere. The first is fatalism: deciding that you are just a product of the rules, so nothing you do matters. The thinkers here would all reject that. Durkheim's rates were made of individual lives; Tocqueville's associations were made by people deciding to form them; Asch's dissenter changed the room.
The second mistake is the opposite: deciding that any rule you don't understand is arbitrary and can be torn down. The political tradition sometimes calls this Chesterton's fence (see The Political Spectrum, Fairly Presented): before removing a fence, find out why someone put it there. Many of the invisible rules that annoy us exist because they solve a coordination problem we no longer notice, like the queue.
Between those mistakes sits the useful habit: noticing the rules, asking whom they serve, and remembering that they were made by people and can be remade by people, slowly, usually together.

The takeaway
Institutions are the rules of the game, formal and informal, and they shape almost everything people do. Durkheim showed that even the most private acts have social patterns, and that both too little and too much regulation can harm. Weber explained why rule-bound bureaucracy conquered the modern world, protects fairness, and risks becoming an "iron cage". Tocqueville saw voluntary associations as democracy's school; Putnam argued they were declining in America, and his critics argued they were changing shape. Asch's conformity effect has replicated decades later, but so has its most hopeful detail: one dissenter breaks the spell. And the 2024 Nobel laureates argue that inclusive institutions explain why some nations are rich, a claim that is influential, well evidenced, and still genuinely debated.
Try this: pick one rule in your daily life that nobody ever wrote down: how meetings run at work, who pays at dinner, what you can say at family gatherings. Ask three questions about it: who benefits from it, what would happen if one person broke it, and what would happen if one other person openly backed them. If you find one worth changing, Asch's lesson is to find your ally first.

Sources & Further Reading
Sources
- North, D.C. (1993). "Economic Performance through Time", Nobel Prize lecture, 9 December 1993. nobelprize.org.
- Durkheim, É. (1895). Les Règles de la méthode sociologique, chapters 1–2 (French text via Wikisource, Alcan 1919 edition). Durkheim, É. (1897). Le Suicide: étude de sociologie, Introduction; Book II, chapters 2–5 and the footnote on fatalistic suicide (French text via Project Gutenberg #40489). All translations from the French are the author's own.
- Robinson, W.S. (1950). Ecological correlations and the behavior of individuals. American Sociological Review, 15(3).
- Becker, S.O. & Woessmann, L. (2018). Social cohesion, religious beliefs, and the effect of Protestantism on suicide. Review of Economics and Statistics, 100(3), 377–391.
- Case, A. & Deaton, A. (2015). Rising morbidity and mortality in midlife among white non-Hispanic Americans in the 21st century. PNAS, 112(49), 15078–15083.
- Weber, M. (1904–05). The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. T. Parsons (1930), chapter 5. Weber, M., "Bureaucracy", in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, trans. and ed. H.H. Gerth & C.W. Mills (1946), from Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Max Weber".
- Baehr, P. (2001). The "iron cage" and the "shell as hard as steel". History and Theory, 40(2). Douglass, R.B. (2015). "Shell as hard as steel" (or, "iron cage"). Journal of Historical Sociology.
- Tocqueville, A. de (1840). Democracy in America, vol. 2, trans. H. Reeve, Part 2, chapters 2 and 5 (Project Gutenberg #816).
- Putnam, R.D. (1995). Bowling alone: America's declining social capital. Journal of Democracy, 6(1), 65–78. Putnam, R.D. (2000). Bowling Alone. Simon & Schuster. Putnam, R.D. & Garrett, S.R. (2020). The Upswing.
- Fischer, C.S. (2005). Bowling Alone: what's the score? Social Networks, 27(2), 155–167. Paxton, P. (1999). Is social capital declining in the United States? American Journal of Sociology, 105(1). Skocpol, T. (2003). Diminished Democracy. University of Oklahoma Press.
- Chetty, R. et al. (2022). Social capital I. Nature, 608, 108–121.
- Asch, S.E. (1955). Opinions and social pressure. Scientific American, 193(5). Asch, S.E. (1956). Studies of independence and conformity: I. A minority of one against a unanimous majority. Psychological Monographs: General and Applied, 70, 1–70. Majority-size and dissenter findings as summarised in Nyczka, P., Byrka, K., Nail, P.R. & Sznajd-Weron, K. (2018), Conformity in numbers, PLOS ONE; Bond & Smith's scope and the "at least once" figure as summarised in Capuano, C. & Chekroun, P. (2024), A systematic review of research on conformity, International Review of Social Psychology.
- Bond, R. & Smith, P.B. (1996). Culture and conformity: a meta-analysis of studies using Asch's line judgment task. Psychological Bulletin, 119(1), 111ff.
- Franzen, A. & Mader, S. (2023). The power of social influence: a replication and extension of the Asch experiment. PLOS ONE, 18(11), e0294325.
- The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (2024). Press release, popular science background and scientific background for the Prize in Economic Sciences 2024. Acemoglu, D., Johnson, S. & Robinson, J.A. (2001). The colonial origins of comparative development. American Economic Review; (2002) Reversal of fortune. Quarterly Journal of Economics. Acemoglu, D. & Robinson, J.A. (2012). Why Nations Fail. Crown.
- Glaeser, E., La Porta, R., Lopez-de-Silanes, F. & Shleifer, A. (2004). Do institutions cause growth? Journal of Economic Growth, 9, 271–303. Albouy, D. (2012). The colonial origins of comparative development: an empirical investigation: comment. American Economic Review, 102, 3059–3076.
- Fukuyama, F. (2012). "Acemoglu and Robinson on Why Nations Fail." The American Interest, 26 March 2012. Diamond, J. (2012). "What makes countries rich or poor?" The New York Review of Books, 7 June 2012.
Go deeper
- 🌐 Popular science background to the 2024 economics prize — six readable pages from the prize committee, with the Nogales story and clear diagrams. The best short introduction to the institutions argument.
- 🌐 Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Volume 2 (Project Gutenberg) — free. Read Part 2, chapters 2 to 7: a short run of chapters on individualism and associations that reads as if it were written last week.
- 🌐 Claude Fischer, "Bowling Alone: What's the Score?" (2005) — a fair, funny, thirteen-page referee's report on Putnam. Read it after the book, or instead of it.
- 🌐 Franzen & Mader (2023), the Asch replication — free full text — a clear modern rerun of the classic, including what money and politics do to it.
- 🌐 Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Max Weber" — a careful guide to rationalisation, bureaucracy and the iron cage.
- 📘 Why Nations Fail — Daron Acemoglu & James Robinson (2012). The big, readable version of the Nobel argument. Read Fukuyama's and Diamond's reviews alongside it.
- 📘 Bowling Alone — Robert Putnam (2000). Long and data-heavy, but the first chapters make the case vividly.
- 🌐 See also, in this library: How Government Actually Works, Rights, Constitutions & the Rule of Law, Thinking in Systems, and next in this series, Status in the Age of Followers.


