Don't Buy These Myths

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In his new book, Luxury Fever (Simon & Schuster, 1999), Cornell economics professor Robert Frank postulates that a substantial proportion of people would choose to make only $100,000 (as long as everyone else was earning $90,000) rather than $110,000 (if everyone else was earning $200,000). Some might even feel sheepish about that choice, thinking they should choose the scenario in which all incomes are higher. But for the individual, rank, not wealth, is what counts; survival has always meant climbing to the top of a relative scale.

Scientists have begun describing how that survival mechanism works on a biological level. When UCLA neuroscientist Michael McGuire and his collaborators studied 19 groups of adult vervet monkeys, they found that the serotonin concentrations in each group's dominant member were about 50 percent higher than in the subordinates. (A neurotransmitter and mood and behavior regulator, serotonin enhances feelings of well-being.) But when the top monkey was removed from the group and isolated for 72 hours, its levels dropped; meanwhile, the levels in the new leader rose. When the top monkey was returned to the group, all serotonin concentrations returned to their previous levels. So for monkeys, at least, the explanation is simple: Being number one feels good.

Is high serotonin the effect of high status, or the cause? One UCLA research team found that animals whose serotonin levels were boosted with drugs were more likely to ascend in the social hierarchy than others treated with a placebo. And in human males, studies have shown a similar correlation between high status and high testosterone: When one rises, the other does, too.

'Suffice it to say that no matter how the relevant mechanisms work,' writes Frank, 'there is compelling evidence that concern about relative position is a deep-rooted and ineradicable element of human nature.'

MYTH #4 CONSUMPTION CAN BE REGULATED As political activists working for sustainable systems, shouldn't we take collective action to curb conspicuous consumption? No, argues Frank; it's been done, and it doesn't work.

Sumptuary laws, as they were called, once invaded virtually every aspect of life. In Rome in the fourth century B.C.E. , for example, laws restricted funeral spending on everything from mausoleum size to lavishness of meals, and even stipulated that funeral pyres be constructed of unfinished, not polished, wood. Often such laws served only to keep the lower classesówhose only way to achieve status was by owning things that connoted itódown where they belonged. During the T'ang Dynasty, Chinese law prohibited commoners from taming peregrine falcons, and, about a thousand years later, from wearing fine silks and using gold on saddles. Ottoman Empire merchants couldn't wear furs, but government officials could.

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