Toby Stuart (on social status)

Toby Stuart (Anointed: The Extraordinary Effects of Social Status in a Winner-Take-Most World) is an organizational theorist, professor of business administration at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, and author. Toby joins the Armchair Expert to discuss attending Harvard Business School before knowing what business school was, the role of sanctioning mechanisms in a social hierarchy, and how circles of status can affect the value of works of art by millions of dollars. Toby and Dax talk about the ‘cool’ experiment he conducted on dating apps, the observation that anything of status plays out in Hollywood or among ten-year-olds, and how the anointing ritual reflects across various social strata. Toby explains why status is unlike most resources in that it can be given away but doesn’t deplete, what distinguishes merit when evaluating a bottle of wine, and implications for those that over-index in the prosperity gospel.

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