Robin Hanson

No matter how fast the economy grows, there remains a limited supply of sex and social status—and earning and spending money is still a good way to compete for it.

Today there’s a stigma to wearing uniforms, in part because it suppresses our individuality. But the very concept of “individuality” is just signaling by another name.

Miller argues that while ecological selection (the pressure to survive) abhors waste, sexual selection often favors it. The logic, as you may recall from Chapter 2, is that we prefer mates who can afford to waste time, energy, and other resources

nature aggressively weeds out costly behaviors unless they somehow pay for themselves by providing survival or reproductive advantages. In other words, if a costly behavior is universal, it typically indicates positive selection pressure. Finally, art is old enough, in evolutionary terms, for selection to have had plenty of time to work its magic.

Art originally evolved to help us advertise our survival surplus and, from the consumer’s perspective, to gauge the survival surplus of others. By distilling time and effort into something non-functional, an artist effectively says, “I’m so confident in my survival that I can afford to waste time and energy.”