THE STATUS REVOLUTION: The Improbable Story of How the Lowbrow Became the Highbrow, by Chuck Thompson
The world is somewhat different now from how it was when Thorstein Veblen wrote “The Theory of the Leisure Class” in 1899, and even from when Vance Packard wrote “The Status Seekers” in 1959. Wealth disparity and class stratification haven’t disappeared since then, but the specific ways they’re signaled in public by the rich and famous have changed a bit. All sorts of people can buy goods from high-end brands, or at least knockoffs of them. In some circles, it’s even considered stylish nowadays to work very hard.
Chuck Thompson seems to regard these changes as a bad thing. “If almost no one has any idea what status and prestige are anymore,” he writes in his new book, “The Status Revolution,” “one thing is certain — the order they’ve traditionally provided is being disrupted. No wonder the country has become so dysfunctional.” He continues: “We no longer know how to measure our value and standing among our fellow citizens.” (Tell me you don’t belong to a subaltern group without telling me you don’t belong to a subaltern group.)
So what are status and prestige, exactly? Thompson explains that, like “those in the biz,” he will be using those words, as well as “luxury” and “elite,” “more or less interchangeably.” They’re not quite the same, though. “Luxury,” if you stare hard enough at it, just means that something costs more than you can generally afford unless you’re wealthy. “Elite” suggests that the number of people who can gain access to something is small. And “prestige” and “status” were defined neatly by Alain de Botton in “Status Anxiety” as “love from the world.” Need-blind Ivy League colleges are elite but not luxurious. MacArthur fellowships are prestigious but not luxurious, since you can’t buy one. Cruella de Vil’s dream Dalmatian-fur coat is luxurious but not prestigious or elite.
Dogs are, in fact, Thompson’s first major example of a shift in status: He traces rescue dogs’ rise and purebred dogs’ decline in popular estimation over the past few decades. But he doesn’t back that up with evidence that the percentage of people acquiring each kind of dog has changed, or any comparative numbers at all. The conceptual fuzziness of “The Status Revolution” doesn’t end there. This is a book so unclear on its own arguments that its subtitle’s words “lowbrow” and “highbrow” appear nowhere in its text.
“Several generations ago,” Thompson asserts in another hand-waving example, “a classic indicator of wealth was a maid or personal servant. Now well more than half of Americans employ them.” What he means is that many people order rides through Uber or ingredients through Blue Apron, for instance. That sort of casual outsourcing, though, doesn’t seem very different from taking a hansom cab in 19th-century London or buying already-baked bread from a pistor in ancient Rome.
Thompson is correct that certain kinds of conspicuous consumption, especially when they suggest snobbery or cruelty, no longer confer status in the sense of “love from the world.” And he occasionally digs up an illuminating piece of information, like a study whose test subjects got a greater dopamine surge the more expensive they were told the wine they were tasting was — from which Thompson concludes, less convincingly, that “consumption of luxury goods is one of the fastest ways to fulfill” the human need for status. (Mistaking dopamine for external validation seems dangerous.)
Very often, “The Status Revolution” goes completely off the rails, as when Thompson attempts to conduct an academic study on the relationship between penis size and interest in sports cars. An interview with the ’80s rocker Rick Springfield shows up in two otherwise unrelated chapters; in a chapter on the current state of philanthropy, Thompson devotes enthusiastic attention to the person who (as he notes) published two of his earlier books. Whenever he runs out of things to say, Thompson resorts to apropos-of-nothing quips: “People have a measurable predisposition for conformity. This sheds light on all sorts of inexplicable cultural phenomena, including everything Kardashian, Republican dating sites, those little nose rings that look like dangling boogers, flavored vaping and ‘Bohemian Rhapsody,’ which, sorry, was a chore when it came out and is an even greater burden on the millionth exposure.” Mama mia, let us go!
The most engaging chapter of “The Status Revolution” focuses on Roy Vickers, an artist in British Columbia, and his work on carving a replica of a historically significant totem pole. It’s full of carefully observed details and well-researched context, and it has almost nothing to do with the rest of the book. In the chapter’s original incarnation, as a 2018 article in Outside magazine, Thompson didn’t mention status at all. Here, it’s called “Luxury at the End of the World: Status as Authenticity” and it’s liberally sprinkled with asides that include the book’s buzzwords, in an attempt to make it fit the Procrustean bed of its context.
What Thompson concludes from his scattershot survey is that “status, luxury, even prestige, are now commodities within everyone’s grasp” (news that the 37.9 million Americans living below the poverty line will surely be glad to hear), and that rich people “dress down like everyone else, vacation in the same places, overspend on wine, eat at Taco Bell.” It’s true that some of the great luxuries of the past — mobile phones, indoor plumbing — are much more broadly distributed nowadays. Still, somebody is wearing Hermès and eating at Le Bernardin. They must really need the dopamine.
Douglas Wolk is the author of “All of the Marvels: A Journey to the Ends of the Biggest Story Ever Told.”
THE STATUS REVOLUTION: The Improbable Story of How the Lowbrow Became the Highbrow | By Chuck Thompson | 270 pp. | Simon & Schuster | $27.99
