ABSTRACT
This chapter examines evidence for innate status seeking, along with evidence for the evolution of inequality as more intensive modes of economic production evolve. It focuses on hunter-gatherer, horticultural, and agrarian societies. The chapter considers status and wealth in modern societies, looking in particular at the leveling of status distinctions in the shift from agrarian to industrial societies despite continuing inequalities in wealth, and at contemporary patterns of conspicuous consumption. The huge social and economic gap between landlords and peasants in agrarian societies has been replaced by a situation in which the majority of the population enjoys a standard of living unimaginable to the average peasant of times past. The chapter also considers the premise that humans naturally strive for status and seek resources; this striving is an evolutionary adaptation that promoted the reproductive success of the most successful strivers in the ancestral environment.
