Love of Power is the Demon of Men
From the totally awesome Nietzsche Family Circus, which pairs a random Nietzsche quote with a random Family Circus strip.
Nietzsche is right. Which is why, if you care about your happiness, you should try hard to diminish your taste for power.
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[…] [Via a blog called Happiness And Public Policy.] […]
I pretty much agree with your take on status, the array of hierarchies we can use to get ‘top dog’ status, the futility and arbitrariness of policy ‘remedies’. But moderation is the key to all things, and so I think there is some validity to the notion that potential mates are somewhat objectively ordered, and competition for them is zero-sum.
But here’s a datapoint in favor of the importance of status, perhaps an implication you haven’t considered. I recently posted a paper on the SSRN Why Risk and Return are Uncorrelated: A Relative Status Approach where I noted that if you assume relative status is all that matters, you don’t get a risk-return relationship in equilibrium. I then discuss the literature which shows that this is a much better description of financial data than assuming risk and return are correlated.
I’m sure both status and absolute utility functions are at work, but that’s a messy hybrid. The pole that totally ignores status, has a large unmentioned elephant in the room: risk and return, as a rule, are not correlated.
lkvwtwes…
lkvwtwes…