Is work a status asset?

October, 2026

Hello!

A few updates / thoughts I’ve been chewing on: what makes a good status asset, my experience with cold outreach vs introductions, emailing John List and the conversations with the folks he connected me to, and how I accidentally got a $10K experience for free.

Read whatever sounds interesting!

Is work a status asset?

Clara Collier at Asterisk Magazine wrote After Work, We’ll Have Each Other, an essay where she contributes to the dialogue around potential AI job displacement by looking at cultures where work wasn’t necessary, such as 17th-century aristocrats, 1970’s housewives, and poor Italian communities in Boston’s West End. She observes how these cultures often become hyper-social, and that hyper-social cultures often become all-encompassing. Status is bounded by the culture’s norms. She points out that friendship today is voluntary, and that this is more difficult in hyper-social cultures where most interactions are status transactions. She suggests work lets voluntary friendship become possible by providing an alternative source of status outside the hyper-social status game.

This is wonderfully backwards from the typical story — that industrial society dissolves social ties, and that is clearly bad. It made me think of status as value: something that can be stored and spent. Hyper-social orders are like barter economies — storing value is difficult and volatile. If sheep are plentiful, the shepherd is poor, and vice versa. Similarly, being a jokester is great in one setting, and makes you unbearable in another. In hyper-social cultures, status is fickle and depends on the personalities in the room. But work disrupts this by functioning like money. It is a status asset, or a value-store technology for status: one is a lawyer, an engineer, a banker, and their positions are consistently recognized and respected.

And this lens goes further — what other social phenomena act as status assets? Maybe money itself plays a similar role — most cultures assign status to individuals with money. Or Christianity in ancient Roman society — assuming a hyper-social background, the Christian story offered a way out, particularly for those that didn’t have status. In the Christian story, status is a gift from God and is explicitly not earned — all are welcome.

I generally agree with Collier: it is good to have multiple stores of status. It makes for a more stable and enjoyable human experience. I want to take this further by using the examples above to sketch out what makes an effective status asset, or something that is useful for diversifying our status holdings:

Not totalizing. In Collier’s narrative, the downside of hyper-social status games is the lack of escape. Everything one does is part of the status game. Modern work is not this way. Usually it is done during working hours; otherwise one is free to pursue other interests and relationships that have nothing to do with work. Similarly, Richard Bauckham describes Christianity as a non-totalizing metanarrative — a universal story that amplifies the particular. Ordinary human life is precious: friendship, good food, children, and work are all celebrated, and almost the point of the kingdom of God. Good status assets leave room for other things, whether that’s other status games or the mundane pleasures of life.

Portable. Even outside of work, one retains work’s residual status — your position as a lawyer is respected in other environments, without lawyering becoming the environment. The same is true with money — you have it at all times, even if you aren’t actively playing the money game.

Durable. When status is concentrated, it is unstable, like the shepherd and jokester example. Having multiple status sources is stabilizing by itself, and it is even better when a status source is durable in and of itself. Again, work and money are durably respected. Money is worth what it is worth, and professions don’t change status on a daily or even yearly basis.

Christianity is durable in a surprising way — it is a status asset that makes other status assets less important — because your status is freely given to you by God, you do not need to strive in other areas. And the reciprocal response to the gift of status is to love God by loving others — this means you can share status with others by generously participating in other status games as someone who doesn’t need status.

Accessible. All these are great, but for society to reap the benefits of status assets, they need to be accessible: if money is a great status store, but you can’t earn money, then it is useless to people without it; Christianity is particularly accessible — all are welcome regardless of their background; I think this is one reason the internet is so powerful — we can now participate in niche communities of like-minded people that would not otherwise be accessible!

Of course, work, money, and Christianity do not always play this role. In fact, they often devolve into hyper-social status games between insiders. I may build this out into a full essay, so send me an email to share relevant books or articles, examples of other status assets, or extend or critique my criteria for what makes an effective status asset.

Cold outreach works better than I expected.

