This post is written as a series of little thoughts and vignettes, all trying to gesture at the same idea. The hope is to convey the gestalt.

Consider the game of middle management, of climbing the hierarchy at a big company. The status games, the simulacrum 3/4 games, the politics, the moral mazes, all that jazz.

Then, open up Forbes’ list of N richest people, and count how many of them got on that list by climbing the management hierarchy at a big company.

I predict that, to within reasonable approximation, the answer will be zero. Nobody gets on Forbes’ list of richest people by climbing the hierarchy at a big company. They get on that list by founding a company, inheriting, or both.

I claim there's a generalizable pattern here. Society has some kind of competition, in this case the competition of who gets the most wealth. That game has a winners’ bracket, in this case Forbes’ list. And then it has a losers’ bracket: a bucket of people who aren’t even in the running for the winners’ bracket, but are still nominally optimizing for the same objective (making money). The generalizable pattern - I claim - is [...]

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First published:

November 18th, 2025

Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/a3K9LEW7WZhr2nHMh/status-is-the-game-of-the-losers-bracket

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.