Overcoming Bias : We Moderns Are Status-Drunk
My key hypothesis is this: evolution had humans use their absolute income/wealth to judge their relative status. (I’m talking here about overall status in the larger community, not status relative to particular associates; we have many better clues to judge that.) Yes, this method would work badly in environments where communities varied greatly in average levels of absolute income/wealth. In that case, someone rich might think that they had high relative status, when in fact most everyone in their society was also rich.