I am trying to understand the limitations and weaknesses of a system of complex human social hierarchical display based on reputation and accolades instead of the accumulation of wealth. Academia is one such example of a hierarchy based on reputation.
What are the weaknesses of such a system, such as failures to account for human adaptation and growth? Where are factors that are not in line with meritorious achievement and the scientific process? What changes could be made to improve the social system of a reputation based hierarchy?
This post is heavily abstract and conceptually framed in layperson terms. Feel free to rephrase and infer meaning. I am thinking about a distant science fiction future when accrued wealth is no longer an adequate form of human hierarchical display, and the benefits, frustrations, and failures of such a system.
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I don’t know of any academic literature on this, but you might find Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow interesting:
Disney World is run by rival adhocracies, each dedicated to providing the best experience to the park’s visitors and competing for the Whuffie the guests offer. In the post-scarcity world of the novel, Whuffie is a currency-like system that primarily measures the esteem of others, or in the case of extremely low Whuffie, their disdain.
As well as The Culture series. The author wrote some background for the series, and touches on reputation:
The Culture doesn’t actually have laws; there are, of course, agreed-on forms of behaviour; manners, as mentioned above, but nothing that we would recognise as a legal framework. Not being spoken to, not being invited to parties, finding sarcastic anonymous articles and stories about yourself in the information network; these are the normal forms of manner-enforcement in the Culture. The very worst crime (to use our terminology), of course, is murder (defined as irretrievable brain-death, or total personality loss in the case of an AI). The result - punishment, if you will - is the offer of treatment, and what is known as a slap-drone. All a slap-drone does is follow the murderer around for the rest of their life to make sure they never murder again. There are less severe variations on this theme to deal with people who are simply violent.
In a society where material scarcity is unknown and the only real value is sentimental value, there is little motive or opportunity for the sort of action we would class as a crime against property.
What makes you think that any form of societal advancement exists within a hierarchical framework?
In fact, destruction of hierarchy not only improves individual social outcomes on the whole, but it improves desirable outcomes for systems, and it improves overall systemic resiliency as power/decision-making is distributed, not concentrated.
I would argue that any movement to enforce hierarchy “merit-based” or not, is inherently regressive.
The importance of hierarchy is cultural, but all social animals display hierarchy in some respect. Those that are driven to this ends are valid and need an outlet too. This isn’t political hierarchy it is social hierarchy, and the most complex social creature in the known universe. You and I are not going to like the full spectrum of reality in the complete picture, but that is the point. Reality is not simple or structured in some rigid binary.
I was recently researching Shapley Values as a way to distribute profits fairly in a cooperative organization. The same calculation can also be used to determine the amount that an agent contributes to any group effort (think AI agents, solving a problem). I THINK this could be applied to reputational systems, provided you could define what you meant by reputation well enough that it could be calculated. Shapley won a Nobel Prize for the work because his method is provably the most fair way to allot responsibility for work.
We’ll always see a “wealth” angle, just depends on what people perceive as valuable and difficult to obtain.
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