With Eudo, our primary focus at the moment is getting our first customer. To do so, I’ve been using cold LinkedIn and email outreach to ask potential customers if they’d be willing to discuss a white paper on field experiments and whether it would be useful in practice. Every day Claude finds ~5 people, and I send out connection requests or emails. For every ~5 connections, ~1-2 accept, and for every ~5 messages, I probably get ~1 person willing to share their thoughts. Those who opt in to these interactions have been very good matches. It’s led to lots of helpful feedback on how I frame the problem and several opportunities to scope out potential experiments!

I’ve been surprised by how much steadier this stream of relationships has been compared to the stream of relationships from introductions. Introductions are still powerful because they provide a ‘trust’ boost that accelerates a relationship — but they are like fishing on your busy friend’s pond; there are a lot of fish, but it is only a pond, and your friend isn’t always around to let you in. Cold outreach is an ocean; it is huge, and you can use it whenever you want, even if it is more effort per relationship.

Speaking of cold outreach, John List replied to my email.

Over the last two years working on Eudo, I haven’t found much that sounds like what we’re working on. And so, I was pleasantly surprised to stumble on the essay, Make Science More Reliable: Study People As They Go About Their Lives by John List (via Tyler Cowen’s Marginal Revolution) praising field experiments.

I sent him a cold email explaining Eudo, and he connected me with three colleagues to learn more about the world of experimental economics: two in academia, and one in business. All three were very generous with their time. A few reflections:

• The first academic emphasized the importance of finding novel mechanisms in their role. This makes sense — running an experiment takes effort, so you want to maximize your chance of discovering something new, especially since journals prioritize new insights. If Eudo succeeds, we’ll play a quality assurance / audit role. We’ll be paid to run lots of “mundane” experiments that won’t uncover something new in isolation. However, I think we’ll learn a lot that you can only find by looking across n=20 similar experiments (e.g., similar programs with different budgets, or change management’s impact across experiments). I’m hopeful Eudo will fill this gap — this knowledge is clearly useful, and is clearly understudied because academics get more novel insight for their effort by conducting 20 unique experiments.
• The second academic offered some very helpful methods feedback. I am self (and AI) trained, so his thoughts on what looked good and where to focus going forward will be very helpful as we build out our process and tool. For example, we initially planned a narrow set of analyses, and he recommended we build a wider set into our tool, even if we have a narrow recommended view. This will make it easier to understand what is going on, vs being locked into our original plan, which may not always be the best fit across experiments.
• The business contact offered some helpful advice on ”selling” experiments. Even for his team, which is embedded and respected inside a single organization, it can be difficult to get buy-in for experiments. He had feedback around language (e.g., test or pilot vs experiment), and emphasized the importance of quick wins — if you can provide causal insight in a couple of weeks, that establishes the relationship needed for more ambitious experiments. To date, we’ve been focused on longer-cycle experiments. I am excited to think about how to compress the process as we establish our first few relationships.

Story time

My brother got married over labor day! It was a wonderful celebration. Leading up to the wedding, the brothers from both sides of the family got together for the day. At one point we explored Point Pelee, a Canadian National Park. Most people took a shuttle from the visitor center to the point, but we decided to hike, walking along the beach most of the way. It was a beautiful day, so we went swimming. A sandbar extended off the point into Lake Erie, so we walked / swam about a quarter mile into the water. It was a lot of fun playing in the waves crashing in from both sides.

On our walk back, we finally noticed no one else was swimming… or even dressed to swim. As we approached the main trail to take the shuttle back to the visitor center, we saw the first of many signs clearly warning people to stay out of the water because of the dangerous currents… ope. Then a park worker chased us down, made sure we were okay, and explained that she could give us each a $10K fine. We explained we missed the signs because of our hike, and she graciously let us off the hook.

It was a wonderful experience in isolation, and it feels even better knowing I should have paid $10K for it!

That’s all for now — as always, I’d love to chat, so please reply to start a conversation, and if this was forwarded to you you can sign up for these ~quarterly updates by clicking the link below, or typing your email into the box on jackskidmore.com. The next update will go out in Q1 2027!

Best
Jack