3 May

I post so much about status because it really is the key that unlocks all human behaviour. Another example, maybe 20-25 years ago I noticed quite a few more luxury European cars circulating in Lithgow. That wasn’t normal, previously. And it wasn’t just the rich driving them. The ‘early adopters’ of most new tech are wealthy because they can afford it. But it’s not just about dollars. They want to differentiate themselves from the less wealthy, in status. And in turn, the less wealthy want that luxury tech, to give themselves higher status. So over time we’ve seen this pattern in German luxury cars (as an example), since the 1970s. The rich got them first, then those less well-off started buying them as their prices dropped. All of this is status-driven. Often as lower status people start adopting luxury brands, higher status people will differentiate themselves by going the other way, buying cheaper things, in a move to what they think of as more ‘authentic’ living. Another genius of Tesla is to combine all parts of the status hierarchy in vehicles, into a single vehicle. Everybody gets the high performance, and the luxury, and the high tech, and the practicality, at every price point. Engineering is the only peaceful way to defeat status.