Wealth accumulation shifted social valuation from actual ability to prestige.

Evidence

Amassing wealth marked the beginning of an ancient transition from relatively egalitarian seminomadic hunter-gatherer communities—in which people were valued for their actual abilities—to agricultural and industrial societies, in which people were measured less by actual achievement and more by prestige, which itself was largely based upon the acquisition and exhibition of wealth. — Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, Tom Pyszczynski, The Worm at the Core, 438

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Market penetration shifted emotional investment into the private sphere; Commodities mediate social prestige despite being essentially social not economic — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 470; Postindustrial society shifts value from utility to cultural distinctiveness. — Michael H. Goldhaber, The Attention Economy and the Net, 9

Related

• Market penetration shifted emotional investment into the private sphere (similarity 0.86)
• Postindustrial society shifts value from utility to cultural distinctiveness. (similarity 0.82)
• Commodities mediate social prestige despite being essentially social not economic (similarity 0.81)