Status in the Age of Followers: Hierarchy Online and Off
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People have always ranked one another. What's new is that the ranking now comes with a number, updates every second, and follows you to bed.

Follows: The Pecking Order (Society 1) · Institutions (Society 5) · Why We Care So Much About Games (Sports) · the Personal Development deep dives
In this deep dive
1. Veblen: wealth has to be seen
2. Positional goods: when what counts is having more than others
3. Festinger, Aristotle and the people we compare ourselves with
4. Status you can count: likes, followers and views
5. The great argument, part one: what the correlations show
6. The great argument, part two: experiments, natural experiments and a national test
7. The attention economy and the new status class
8. What to do with all this

Picture two people posting the same photo of the same sunset. One gets four likes. The other gets four thousand. Nothing about the sunset differs. Nothing about the two people's lives has changed in the last minute. And yet for many of us, that gap would sting. We'd check again an hour later. We might wonder what we did wrong.
That small sting is the subject of this piece. Earlier pieces in this series looked at hierarchy from a distance: where it comes from, how classes and castes ranked people, how much people move, and the institutions that hold it in place. This last piece comes close up. It asks how the oldest human question, where do I stand, works when standing is measured in public numbers that update in real time.
It begins with classic thinkers who wrote long before smartphones but explain a lot about your feed. Then it takes the biggest live argument seriously: does social media harm young people's mental health, and how much? Serious researchers disagree, and you'll get both sides at their strongest. It ends with what a reader can actually do.
Part 1 — Veblen: wealth has to be seen
In 1899 an American economist named Thorstein Veblen published The Theory of the Leisure Class. It's an odd, ironic book, written in a stiff, formal style that sounds like a scientist describing a strange tribe. The tribe was the American rich of the Gilded Age. Veblen's central idea is short enough to fit on a phone screen.

"In order to gain and to hold the esteem of men it is not sufficient merely to possess wealth or power. The wealth or power must be put in evidence, for esteem is awarded only on evidence." (Veblen, 1899)

