I don't want to get too far away from the topic of Clay's book - but the basic questions about inequality in status and income that we are talking about are important to his chosen themes. Two quick points in response to Julian.

First, I'm not actually making a materialist argument that everything reduces down to money. My original post, which spurred Clay to invite me to participate in this seminar, had a title riffing on a famous Max Weber essay which is all about how Karl Marx is wrong, and status distinctions can't be reduced down to material benefits. Good lefty that I am, I think that material forces are incredibly important, but they don't explain everything. Here, I'm relying on Bourdieu, who argues for a variety of different forms of 'capital' without saying that they can be reduced down to material benefits or to anything else (this causes some real problems for his theory, but since this is already sounding too much like a graduate seminar, I won't go into them here). So my argument doesn't really rely on everything depending on the cash nexus.

What may have caused some confusion is that I've written two posts pointing in different directions. One was my basic argument about how group relations are ridden with status hierarchies too. Here, the disagreement was with Will Wilkinson's claim that the proliferation of status groups gives us an escape hatch from Fred Hirsch and others' suggestions about the relationship between positional goods and happiness The other was my disagreement with Tim's suggestion that the inequalities we observe in Internet based social relations are a good analogy with the kinds of inequality we observe in the economy. But these arguments are taking on quite different claims and don't add up to a common argument that everything boils down to economics. I may also have made my argument sound more economistic than it is by using economic examples and metaphors - my reason for doing this was that people usually grasp the concept of economic capital more easily than cultural capital, social capital etc.

Second, when Julian says that

Whatever people with elite tastes are doing when they sneer at "low culture," I don't think (pace Henry) it's an attempt to get mass recognition of the value of one's favorite composer or artist. Often, it seems to be just the opposite: Think of the indie rock scenester who's heartbroken when the band he's been following since their first backyard gig is played on The OC.

I heartily agree! I obviously haven't been clear enough about what Bourdieu is arguing - he isn't saying that people want to get everyone else in the world to recognize their tastes as being good. Instead, he is arguing that taste is a kind of capital that can be used in an ongoing series of status struggles - and that like all forms of capital, its value is in part a function of its scarcity. The disconsolate hipster who has just seen Amon Tobin go triple-platinum is precisely analogous to the stockholder who has just seen the value of his shares diluted by a massive new offering. See further the sort-of-similar-argument I make about the political economy of Pitchfork reviews in this old post. I really recommend that Julian read Bourdieu's Distinction - from what I know of his tastes, I think he'd enjoy it. It's written deliberately to annoy its most likely readers - smug academics who think that they are ever so much more sophisticated than the vulgar herds.

More generally, I think that Clay's argument here may have some legs - we may expect that status distinctions may become looser, the further they are away from actual political power (or some other metric that allows one to figure out which group is losing and which group is winning). He is likely right that the Internet has led to a loosening of these distinctions among some groups - but I'd still hold to my original position that this is not leading to a disappearance of these distinctions. Also, Tim's last post points to some interesting open questions for both lefties and libertarians. New forms of social interaction on the Internet don't fit neatly into either standard libertarian market based choice accounts or standard social democratic state based accounts of how to manage society. Their sustainability over time is still an open question, but at the least, they're a fascinating experiment, which should be pushing people on both left and right to think more seriously about the sustainability of self managed communities. Which brings us around again, in a nice circle, to the themes of Clay's provocative, entertaining, and deeply thoughtful book.