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What do you think is the best example of this kind of principle at work? My first guess would be academia, but I can also think of a dozen reasons why the prestige system in academia is flawed.
My intuition is that there is really no shining example of the prestige economy in the real world - but whether this has to do with the difficulty of implementation, or a flaw with the idea itself, I'm not sure.
There can be many flaws in implementation, and we probably won't find a perfect one, but academia seems like a decent example. It has a goal (research and education), and it assigns status (academic functions) to people who contribute to that goal, and the status comes with certain benefits (salary) and powers (over students) which means other people will recognize it as a status.
If you spend a lot of time hanging out with professors and learn all their buzzwords, but you will do no research nor teaching, you are not going to become a professor, i.e. you a... (read more)