The Invisible Hierarchies that Rule Our World (with Toby Stuart)

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4.7 • 4.3K Ratings

🗓️ 6 October 2025

⏱️ 73 minutes

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Summary

Status isn't fixed; it's transferred and "bestowed," shaping who gets resources, attention, and opportunity. So argues author Toby Stuart of UC Berkeley in his book, Anointed. He and EconTalk's Russ Roberts explore why hierarchies persist--reducing conflict, allocating scarce resources, and curating our overwhelming choices--and how endorsements, blurbs, and brands quietly steer our judgments, from bookstores to wine shops and art galleries. At the end, Stuart reflects on imposter syndrome and how thinking deeply about the anointed changed how he sees success.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty.
0:07.9	I'm your host, Russ Roberts, of Sholem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
0:13.8	Go to EconTalk.org, where you can subscribe, comment on this episode, and find links and other information related to today's conversation.
0:21.2	You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done going back to 2006.
0:26.7	Our email address is mail at econTalk.org.
0:30.0	We'd love to hear from you.
0:36.6	Today is September 3rd, 2025, and my guest is Toby Stewart, the Leo Halsall Chair in Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the Hoss School of Business at UC Berkeley.
0:47.4	Our topic for today is his book, Anointed, The Extraordinary Effects of Social Status in a winner-take-most world.
0:55.6	Toby, welcome to e-con talk.
0:58.1	Thanks, Russ.
0:59.2	Thrilled to be here.
1:00.4	Really, really excited for our conversation.
1:02.4	Me too.
1:03.2	What's the central idea of the book?
1:04.9	Why did you call it anointed?
1:07.8	So, Anointed, I have to say, I think I'd probably call it Anointed because it harkens back to my Catholic school, my Catholic high school and these, you know, a non-Catholic and Catholic school, but these biblical references kind of landed with me.
1:26.4	And then, but Anointed gets to just a central part of the book,
1:32.1	which is this idea about social status that it moves around.
1:37.0	So it moves from actor A to actor B.
1:40.1	That is actors that have high status bestow it upon others. And that happens in the cosmic scheme of things,
1:48.4	like anointment in a biblical sense, or anointment in modern life. Like we use that word
1:54.5	colloquially, and we use it often to mean some kind of status event that's more of a right of passage.
	...

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