Respect, in other words, isn't given for what you have. It's given for what others can see you have. From that one idea, Veblen built a theory of why the rich behave as they do.
His first answer was conspicuous leisure. In older societies, the clearest proof that you were rich was that you didn't have to work. Visible idleness, long hours at sport or study of useless things, hands that had never done manual labour: all of these said "I am above needing to earn." His second answer, which gave the language its most famous phrase, was conspicuous consumption: spending on things whose main job is to be noticed. "Conspicuous consumption of valuable goods," he wrote, "is a means of reputability to the gentleman of leisure."
Veblen didn't think this was only a vice of the rich. He thought the habit ran all the way down. "No class of society, not even the most abjectly poor, forgoes all customary conspicuous consumption." And he thought it could never be satisfied by economic growth, because the goal is relative. In his words, "no general increase of the community's wealth can make any approach to satiating this need, the ground of which is the desire of every one to excel every one else."
The stranger in the crowd
The part of Veblen that reads most like a prophecy is a passage about cities. In a village, everyone knows how rich you are. In a modern city, you are surrounded by strangers whose "transient good opinion" still matters to you. Veblen noted that people increasingly gathered in "churches, theaters, ballrooms, hotels, parks, shops," among others to whom "one's everyday life is unknown." To impress these passing observers, he wrote, "the signature of one's pecuniary strength should be written in characters which he who runs may read."
That last phrase means: so plain that someone hurrying past can read it at a glance. Veblen concluded that as life filled up with strangers, showy spending would matter more and quiet leisure less, because spending is easier to read quickly.
Now think about a social media feed. It's a crowd of strangers and half-strangers, scrolling fast, giving each image a second or two. It's Veblen's theatre lobby with billions of seats. The holiday photo, the restaurant table, the gym mirror, the new trainers: they're signatures written for people who are scrolling past. Veblen never saw a screen, but he described its audience.
What Veblen got wrong, or left out
Veblen is a starting point, not a final word. Not all display is about money: people also display taste, knowledge, kindness and skill, as Pierre Bourdieu argued at length (see Class, Status and Power, Society 2). Not all consumption is display: most things are bought because they're useful or liked. And Veblen was satirising as much as measuring. His book has almost no data in the modern sense; its strength is a way of seeing, which later researchers have had to test piece by piece.
Part 2 — Positional goods: when what counts is having more than others
Veblen had an important ancestor. In The Wealth of Nations (1776), Adam Smith stopped in the middle of a discussion of taxes to define what counts as a "necessary." His answer was social, not just biological. A necessary is not only what keeps you alive but "whatever the custom of the country renders it indecent for creditable people, even of the lowest order, to be without."
His example was a linen shirt. The ancient Greeks and Romans lived comfortably without linen, he noted. "But in the present times, through the greater part of Europe, a creditable day-labourer would be ashamed to appear in public without a linen shirt." Not having one would signal a "disgraceful degree of poverty." What you need, in other words, depends on what others around you have. Smith wasn't describing vanity. He was describing the price of being treated as a respectable member of your community.
Fred Hirsch's arms race
Two centuries later, in 1976, the economist Fred Hirsch gave this idea a sharper name in Social Limits to Growth. He called them positional goods: things whose value to you depends on your position relative to others, not just on the thing itself.
A clean water supply is not positional. It's just as good to you whether your neighbours have one or not. A top degree, used to get a job, is different. If everyone gets a degree, it no longer sets you apart, so you need a better one. A house with a view, a seat at the most exclusive restaurant, being the most-followed person in your class: all positional. Their value comes partly from the fact that others can't have them.
Hirsch's worry was that growth can't fix this. As a society gets richer, more of what people want becomes positional, and the competition for it becomes an arms race. Everybody spends more and works harder to stay in the same place.

Non-positional goods
Positional goods

Value depends on
The thing itself
Your rank compared with others

When everyone gets more
Everyone is better off
Little or no one is better off; the bar moves

Examples
Clean water, vaccines, safe streets, free time with friends
A top-ranked degree for a job search, the most exclusive address, the biggest following

Online equivalent
A useful tutorial, a message from a friend
Follower counts, like counts, being "verified"

Do people really think this way?
Researchers have tested how strongly people care about relative position. In a 1998 study, the researchers Sara Solnick and David Hemenway asked people to choose between two imaginary worlds. In one, they would earn more than others. In the other, everyone, including them, would be much richer in real terms, but they would earn less than others. About half picked the first world: less real income, as long as they were ahead. How much people cared about their relative position depended on what was being compared. Concern was strongest for attractiveness and for praise from a supervisor, and weakest for holiday time.
A 2005 study by the economist Erzo Luttmer, titled "Neighbors as Negatives," used American survey data and found something similar in real life. Holding a person's own income constant, the higher the earnings of people in their local area, the less happy that person reported being.
And inequality seems to sharpen the concern. In 2016, the researchers Lukasz Walasek and Gordon Brown looked at internet searches across countries. People in more unequal countries searched relatively more often for status brands such as Prada, Louis Vuitton and Chanel. That pattern was stronger among well-developed countries, and they found no evidence that a country's income alone explained it.

Growth can't satisfy a positional want. When everyone gets more, the bar simply moves.

None of this proves that people are only status-seekers. It does show that where you stand is something many people value for its own sake, and are willing to give up real things to get. Social media didn't invent that. It found a way to measure it.
Part 3 — Festinger, Aristotle and the people we compare ourselves with
If status is relative, then the obvious question is: relative to whom? You don't compare yourself with everyone. You compare yourself with some people, and the choice matters enormously.
Festinger's theory
In 1954 the American psychologist Leon Festinger published "A theory of social comparison processes," a classic of social psychology. His starting point was simple. People want to know how good their opinions and abilities are. When there's an objective test (a stopwatch, an exam score), they can use that. When there isn't, they look at other people.
But not just any people. Festinger argued that we prefer to compare ourselves with people who are similar to us. A beginner tennis player learns little from comparing herself with a professional; she learns from players near her level. Later researchers added a key distinction:

Upward comparison is comparing with someone better off. It can inspire ("if she can do it, so can I") or deflate ("I'll never be that good").
Downward comparison is comparing with someone worse off. It can comfort ("at least I'm not in that situation"), though it can also bring anxiety ("that could be me").

