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 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 cost: 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.

Anointed has been longlisted in the Personal Development & Human Behavior category of Porchlight Book Company's 2025 Business Books Awards. The excerpt below is adapted from the book's Introduction.

◊◊◊◊◊

On a characteristically dreary Dutch winter day in 2016, the art dealer and Rembrandt expert Jan Six made a remarkable discovery. Maybe. That morning, while scanning a catalog for an upcoming Christie’s auction, Jan’s sixth sense fired as he came across a seventeenth-century portrait of a young man wearing a lace collar. Christie’s had attributed the painting, entitled Portrait of a Young Gentleman, to an artist in the “circle of Rembrandt”— which is to say, to one of the master’s disciples. But Six, a former head of the Old Masters department at Sotheby’s, had in the past studied each of the artist’s 341 known paintings. As he scrutinized the image staring back at him from the catalog, Six experienced a sense of déjà vu. The painting seemed strikingly familiar, and yet he felt sure he had never seen it before. From these contrasting impressions, a thrilling possibility occurred to him: this painting might not be from the hand of a disciple but from Rembrandt himself! 

The big tell in Six’s mind was the young man’s lace collar. This type of collar was fashionable in portraiture for only a few short years during the early to mid-1630s. Afterward, it largely disappeared. Based on the collar, Six deduced that the work must have been painted between 1633 and 1635. But Rembrandt had yet to make it big by that time, which means that his disciples had yet to arrive on the scene. After viewing the painting and comparing the intricate lacework to an authenticated Rembrandt, Six concluded that Portrait of a Young Gentleman was indeed an original, one previously unknown to the art world, and the first Rembrandt to have been discovered in decades. 

If Six was correct—or, more precisely, if he could convince art world insiders of his opinion—he would massively boost the painting’s market value. Operating under the assumption that one of Rembrandt’s disciplines had painted it, Christie’s pre-sale estimate for the painting was $19,000 to $25,000. At the auction itself, Six purchased the portrait for $185,000 after competition from another buyer jacked up the price. Just a year earlier, however, a pair of authentic Rembrandt portraits from the mid-1630s had sold for $174 million. 

As of this writing, recognized authorities in the art world have yet to reach an “official” finding that the painting is a Rembrandt. Some influential experts have agreed with Six, while others have declined to offer a decisive opinion based on the available information. Six vehemently argued for the painting’s authenticity, going so far as to publish a book making his case. If a consensus eventually emerges that Rembrandt painted Portrait of a Young Gentleman, Six’s purchase will turn out to be quite a shrewd investment.

That a possibly authentic Rembrandt had gone unnoticed for so long is curious, but there’s a much more profound mystery to be unraveled here. If not painted by Rembrandt himself, Portrait of a Young Gentleman is so similar in technique, style, materials, and everything else that the worlds’ most knowledgeable experts can’t distinguish it from an actual Rembrandt. Why, then, would the painting be more than 1,000 times more valuable simply because a small handful of these experts publicly confer their stamp of authenticity on it? How did these experts come to wield such influence in the creation of market value? For that matter, who elevated Rembrandt’s status to the point that it so drastically amplifies the value of his work in the first place? Why is it that the value of a painting hinges not on artistic merit but on the prestige, or lack thereof, of the name of the artist who (supposedly) created it?  

This phenomenon extends far beyond the art world. In 1886, a gentleman named John William Strutt submitted a manuscript for publication in a prestigious scientific journal, the British Association for the Advancement of Science. The paper described some ideas in electrodynamics, an emerging field at the time. Due to a clerical error, the author’s name was inadvertently left off the manuscript. Ignorant of its author’s identity, the journal’s editorial team read and decisively rejected the article, believing that it came nowhere near the journal’s high standards for quality and scientific relevance. Worse, the editors deemed the paper to be the work of a “paradoxer”—a pseudoscientist—and said as much in a letter addressed to the anonymous author. 

That, it turned out, was a cringeworthy mistake. Strutt, also known as Lord Rayleigh, was a big name in physics—in fact, one of the all-time biggest. Over a long and distinguished career, he collected nearly every major award a scientist could win, including the Nobel Prize. If Isaac Newton explained why an apple falls from the tree, Lord Rayleigh explained why the sky is blue. Calling Rayleigh a pseudoscientist was on par with calling Michael Jordan an amateur basketball player or Taylor Swift a wannabe pop star. 

