Why class will never disappear with Hanno Sauer

I discovered this wonderful philosopher Hanno Sauer's recently, at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas. I really enjoyed his talk "After Equality, why class will never disappear".

His central argument was that inequality isn't only about money. It's also about status. And status is a particularly difficult kind of scarcity because, unlike material goods, we can't simply create more of it. It depends on where we stand in relation to everyone else.

A few things I found particularly interesting/made me think again:

- Even as societies become wealthier, we invent new ways of signalling status. Where we eat, what we buy, where we travel, what we know. Sauer points out that "Exclusive" somehow makes something more desirable. I'd never thought about it in that way before - how/when does "excluding" is a good thing?!

- Redistribution can reduce material inequality, but it doesn't necessarily change the status hierarchy. You can't redistribute prestige in the same way you can redistribute money.

- Sauer also talked about "caviar cope", which I loved - I'd never heard the term so had to look it up! Roughly: when we don't have access to something desirable, we make ourselves feel better by deciding the people who do have it are morally worse. Think of our cultural fascination with portraying the very rich as miserable, corrupt or awful people.

- His argument wasn't that we should simply accept inequality. Rather, if status hierarchies are going to exist, perhaps we should think harder about what earns someone status. For example, could we give more prestige to people who contribute to society or benefit others?

His latest book "Klasse" isn't available in english at the moment, but he develops his argument in his open-access paper Socially constructed scarcity: How status signalling creates class inequality. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s42048-026-00254-8

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