Aristotle got there first
Festinger's similarity idea would not have surprised Aristotle. In the Rhetoric, written in the fourth century BCE, he described envy as a kind of pain at the good fortune of people "like" ourselves, and noticed exactly whom it targets. In J. H. Freese's translation: "They envy those who are near them in time, place, age, and reputation." Nobody, he pointed out, "tries to rival those who lived ten thousand years ago." He quoted an old saying, "Potter [being jealous] of potter." Potters envy other potters, not kings.
This is the crucial point for understanding social media. Celebrities have always been richer and more beautiful than ordinary people, but they were far away, like kings. Social media brings the comparison down to people "near" you: classmates, colleagues, the friend from school, the stranger your own age doing your own hobby slightly better. It also shows you their best moments, carefully chosen, placed right next to your ordinary Tuesday.
Two kinds of envy
In 2007 the psychologists Richard Smith and Sung Hee Kim reviewed the research on envy in Psychological Bulletin. They defined it as "an unpleasant, often painful emotion characterized by feelings of inferiority, hostility, and resentment caused by an awareness of a desired attribute enjoyed by another person or group of persons." They also drew a distinction that later research took up: envy proper, which is hostile, and a benign envy that lacks the hostility.
A 2009 study by Niels van de Ven, Marcel Zeelenberg and Rik Pieters tested that distinction. They started in the Netherlands, where Dutch has separate words for the two kinds, and then found the same two experiences in samples from the United States and Spain, where one word covers both. The difference was in what each kind of envy made people want to do:

Benign envy
Malicious envy

Feels like
"I wish I had that too"
"I wish they didn't have that"

Pushes you to
Move yourself up
Pull them down

Can lead to
Effort, learning, imitation
Gossip, sabotage, pleasure at their failure

This matters for what comes later. Comparison isn't simply good or bad. It can push you to improve, or it can sour into resentment. What tips it one way or the other is part of what researchers argue about.
Part 4 — Status you can count: likes, followers and views
For most of history, status was a fuzzy thing. You could tell roughly who was respected in your village, but nobody had an exact number. Social media changed that. It turned approval into a count that's public, precise, comparable and constantly updated. A like count is something new in human history: a status scoreboard for ordinary people.
Is a follower count prestige?
The word "followers" is apt. The Pecking Order (Society 1) described two routes to rank: dominance, taken by fear, and prestige, given freely by people who want to watch and learn from someone. A following looks like prestige turned into a number: people choosing to pay attention to you. But the number is a blunt instrument. It can't tell admiration from curiosity, amusement or outrage. It can't tell a loyal audience from a lucky week in a recommendation algorithm. And it ranks everyone, the teenager and the pop star, on one public scale, which village reputations never did. That's what makes it new. The status motive is ancient; a single, exact, public scoreboard for it is not.
What a like does in the brain
In 2016, a team led by Lauren Sherman at UCLA built a fake version of Instagram and showed it to teenagers lying in a brain scanner. The photos were shown with either many likes or few likes, and the teens could add their own like.
Two findings stood out. First, the teenagers were more likely to like photos that already had many likes, whether the photos were neutral or showed risky behaviour such as drinking or smoking. The number itself pulled them. Second, viewing photos with many likes was associated with greater activity in brain regions involved in reward, social thinking, imitation and attention. The researchers argued this showed one way peer influence works online. A caution, though: this was a laboratory study of what happens in the brain while viewing likes. It shows a mechanism, not long-term harm.
When a platform tried hiding the score
The companies know the scoreboard matters. Instagram spent a period testing what happened when it hid like counts. In May 2021, Meta announced the result: everyone on Instagram and Facebook would get the option to hide their public like counts. Its explanation was unusually frank. It had tested hiding likes "to see if it might depressurize people's experience on Instagram." What it heard was that not seeing like counts "was beneficial for some and annoying to others," partly because people use like counts to see what's popular. So the score stayed, with an off switch.
The scoreboard is steep
Online status isn't just countable. It's extremely unequal. In a 2018 study of a random sample of YouTube channels over ten years, the media researcher Mathias Bärtl found that on average about 85% of all views went to about 3% of channels. Most people who post get a small audience. A few get a giant one. That shape matters for status: it means the people you see most are, almost by definition, the rare winners.

Celebrities used to be like kings: far away. Social media brings the comparison down to the potter next door, and shows you only her best pots.

Why this connects to fans and games
There's an older status move worth noticing here. Why We Care So Much About Games (Sports & the Body in Motion) describes how fans "bask in reflected glory," feeling bigger when their team wins even though they did nothing. Online, the same instinct shows up in sharing a famous person's post, following accounts that signal what group you belong to, and arguing for "your" side. Much online status isn't personal at all. It's borrowed from the group you've attached yourself to.
Part 5 — The great argument, part one: what the correlations show
A note before this part and the next: they discuss research on anxiety, depression, self-harm and young people's mental health. If you're struggling, please talk to someone you trust or a professional. If you're in crisis or thinking about ending your life, in the US you can call or text 988 (the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline); in the UK and Ireland, Samaritans answer on 116 123; elsewhere, contact your local emergency or crisis service.
Now to the biggest live argument in this whole area. It starts from a worry almost everyone shares: young people are struggling. Haidt's book points to sharp rises in anxiety, depression and self-harm among teenagers, especially girls, from the early 2010s, around the time smartphones and social media became nearly universal among them. Even his sharpest critic in this section, Candice Odgers, writes of "rising levels of teen depression and anxiety." The dispute is about why. Two well-informed camps answer very differently. Here are both at their strongest.
The case for harm: Jonathan Haidt
The social psychologist Jonathan Haidt made the case for harm most famously in The Anxious Generation (2024). His argument is that between about 2010 and 2015 childhood went through a "Great Rewiring," shifting from a "play-based childhood" to a "phone-based childhood." Children got less unsupervised time in the real world and much more unsupervised time online. Haidt's phrase for this is overprotection in the real world and underprotection online. He believes this shift is a major cause of the rise in teenage mental illness, especially among girls: the phone-based childhood crowded out free play, independence and face-to-face connection, fragmented attention, and exposed children to constant comparison and new risks. His campaign groups its proposals into four areas: phone-free schools, more childhood independence, age limits for social media, and tech regulation.
The case for caution: Candice Odgers and Amy Orben
In a review of the book in Nature in March 2024, the psychologist Candice Odgers wrote that "the book's repeated suggestion that digital technologies are rewiring our children's brains and causing an epidemic of mental illness is not supported by science." She made several points:

