The Existential Importance of Status

Society depends upon the social control of hypergamy and maternal status

The link between female educational attainment and declining birthrates is so firmly established that the global depopulationists regard advanced education to be a tool in their arsenal that is as important as birth control. While I’ve always attributed that to women’s hypergamous preference for even-more educated men, it actually appears to be combination of that with the negative effects of marriage and children on female status:

Status, or ‘social status’, is a key field within sociology. The term denotes a universal set of human instincts and behaviors. Status describes the perceived standing of the individual within the group. It denotes their social value and their place within the formal and informal hierarchies which comprise a society. It finds expression in the behaviors of deference, access, inclusion, approval, acclaim, respect, and honor (and indeed in their opposites - rejection, ostracization, humiliation, and so forth).

Higher status individuals are trusted with influential decisions (power), participation in productive ventures (resources), social support (health), and access to desirable mates (reproduction).

Gaining status is a motivation for each individual to productively participate in society. Status is gained and maintained through approved behaviors (achievement, etiquette, defending the group) and through the possession of recognized ‘status symbols’ (titles, wealth, important physical assets).

For the group, status has utility when coordinating social actions: it serves as a proxy measure for attributes like probable competence, leadership capacity, and virtue.

As Will Storr describes in ‘The Status Game: On Social Position and How We Use It’:

We play for status, if only subtly, with every social interaction, every contribution we make to work, love or family life and every internet post. We play with how we dress, how we speak and what we believe. We play with our lives – with the story we tell of our past and our dreams of the future. Our waking existence is accompanied by its racing commentary of emotions: we can feel horrors when we slip, even by a fraction, and taste ecstasy when we soar.

As an explanatory factor, status has the advantage of being a relative - as opposed to absolute - attribute. Ascribing primary explanatory status to any absolute factor is challenging because almost all material factors have improved over the last two centuries, while fertility has dropped. It is difficult to make a straightforward economic argument that millennials can’t have children for financial security reasons when their ancestors had a higher fertility rate while living in far greater poverty (and had such medical and food insecurity that they would have expected several of their children to die in childhood).

Status is also of existential importance to individuals. This is necessary for our inquiry because we are seeking a behavioral determinant which is powerful enough to influence fundamental human decisions like whether or not to reproduce.

The problem is that by granting women access to male status, it has both reduced the ratio of higher-status men to women and upended the intra-female status structure in a way that particularly affects young women of marriageable age that is optimal for child-bearing.

To prioritize college and career is necessarily to sacrifice potential children.