After realizing their error, the journal’s editorial board reversed course. The journal accepted the article and rushed it into publication, but not because Rayleigh had revised the paper. The editors had simply reunited the cover page with the article, discovering in the process that the paper was in fact his work. They were so embarrassed that they apologized profusely to the distinguished scientist. 

Here again, we encounter the strange notion that an object’s value depends not on its inherent merit but on its creator. The editorial board hated the paper until they realized who wrote it. Merely attaching the name “Rayleigh” to the article transformed it from unpublishable junk into top-notch science. As for other qualified scientists doing important work who didn’t have such a distinguished name gracing their paper submission, this episode suggests that they were quite likely out of luck. Since the journal could only publish a fixed number of articles, giving pages over to Rayleigh meant turning down another, potentially quite worthy scientist’s work.  

A great deal of work already documents the evolution and extent of inequality in modern societies. Books such as The Triumph of Injustice, Caste, The Meritocracy Trap, and Invisible Women—to name but a tiny handful—have presented extensive evidence about the presence and persistence of income inequality, the extent of intergenerational social mobility, and the presence of implicit biases or overt sexism and racism. Anointed addresses these subjects (and many others) but in a different and, I hope, illuminating way. I aim to dive deeply into how societies operate, exploring the foundational dynamics that decouple a person’s social status from their merit and, in the process, allocate opportunities in ways that diminish equality. It’s certainty vital to understand the historical, institutional, cultural, and economic dynamics of sexism, racism, classism, and other “isms” directly, but we can’t fully understand social and economic outcomes today unless we also unravel anointment’s unique—and uniquely fascinating—logic.  

In fact, the status system sheds light not just on implicit racial or gender bias but on all kinds of inequalities that permeate the world around us. Anointment explains why Beyoncé and Garth Brooks have thousands of times more downloads than other great singers even though their singing isn’t (in most sane people’s estimation) thousands of times better. Why a bottle of Premier Cru will set you back more than $1,000 even though few buyers can identify the content of the bottle without seeing the label and very good bottles of wine are available for $25. Why an authentic Rembrandt can fetch hundreds of millions while a nearly identical painting by his most talented disciple goes for a tiny fraction of that. Why Yale, Princeton, and Oxford Universities are inundated with far more applicants than the public universities next door. And on and on. 

One point you’ll take from the book is that we all practice a form of snobbery as a consequence of living in society, even if we are not all cognizant of it. Regardless of whatever more specific biases we have, we make judgments and decisions throughout our lives based on social status—from our personal relationships and careers to how we behave in social and work settings to the specific tastes and aesthetic preferences we form. This behavior has massive consequences for ourselves and others, often leading to outcomes that may offend our sense of fairness and justice. It’s really not possible to grasp present-day economies and societies without appreciating how the dynamics around anointment are constantly at work in the background to shape the choices we make and the outcomes they create. 

As you read the following chapters, I hope anointment will no longer seem like a veiled, mysterious force operating out of view. With a better understanding of our winner-takes-most world, I hope you’ll be able to engage more insightfully with some of today’s most pressing social questions. Most of all, I hope that a new understanding of anointment and its workings will enable more empathy both individually and collectively. If you occupy high social status, perhaps the book may prompt greater humility—to be more conscious of the advantages you’ve received, more grateful for them, and more inclined toward generosity for others who haven’t benefited from anointment’s helping hand. 

It’s time that we come to grips with the phenomenon of anointment and its impact and consider whether, as a society, we might be able to do things differently. 

Adapted from Anointed: The Extraordinary Effects of Social Status in a Winner-Take-Most World by Toby Stuart, published by Simon & Schuster. Copyright © 2025 by Toby Stuart. All rights reserved.

About the Author

Toby E. Stuart is the Leo Helzel distinguished professor of business administration at the Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley. He is faculty director of the Berkeley-Haas Entrepreneurship Program and faculty director of the Institute for Business Innovation; and distinguished teaching fellow. He previously has held named professorships at Harvard University, Columbia University, and the University of Chicago. Stuart is the cofounder of a tech company and on multiple corporate boards. He has published dozens of academic papers on social status and social network dynamics. He was the long-time department editor for entrepreneurship and innovation at Management Science, and has been an editor at many prominent journals, including American Journal of Sociology and Administrative Science Quarterly.