Most studies find no association, a small one, or mixed results, between social media use and teen mental health.
Where there is an association, it may run the other way: struggling teenagers may use social media more, rather than social media making them struggle.
Large studies across many countries don't show the consistent pattern a major cause would produce.
Focusing on phones "might distract us from effectively responding to the real causes" of the mental health crisis, which may include many other things.

She also wrote something easy to miss: "Two things can be independently true." Social media can be a poor environment for children, and still not be the main cause of the rise in mental illness. She agreed many of the book's solutions were reasonable.
The psychologists Amy Orben and Andrew Przybylski are known for the most-quoted correlation study in this debate. In 2019, using three large datasets covering 355,358 adolescents, they found that digital technology use explained at most 0.4% of the variation in teenagers' well-being. To give that a sense of scale, they compared it with other things in the same data. The association was in the same range as those for eating potatoes or wearing glasses. Nobody thinks potatoes cause depression. The point is that a very small correlation can't by itself show a big harm.
What sits between the camps
Two more findings complicate both simple stories.
First, timing in development may matter. In 2022 Orben, Przybylski, Sarah-Jayne Blakemore and Rogier Kievit analysed two UK datasets of 84,011 people aged 10 to 80. The link between social media use and lower life satisfaction was most negative in younger adolescents. In the 17,409 young people they followed over time, there seemed to be "windows" of sensitivity, when higher social media use predicted lower life satisfaction a year later. Those windows came at different ages for girls (11 to 13, and 19) and boys (14 to 15, and 19). The effect also ran the other way: lower life satisfaction predicted more social media use later.
Second, averages hide individuals. In a 2021 study, Patti Valkenburg and colleagues had 387 adolescents aged 13 to 15 report their social media use and self-esteem six times a day for three weeks. When they analysed each teenager separately, 88% showed no effect or a very small one, 4% showed positive effects, and 8% showed negative effects. A tiny average can hide a minority who are harmed and a minority who benefit.

The case for harm (Haidt)
The case for caution (Odgers, Orben, Przybylski)

Main claim
Phone-based childhood is a major cause of the teen mental health crisis
Evidence doesn't show it's a major cause; the effect sizes are small and mixed

On small correlations
They hide larger effects for heavy users and girls
They're small, and may partly run the other way

On causes
Lost play and connection, fragmented attention, comparison
Many possible causes; phones may distract from them

On action
Act now on the most plausible theory
Improve research and target real risks; many proposals are still reasonable

Part 6 — The great argument, part two: experiments, natural experiments and a national test
Correlations alone can't settle a question about causes. So both camps look at experiments and natural experiments, where something changes for some people and not others.
Experiments: what happens when people cut back

A short limit. In a 2018 study by Melissa Hunt and colleagues, 143 undergraduates at the University of Pennsylvania were randomly assigned either to limit Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat to 10 minutes per platform per day, or to carry on as usual, for three weeks. The limited group showed significant reductions in loneliness and depression compared with the others. Both groups showed less anxiety and fear of missing out, which the authors suggested might come from simply tracking their use.
A month off Facebook. In a large experiment published in 2020, the economist Hunt Allcott and colleagues randomly assigned American adults to deactivate Facebook, or not, for the four weeks before the 2018 US midterm elections. Those who quit spent less time online and more time offline, including watching TV alone and socialising with friends and family. They knew a little less about the news, became somewhat less politically polarised, reported higher well-being, and used Facebook less afterwards.
A surprise. In 2024, Lisa Walsh, Sonja Lyubomirsky and colleagues reported an eight-day experiment with 338 members of Generation Z, comparing two kinds of restriction. Cutting back on smartphone use in general brought a range of benefits, including higher life satisfaction and less loneliness and stress. Cutting back on social media alone brought few benefits, and even some more negative emotion. The device and the social media apps may not be the same problem.

