April 10, 2022
Tall Poppy Syndrome describes a set of informal norms that govern how people respond to the success of their neighbors, peers, and coworkers.
When one poppy grows taller than the rest—as judged by income, wealth, health, promotion, or whatever—the other poppies respond by cutting the winner down to size.
Here’s even a website devoted to addressing TPS in the workplace.
This sort of dysfunctional behavior, seemingly stemming from a sort of ressentiment, can also be observed throughout entire societies. For instance, here’s Peter Boettke (22 minute mark) describing a particularly colorful manifestation of TPS that was prevalent in the Soviet transition economy.
It’d be tempting to say that such behavior is, ceteris paribus, a drag on the economy. And of course, nothing could ever be said to ground it ethically. However, it strikes me that even such a seemingly dysfunctional social norm might evolve a wealth-preserving role in certain institutional contexts.
The contexts I have in mind are fundamentally zero-sum societies. As Baumol put it in his classic 1990 paper, entrepreneurship is ubiquitous across time and place. But not all entrepreneurship consists of positive-sum value-creation—what he calls “productive entrepreneurship.” Some acts of entrepreneurship (profit-seeking) can be “unproductive” (seeking transfers) or “destructive” (organized crime, etc…). Institutions, a society’s formal and informal rules of the game, structure the payoffs associated with these three possibilities. When the rewards to unproductive entrepreneurship increase, say through increased opportunities for rent-seeking, some entrepreneurs shift their activities from productive to unproductive.
Historically, it virtually has to be the case that most societies were mired in unproductive/destructive entrepreneurship equilibria. Baumol famously offers the examples of Ancient Rome and Medieval China.
My argument here is simple: In societies where unproductive and/or destructive profit opportunities predominate, becoming wealthy is a reliable indicator of having engaged in zero-sum or negative-sum activity to acquire one’s wealth. High or increased wealth is a sign of parasitism. If this is right, then Tall Poppy Syndrome, whereby people take it upon themselves to cut down their successful peers, discourages wealth-seeking. And since wealth-seeking in such a society is largely zero or negative-sum, Tall Poppy Syndrome may discourage at least some acts of wealth destruction.
Take the case of the Soviet Union again. Boettke has argued that the USSR was not a truly “socialist” society, but was rather a “prohibited,” a regulated, mercantilist economy. In such a context, it is not impossible to get wealthy in positive sum ways (else no wealth at all would be produced), but it is surely less likely than in primarily laissez-faire societies. More often than not, wealth would indicate personal connection, grift, bribery, Soviet “blat,” sheer luck, or some combination of these.
Supposing that the behaviors of the TPS serve the function I’ve described, one problem is their persistence in the face of “better” institutions. At least on paper, the Soviet Union transitioned to a market economy in the early 1990’s, as did its Eastern bloc satellites. Of course, scholars debate intensely the extent to which this transition has been “real” as “opposed” to nominal.
But for the sake of argument, imagine that this transition contained at least some “real” elements, that Soviet society became at least somewhat more market-oriented. If so, the scope for “productive entrepreneurship” expands, the opportunities to amass wealth in positive-sum ways increase. As the institutional scales continue to tip in such a way that more and more favor wealth creation, TPS behaviors more frequently “punish” wealth-creators instead of wealth-destroyers, as they had before. TPS is increasingly “dysfunctional,” just as it seems.
This is plausible because we know that informal norms are relatively “sticky.” This stickiness explains, for instance, why merely plopping down “good” formal institutions in society X is not sufficient to guarantee society X’s success.
However, there’s also cause for optimism here too. Market institutions erode, even if they don’t outright destroy, the behaviors that we call Tall Poppy Syndrome. In the first place, better property rights protections stop behaviors which are outrightly aggressive. More subtly, thinkers in the Doux Commerce tradition have long argued that exchange softens and humanizes market participants. They no longer see one another as rivals in a bitter struggle for survival over scarce resources, instead coming to appreciate the mutual gains they can enjoy through cooperation.