Feature: How does power and prestige really work?

Long before we know what social status is, we know how it works. There's always a popular crowd from the playground to the office and everyone knows who's in and who is out. Toby Stuart is a Professor of Business Administration at University of California, Berkeley. He argues that instinct about social status never leaves us. It becomes the invisible architecture of adult life directing attention, opportunity, and reward in ways that have little to do with fairness or talent. It shapes what we admire, what we buy, even what we believe is good. But as algorithms increasingly rank, rate, and recommend on our behalf, the old status ladders may be wobbling. His latest book explores how power and prestige really work and what happens when the system starts to shift. It's called Anointed: The Extraordinary Effects of Social Status in a Winner-Take-Most World,