A natural experiment: Facebook arrives at college
When Facebook first launched, it opened to American colleges one campus at a time. In a 2022 paper in the American Economic Review, Luca Braghieri, Ro'ee Levy and Alexey Makarin used that staggered rollout as a natural experiment. They found that Facebook's arrival worsened students' mental health, and that the evidence pointed to unfavourable social comparison as one channel: students comparing themselves with peers who seemed to be doing better. This is Festinger's theory showing up in economic data.
Haidt's reply, and the state of play
In April 2024 Haidt published a reply to Odgers. "Odgers is wrong to say that I have no evidence of causation," he wrote. He pointed to the experiments, the natural experiments, the international scope and timing of the rise, the "eyewitness testimony" of young people who blame social media themselves, and what he calls group-level effects: when a whole community of teenagers moves its social life onto the platforms, abstaining becomes costly, and those who try to quit find themselves socially isolated. Studies that treat use as an individual dose, like sugar, can miss that. On uncertainty, he argued that "at a certain point, we need to take action based on the most plausible theory." In April 2026 he and Zach Rausch set out "seven lines of evidence," while acknowledging that "Scientific debates are never closed."
Meanwhile, in 2023 the US Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy, issued an advisory on social media and youth mental health. It said that up to 95% of 13- to 17-year-olds use a social media platform, that teenagers who spend more than three hours a day on social media face double the risk of mental health problems such as symptoms of depression and anxiety (a finding from correlational research), and that "we cannot conclude social media is sufficiently safe for children and adolescents."
A national test: Australia
The argument has now left the journals. Australia's Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Act 2024 came into effect on 10 December 2025. It requires designated social media platforms to take reasonable steps to stop Australians under 16 from creating or keeping accounts. Preliminary estimates suggested that around 1.2 million young people would be affected.
Early evidence is limited. One study published in the BMJ in 2026 followed 408 Australian adolescents from just before the law to about three months after. More than 85% of those under 16 reported still using the covered platforms, often through their own accounts, and some used fake accounts or other workarounds. The researchers found little evidence of an immediate drop in social media use among under-16s. That study is small, relies on self-report and looks only at the first months. Larger evaluations, tracking thousands of young people and their families, are under way. Whatever they find, the Australian experiment will be one of the most closely watched in this debate.

The honest summary: heavy use and poor mental health go together, a few experiments point to harm, and nobody yet knows how much of the teenage crisis social media explains.

Part 7 — The attention economy and the new status class
To understand why the status scoreboard exists, follow the money. Social media is mostly free to use because users aren't the main customers. Advertisers are. What advertisers buy is your attention.
Simon's warning
The social scientist Herbert Simon saw the logic coming in 1971, long before social media. In an essay on designing organisations for "an information-rich world," he wrote:

"A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it." (Herbert Simon, 1971)

Information isn't scarce any more. Attention is. And whatever is scarce becomes something people compete for and sell.
The merchants of attention
The writer Tim Wu traced this business model a long way back in The Attention Merchants. In his telling it began when newspapers started living mainly on advertising rather than on readers' subscriptions. Once that happened, the reader became the product being sold, and the paper's job was to capture as much attention as possible. Radio, television and the internet followed the same model, each more precise. Wu quotes the technologist Jeff Hammerbacher: "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks."
The writer James Williams, in Stand Out of Our Light (2018), put the users' side simply: "No one wakes up in the morning and asks: 'How much time can I possibly spend using social media today?'" Yet that's often the number the systems are built to raise. Public like counts, follower numbers and streaks aren't neutral features. They tap the status motive described in Parts 1 to 3, and status-seeking keeps people posting, checking and scrolling.
Influencers: a status class with a business model
Out of this system came a new kind of status: being followed. Researchers call it micro-celebrity, a term popularised by the media scholars Theresa Senft and Alice Marwick. Marwick defined it as "a mindset and set of practices in which the audience is constructed as a fan base, popularity is maintained through ongoing fan management, and self-presentation is carefully assembled to be consumed by others." Her book Status Update (2013) studied San Francisco's tech community in the years between the dot-com boom and the App Store, and argued that "Web 2.0" encouraged a preoccupation with status and attention rather than the democratic culture it promised.
In older terms, influencers are a status group in Max Weber's sense (see Class, Status and Power): a group defined by a shared kind of honour and lifestyle, not just by money. They're often also a business, earning from brands that want access to their followers. Being admired is the asset, and attention is the income.
Two facts keep the glamour in proportion:

Most don't make it. Bärtl's YouTube study, in Part 4, found that a small minority of channels captures most views. Fame online follows the steep curve of positional goods: there's only so much attention to go around.
Much of the work is unpaid. The media scholar Brooke Erin Duffy, in (Not) Getting Paid to Do What You Love (2017), studied women working as fashion bloggers, beauty vloggers and designers. She called their effort "aspirational labour": mostly unpaid work now, in the hope of being paid and recognised later. Her book draws attention to the gap between the handful who find lucrative careers and the rest, whose "passion projects" amount to free work for brands.

