Toby Stuart

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A leading organizational theorist takes us deep into the realm of humanity’s most powerful invisible force—social status—and how it shapes everything from who we trust and what we value to which ideas and innovations change the world and who gets credit for their success.

Why does an authentic Rembrandt fetch hundreds of millions while a nearly identical painting by his most talented disciple goes for a tiny fraction of that price? What makes a show more restaurant “hot,” a neighborhood “up-and-coming,” or a technology “the next big thing”? Why do people often choose the same seats in recurrent office meetings? Who is most likely to interrupt someone else mid-sentence? Why do big name lawyers earn so much? Why are health disparities so pronounced? And why, when someone gets a bit ahead in life, does the small advantage so often compound?

The answer to all these questions is social status—invisible hierarchies that influence every aspect of our lives, from our health to our personal relationships and careers to how we behave in social and work settings to the tastes and preferences we form. Without it, we’d be lost and paralyzed when faced with even the simplest decisions. But it comes at a steep status works as a powerful amplifier, turning small initial advantages into insurmountable leads. Inequality is baked into its core.

Through compelling examples from business, economics, literature, art, fashion, and beyond, Anointed demonstrates how status cascades through society, creating winners and losers in ways that often have little to do with merit. And how new technology offers a glimpse of a more equitable future.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Analyzing what inequality *does* is pretty much the most important topic in the vastly-more-polarized world of 2025. Why it does those things is harder to pin down because that makes the researcher confront very touchy topics like racism, sexism, class snobbery...all very germane to the topic but also more fungible due to their seeming inevitability. In a world with slavery going on in it this exact instant yet that fact being unacknowledged, unacknowledgable in fact, how does one tease out the roots of the practice? Never mind that it goes back over five thousand years. That we're sure of.

So what's the evidence we have, mountains and mountains of it, say? That inequality exists, that it does some good things...you specifically and personally have the following choices based on your status is a good way to avoid overload when making decisions...and bad ones like "this thing you need to save your life is not available to people of your status." There are obviously many points along the continuum between those arbitrarily opposed points. The author is more careful in framing his examples than I choose to be in this review. As you'd expect.

The conferred prestige of social worth by being in some specific in-group is a golden passkey to benefits at every level of human endeavor. The author does a cracking job of putting this fact before us in blue-chip language backed by stellar research done in prestigious institutions. What does it mean is permaybehaps not always as clear. Does the author, does the data more importantly, support the common perception that this is unjust?

To whom?

There is a lot of data digested, a lot of analysis done, and at the end of the read...copiously annotated and with a very impressive bibliography...I do not have an answer to give you. There may be no answer to be found in the data.

So, my idea is: look at the data left unexamined. No one can look at everything. Do this same himalaya of work with the other stuff. This book is a terrific curiosity lighter, an excellent introduction to the study of inequality, and not an epitome or summation of it. Nor does the author present it as such. He makes no claims to resolving any debates, he presents case studies...the Rembrandt one he opens with is very trenchant indeed...he leads you through facts that illuminate the issues and then expects you'll do some work.

People who vaguely wonder "why does my boss get a reserved spot near the door?" are well-advised to get this study into their grasp. Status and prestige are very important in your daily life, it behooves you to get a handle on how and (to an extent) why they exist. show less

We are all rankers. (Sorry. Couldn’t resist.) We rank everything by size, by importance, by acclaim, by familiarity, by birth, by wealth, by style – you name it. And Toby Stuart does, in his new book Anointed. It is an exhaustive look at how people put other people and various things in order, ranking them, assigning them value according to the ranking they made up, and living by that. Stuart teaches this at UC Berkeley. It’s his whole focus and he’s out to prove he knows literally show more everything about it. But he missed a spot.

At first, the book is all about class: kings and noblemen, lords and gentlemen, bishops and landowners. They were or are privileged, not only getting off with lighter punishments for crimes (and they commit more of them than commoners do, Stuart found), but constantly adding to their influence and wealth. We spend our lives deferring to them, needing their approval, emulating their thoughts.

For the rest, good luck with that brilliant idea or scientific paper or fundraising for the company. Without a ranked name, refusals rule the day. (This is why the anointed get asked to sit on boards where they have absolutely no expertise. Just their presence can validate a mission.)

I think we all know this already, but Stuart is just getting started. We rank brands, songs, artworks, neighborhoods and zip codes. People, shown a variety, will rank every one or thing in it. And then use that as an excuse for an opinion, a judgment, a decision or even a life choice. It doesn’t matter that the cheaper wine might be far better. The name, the region and the price rank things like wines automatically for us, it seems.

Stuart says “We tend to shape our behavior to acknowledge other people’s social rank or to reinforce our own position. In other words, we behave in ways that show deference to others or that lead us to expect it from them.” We don’t even have to think about it. We just do it.

One chapter looks at social media, where fake followers, fake reviews and fake movements are all about anointing someone as better than the rest.

He has some interesting examples: all-star sports teams are not as manageable or as successful as regular teams. This is because everyone on the team is anointed (in Stuart’s terms – no worker-bees), and don’t easily mix with other anointeds. It apparently doesn’t matter that they’d never played together as a team before, never trained together, never even shared a pizza or gave each other a tip or two. Just the fact they are recognized and overpaid is enough to make them anointed and means we expect them to make the best team ever, instantly.

He also dabbles in allostatic load – the accumulation of damage from stress, that seems to be getting worse every year, as life on Earth becomes increasingly complex and difficult. Does some of it come from paying too much attention to the anointed?

