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The cover of The Status Game

The Status Game

Will Storr, 2021

Will Storr shows how the universal drive for status shapes love, work, morality and politics, and how to recognize the game without being ruled by it.

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15 parts, about 30 minutes to read.

Why read it

  • See status as the respect a group grants, and tell its three routes apart: dominance, virtue and success
  • Follow how rank reaches into health, belief and violence, with each claim held to what the evidence does and does not show
  • Take seven rules for better games, such as playing several games at once and replacing small acts of dominance with gifts of prestige

Who it is for

  • Readers puzzled by why groups cling to beliefs against evidence
  • People who feel their worth rides on one job or role
  • Readers curious about social media, mobs and moral outrage

What the summary covers

  1. The Game Beneath the Story1 min
  2. When a Hierarchy Becomes a Self1 min
  3. Belonging, Rank and the Body2 min
  4. A World Made of Signals and Rules2 min
  5. Three Routes to Standing2 min
  6. Humiliation and the Need for Smaller Games2 min
  7. Machines That Never Stop Scoring2 min
  8. Beliefs That Protect the Player1 min
  9. A Panic Rewards Active Belief2 min
  10. Rival Games, Mobs and Purity2 min
  11. How Leaders Build a Total Game3 min
  12. Games That Reward Discovery2 min
  13. The Neoliberal Self and Unequal Access3 min
  14. The Soviet Attempt to Abolish Rank3 min
  15. Seven Rules for Better Games2 min

Recommended by

  • Greg LukianoffPresident of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression
    The Status Game could not be more timely and provides a missing piece for understanding where we are, and how to get out of this mess
  • Helen LewisStaff writer at The Atlantic
    Bursting with insights into the hierarchy-crazed hellscape of a world shaped by social media, this book confirms Will Storr's own status as a master storyteller
  • Daniel FinkelsteinPolitical columnist at The Times
    I haven't finished reading The Status Game because I've only read it once. There's so much in this dazzling book I will be revisiting over and over again
  • Philippa PerryEnglish psychotherapist and author
    I hope everyone reads, digests and resists starting a cult about it. It'll be difficult though

About the author

  • Will StorrBritish journalist and author
    • Longform journalist who specialised in human rights reporting in Latin America, Africa and Aboriginal Australia
    • His reporting on sexual violence earned the Amnesty International Award and the One World Press Award
    • Contributing editor at Esquire and GQ Australia
    • Reported from the South Sudanese civil war, where a militia abducted him and he narrowly avoided execution
    • His work has appeared in the Guardian, the Sunday Times, the Observer, the New York Times and the New Yorker
    • The Science of Storytelling (2019) was a Sunday Times bestseller
    • Also a ghostwriter: Ant Middleton's memoir First Man In was shortlisted at the 2019 British Book Awards
    • The Status Game sets out his theory of the hidden structure of social life, built on the human need for status

Read it alongside

  • Goes deeperThe Tyranny of Merit

    Will Storr argues that success and failure became more individual in Western economies and that inherited advantage should not pass as merit, while Michael Sandel argues that the ideology of deserving breeds credentialist contempt and harms the dignity of work for people without degrees.

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