This new class changes the rest of us, too. When the most visible people in your feed are professionals at being looked at, an ordinary life can start to look like failure.
Part 8 — What to do with all this
There's no need to throw away your phone to live well with status. Hierarchy is part of human life, as The Pecking Order showed. What you can change is which ladders you climb, which people you measure yourself against, and how much of your attention you hand over. Here is what the research supports, labelled honestly.
Choose your pond
Festinger's insight is that you pick your comparison group, mostly without noticing. You can pick it on purpose. A feed full of strangers who are professionally beautiful or successful sets your whole life against their edited best moments. Muting accounts that leave you feeling small is not weakness; it's choosing a fairer comparison. The research on envy suggests one useful test: does this account leave you wanting to do something (benign envy), or leave you resentful and flat (the malicious kind, or plain discouragement)?
Use envy as information
Benign envy is a signal. If you keep envying a friend's language skills, it may be telling you that you value learning a language. A Life That Means Something (Personal Development) explains how to turn vague longings into named values and small actions. That's the healthy use of upward comparison: it points at what you care about.
Watch how, not only how long
The evidence on "passive" versus "active" use is weaker than once thought. A 2015 study by Philippe Verduyn, Ethan Kross and colleagues found, in the laboratory and in daily life, that passively scrolling Facebook lowered people's mood, partly by increasing envy. But a 2022 review of 40 studies by Valkenburg and colleagues found that most did not support the simple claim that active use is good and passive use is bad. A practical version that fits both: notice how specific apps, accounts and times of day make you feel, and adjust those. You are your own best data, as the person-specific research in Part 5 suggests.
Protect sleep and real-world time
The simplest steps don't depend on who wins the argument. Keep phones out of the bedroom at night. Have some daily stretches without a screen. Spend time with people in person. These help on almost any theory of what's happening, and they're the kind of environment design that Why Most Self-Improvement Fails (Personal Development) argues works better than relying on willpower.
Be kind to yourself about it
If you catch yourself checking likes or measuring yourself against strangers, the answer is not self-contempt. Self-Discipline Without Self-Hate (Personal Development) covers the research on self-compassion and its critics, and why treating slips as normal and fixable makes habits easier to change.
Play a longer game
Positional goods, as Hirsch noted, are an arms race nobody wins. Many non-positional goods, such as friendship, health, skill, free time and meaning, don't lose value when other people have them too. The Long Game (Personal Development) looks at what compounds over a life, and at what people come to regret.

What to try
Evidence
Why it might help

Keep phones out of the bedroom
Not tested here as a single fix; sensible on either side of the debate
Protects sleep, which affects mood

Mute or unfollow accounts that leave you feeling worse
Fits social comparison and envy research; not tested as a single fix
Makes your comparison group fairer

Set daily limits on social apps
Some experiments show benefits (e.g. Hunt 2018); others show few
Frees time for offline life

Hide like counts
Meta's own finding: helpful for some, annoying for others
Removes the most visible scoreboard

Turn envy into a named goal
Fits benign envy research
Uses comparison as motivation

Spend more time with people in person
Consistent with deactivation findings (e.g. Allcott 2020)
Real-world status and belonging

The takeaway
Status has always been relative, visible and sought for its own sake. Veblen showed that esteem goes to wealth that can be seen, especially by strangers. Smith and Hirsch showed that what we need, and much of what we want, depends on what others have, so growth alone can't satisfy it. Festinger and Aristotle showed that we compare ourselves with people near and similar to us, and envy research shows that comparison can push us up or sour into a wish to pull others down. Social media turned all of this into public numbers, sold to advertisers as attention, with a few influencers at the top of a very steep curve. Whether it's a major cause of the rise in teenage mental illness is a genuine, open argument: Haidt says yes and wants action now; Odgers, Orben and others say the evidence is weaker and the causes wider. Australia's under-16 law is a live test. Meanwhile, you can choose your comparison group, use envy as a signal, protect sleep and offline time, and invest in goods that don't lose value when others have them.
Try this: for three days, each time you close a social app, ask one question and jot down a single word in reply: "Do I feel better, worse or the same?" At the end, look at the pattern. Which apps, which accounts and which times of day left you worse off? Change just one thing: mute one account, move one app off your home screen, or charge your phone outside the bedroom. Then repeat the three-day check and see what changed.