Books on the best seller list do better than other books because the list narrows the choice from the millions to ten or twenty. And someone of significance has reviewed them and anointed them as worthy. (I realize that I do this, and have for decades, but I basically never review the best sellers. I am all about the long tail of unknowns who deserve the boost.)

All those seemingly pointless awards shows for everything imaginable are massively important – to the nominees, who get anointed just for being nominated.

The armed forces of course are all about ranks, and soldiers learn to salute the rank, not the person in the uniform. Doesn’t get more obvious than that.

This can go on forever, I think you can see.

And it does. The problem with the book is that it is a mile wide and an inch deep. Stuart goes on forever about ranking things, but it’s the same story, again and again. And since we all do this, apparently innately, we all get it after the first page or two. The themes never build into anything bigger or deeper; it’s all just more of the same.

That is, until the very end, where Stuart suddenly goes way too far. Using inductive reasoning, he declares that since we all do this with everything, we must be doing it as a civilization. We have no choice. We can’t run from it because we bring it with us everywhere we go. This, he claims, means there will always be class discrimination, extremely rich and extremely poor, bad decisions and assumptions, ripoffs, corruption, and cruelty.

But it’s not true that we must anoint and defer to the anointed no matter who or where we are. And the proof is right in Stuart’s back yard. Native North Americans built dozens of societies of equality. Women were always consulted on tribal decisions. The natives had no 1% lording it over them. They did not have the money or the wealth issues it causes. Everyone contributed, and everyone was taken care of. The so-called chief was largely powerless. He served at the pleasure of the tribe, and if he displeased them, they just picked someone else. The chief’s family was no kind of royalty; no nepo kids. Chiefdom was not passed from generation to generation.

Land was not ownable; owning land was an insane concept to the natives. Only the home built on it could be claimed as a possession. Agriculture, which was far more developed and sophisticated than modern historians give credit for, was entirely for everyone in the community. No one got rich growing more corn than the next person. You could not tell a person by the clothes they wore; everyone wore what they were given. No one was anointed. For thousands of years, whether in nomadic communities of tepees, or in large cities with apartment buildings, egalitarian societies had no use for ranking or anointing.

So it is not only possible to build a society without anointing anyone or anything, but North America was the greatest example of it in the world, until Europeans brought capitalism and selfishness to its shores. So after hundreds of examples of deferring to the anointed, Anointed veers off course and doesn’t even realize it has crashed.

David Wineberg show less

Anointed by Toby Stuart is a fascinating journey through one of humanity's enduring puzzles: social status. This isn't an academic treatise on sociology; it's an accessible study of how status has shaped civilizations throughout history and continues to influence us today in ways we're only beginning to understand, thanks to the rise of social media and AI.

Stuart centers the book on an idea that is both simple and profound: social status operates as a unique form of currency. Unlike material show more wealth, you can't simply acquire status through purchase or conceal it for safekeeping, no matter how desperately some might try.

One of the book's strongest demonstrations shows how hierarchies emerge naturally, even in societies that actively pursue equality. These social rankings don't appear out of nowhere; they're built on subtle cues, signals, and markers that we often process unconsciously. From the way someone dresses to the words they choose, from their social connections to their cultural references, we're constantly transmitting and receiving status information.

Once we have a solid background of how this happens, Stuart explores the concept of "anointment." Status isn't gained by climbing a straightforward ladder with globally expected and accepted results. It's remarkably fickle and context-dependent. Someone who commands respect in one setting might find themselves completely overlooked in another. The author illustrates this through compelling examples from various fields, showing how the same person can be simultaneously high-status and low-status depending on their environment.

This dynamic became painfully clear when my late mother-in-law was advised to introduce herself as "Dr. —" to medical professionals during her cancer treatment. She had a doctorate in economics. Using this title earned her better attention and clearer explanations. It bothered us both: what about those without her education? This is what Stuart calls "Competence Confusion", status markers influencing even life-and-death interactions.

The book truly shines in its interdisciplinary approach. Stuart doesn't confine the text to business case studies or academic research. Instead, he weaves together insights from literature, art, fashion, technology, and organizational behavior to create a comprehensive picture of how status operates across different domains. This makes complex sociological concepts surprisingly digestible for general readers.

What makes the book feel urgent is Stuart's look at how social media and AI are reshaping status dynamics right now. Traditional gatekeepers are crumbling, new influencers are rising, and status shifts happen at lightning speed. Where does this leave us? Stuart captures our challenge perfectly with a Robert Louis Stevenson quote: "The worst historian has a clearer view of the period he studies than the best of us can hope to form of that in which we live. The obscurest epoch is today."

Anointed is packed with insights that will have you reconsidering everyday social interactions and questioning assumptions you didn't even know you held. show less

One of the most intriguing books I've read in a while. I was a bit skeptical of the topic as I don't love reading about influencers, social media and the like. However, Stuart is engaging and persuasive in documenting the reality, challenges and costs/benefits of our current societal structure where 'Anointers' determine much of what has value and our 'unlimited' range of choices is actually somewhat smaller than we presume to think. The one area which I'd love to see more effort is the show more conclusion. Stuart expresses some optimism for the future as well as possibilities. However, I'd love to hear more of his thoughts on possible action or best practices. Overall, an intriguing, timely book from an author that I'll be keeping tabs on to see what he writes next. show less