[BlueTie]

A few takes on this:

* College degree is just a proxy for people in dead end jobs. This could easily say "Men without yachts..." "Men without country club memberships..." "Men without genius IQs..." etc. "People with dead end jobs dropping out of work" would be a better title.

* This makes sense because these jobs are indeed more dead end than ever. You've been competing with offshoring/globalization for the last 30 years. Now you're also competing with AI/Automation.

* The status threat is also amplified as of late because earnings/wealth is increasingly the only status. It wasn't long ago that being physically strong held status in society. Or having a strong social network. We're pretty close to wealth-is-all-that-matters for social status now. The highest status people in society are dominated by social awkward, physically weak people with high earnings. Lots of this has to do with a decrease in violence (bar fights used to be common - now they're rare and end in court).

* Finally, status has adopted a capitalist winner-take-all dynamics thanks to dating apps and social media. It's now feast or famine in the dating world. Top 1% of men are getting like 50% of the attention from women on apps and even in the real world - women are less available because the guy at the bar is competing with the guy on bumble.

[lilsoso]

You write, "The highest status people in society are dominated by social awkward, physically weak people with high earnings." The socially awkward may earn increasingly higher salaries, but this does not necessarily confer status upon them.

You downplay athleticism (ie, health) and "strong social networks". But it's precisely those groups who still tend to dominate the socially awkward in status games. An autistic FAANG engineer does not have higher status than an executive or successful salesman.

Going through your comment history, I see you're in sales. I'm sure you'd recognize that status is much more complex than a single variable such as net worth or IQ.

[FrontierPsych]

I think that you are too narrowly re-defining the point that BlueTie was trying to get accross.

If you look at society as a whole, the tech field dominates in large numbers when it comes to higher paying jobs.

Nobody is saying that professional athletes don't get paid a boatload, or that entertainers can be paid astronomical amounts. But the reality is that there a maximum of 450 NBA players in the NBA, for example, and only the tippy top of them get the massive dollars.

But also, the entire NBA earned $6.41 billion in 2020/2021 season. By comparison, one single company, Apple, earned $394 billion in 2022.

It's the same with executives. While some execs have high social status, you pretty much have to be at a C-suite level. Nobody cares about some mid-level exec. And C-suite is fairly much anomolous. In 2022, Apple has 164,000 employees, but only one CEO. When looking at entire job classes, technical workers predominate over all other jobs in terms of dollars earned. An autistic FAANG doesn't have higher status than an executive, but then again, he doesn't have higher status than the receptionist at the front desk. However, an average tech has high status, comparatively speaking.

Status is clearly complex for sure, but despite what people say, generalizing is just fine, as long as it's within parameters (which I'm not going to define). And tech people have way more cachet than they did 40 years ago, for example.

[Beaver117]

Why would people participate in a rigged/losing game like that? Dropping out is rational.