Sources & Further Reading
Sources
- Veblen, T. (1899). The Theory of the Leisure Class. Chapters 2–4 (Project Gutenberg #833).
- Smith, A. (1776). An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Book V, Chapter II (Project Gutenberg #3300).
- Hirsch, F. (1976). Social Limits to Growth. Harvard University Press. Cass, D. (2023). Positional goods and social equality. Res Publica, 29(3), 501–520.
- Solnick, S.J. & Hemenway, D. (1998). Is more always better? A survey on positional concerns. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 37(3), 373–383.
- Luttmer, E.F.P. (2005). Neighbors as negatives: relative earnings and well-being. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 120(3), 963–1002.
- Walasek, L. & Brown, G.D.A. (2016). Income inequality, income, and internet searches for status goods. Social Indicators Research, 129(3), 1001–1014.
- Festinger, L. (1954). A theory of social comparison processes. Human Relations, 7(2), 117–140.
- Aristotle, Rhetoric, Book II, chapter 10, trans. J.H. Freese (Loeb, 1926), via the Perseus Digital Library.
- Smith, R.H. & Kim, S.H. (2007). Comprehending envy. Psychological Bulletin, 133(1), 46–64.
- van de Ven, N., Zeelenberg, M. & Pieters, R. (2009). Leveling up and down: the experiences of benign and malicious envy. Emotion, 9(3), 419–429.
- Sherman, L.E., et al. (2016). The power of the like in adolescence. Psychological Science, 27(7), 1027–1035.
- Meta (26 May 2021). "Giving People More Control on Instagram and Facebook." about.fb.com.
- Bärtl, M. (2018). YouTube channels, uploads and views: a statistical analysis of the past 10 years. Convergence, 24(1), 16–32.
- Haidt, J. (2024). The Anxious Generation. Allen Lane / Penguin Press. The Anxious Generation movement, "About" page (anxiousgeneration.com).
- Odgers, C.L. (2024). The great rewiring: is social media really behind an epidemic of teenage mental illness? Nature, 628, 29–30.
- Haidt, J. (9 April 2024). "Yes, Social Media Really Is a Cause of the Epidemic of Teenage Mental Illness." After Babel. Haidt, J. & Rausch, Z. (9 April 2026). "The Case Against Social Media: Seven Lines of Evidence." After Babel.
- Orben, A. & Przybylski, A.K. (2019). The association between adolescent well-being and digital technology use. Nature Human Behaviour, 3(2), 173–182.
- Orben, A., Przybylski, A.K., Blakemore, S.-J. & Kievit, R.A. (2022). Windows of developmental sensitivity to social media. Nature Communications, 13, 1649.
- Valkenburg, P.M., et al. (2021). Social media use and adolescents' self-esteem: heading for a person-specific media effects paradigm. Journal of Communication, 71(1), 56–78.
- Valkenburg, P.M., van Driel, I.I. & Beyens, I. (2022). The associations of active and passive social media use with well-being: a critical scoping review. New Media & Society, 24(2), 530–549.
- Verduyn, P., ... Kross, E., et al. (2015). Passive Facebook usage undermines affective well-being. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 144(2), 480–488.
- Hunt, M.G., et al. (2018). No more FOMO: limiting social media decreases loneliness and depression. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 37(10), 751–768.
- Allcott, H., et al. (2020). The welfare effects of social media. American Economic Review, 110(3), 629–676 (NBER Working Paper 25514).
- Walsh, L.C., ... Lyubomirsky, S., et al. (2024). Does putting down your smartphone make you happier? The effects of restricting digital media on well-being. PLOS ONE, 19(10), e0306910.
- Braghieri, L., Levy, R. & Makarin, A. (2022). Social media and mental health. American Economic Review, 112(11), 3660–3693.
- Office of the US Surgeon General (2023). Social Media and Youth Mental Health: The U.S. Surgeon General's Advisory. hhs.gov.
- Stevic, A. et al. (2026). Evaluation protocol for the Social Media Minimum Age. BMJ Open. Barnes, C. et al. (2026). Early effects of Australia's Social Media Minimum Age Act on adolescents' social media use. BMJ.
- Simon, H.A. (1971). Designing organizations for an information-rich world. pp. 40–41, as quoted in Bruineberg, J. (2023). Adversarial inference. Neuroscience of Consciousness, niad019.
- Wu, T. The Attention Merchants (Vintage edition, 2017), p. 30. Williams, J. (2018). Stand Out of Our Light. Cambridge University Press, p. 8.
- Marwick, A.E. (2013). Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity, and Branding in the Social Media Age. Yale University Press (publisher's description). Marwick, A.E. (2015). You may know me from YouTube: (micro-)celebrity in social media. In P.D. Marshall & S. Redmond (eds), A Companion to Celebrity, Wiley, p. 337. Senft, T.M. (2013). Microcelebrity and the branded self. In A Companion to New Media Dynamics, Wiley.
- Duffy, B.E. (2017). (Not) Getting Paid to Do What You Love: Gender, Social Media, and Aspirational Work. Yale University Press (book and chapter abstracts).
Go deeper
- 🌐 Candice Odgers, "The great rewiring" (Nature, 2024) — the sharpest short case for caution about The Anxious Generation. Read it together with the next link.
- 🌐 Jonathan Haidt, "Yes, Social Media Really Is a Cause of the Epidemic of Teenage Mental Illness" — Haidt's direct reply to Odgers, setting out the evidence he thinks shows causation. Reading both is the fastest way into the real argument.
- 🌐 Orben, Przybylski, Blakemore & Kievit, "Windows of developmental sensitivity to social media" (free full text) — a careful study that shows why age and timing may matter more than averages.
- 🌐 Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (Project Gutenberg) — free. Read chapters 3 and 4, on conspicuous leisure and conspicuous consumption. The prose is dry, but the jokes are deadpan and still land.
- 📘 The Anxious Generation — Jonathan Haidt (2024). The book at the centre of the debate. Clear, urgent and full of proposals; read it with Odgers' review in mind.
- 📘 Status Update — Alice Marwick (2013). An inside look at how status, attention and self-branding work in the tech world that built social media.
- 📘 The Attention Merchants — Tim Wu. The history of the advertising model behind your feed, from newspapers to apps.
- 🌐 See also, in this library: The Pecking Order (Society 1), Class, Status and Power (Society 2), Why We Care So Much About Games (Sports), and in Personal Development, Self-Discipline Without Self-Hate, A Life That Means Something and The Long Game.