Ground Floor: According to Alain De Botton's latest bestseller, Status Anxiety, the rot set in back in 1793, with the publication of The Fable of the Bees, an economic tract in verse by a London doctor, Bernard Mandeville.

Up to then, the generally accepted view was that wealth was created by the poor and the rich were a blight on the rest of us. Mandeville argued that this economic truism of centuries was wrong and that in fact the rich were useful, with their pursuit of wealth and useless luxuries providing the bumph to the economy on which the masses depended for survival.

Since then the idea has grown and, alongside a general rise in living standards and the dominance of a materialist worldview, the status of the wealthy in society has risen considerably.

De Botton's overall thesis is that the drive for status is as strong as the sex drive but less often discussed or noted. Not an earth-shatteringly original thought, I'll grant you, but it is sometimes useful to be reminded of the obvious.

Reporting on the world of business, it often seems that status is a significant factor in occasional dramas that give a lift to the business pages of this and other newspapers. Business figures, almost always men, fighting in the boardroom or over control of some company or asset, can spend considerable parts of their time and attention looking to skewer some other person who has in the past, they believe, slighted them in some way. It makes great copy.

Of course, this type of behaviour is something that we are all susceptible to, but it takes a very strong personality not to become unusually vainglorious when they have control of a huge company or own vast amounts of money.

People jump to anticipate your commands, planes take you where you want, when you want, and banks never ask you to queue. It can do your head in. It does you no good.

Furthermore, although it is by no means always the case, it is a frequent enough occurrence that someone becomes hugely wealthy and successful because of drive motivated by deeply felt insecurity.

The car sector is particularly attuned to the power of playing with status and could be pointed to as proof of De Botton's contention. The marketing of cars has very successfully used men's vulnerability to the suggestion that an essential element to having status in society is to own a whopper.

Lesser mortals, if they can afford to, buy enormous four-by-four gas-guzzling monsters that will flatten any car, bicycle or child that gets in its way, when they could just as easily get from A to B in, say, a Renault Megane.

While in Jersey recently on a story for this newspaper, two taxi-drivers took it upon themselves to mention to me the car-to-person ratio on the island. Jersey measures nine miles by five and has a population of about 90,000. It is criss-crossed by small roads, many of them country lanes really, barely the width of two average-sized cars. The island has 2.5 cars per head of population of driving-age. Some are Porches and Ferraris. You can watch them roaring along the seafront at 30 miles an hour.

And then there are cars that cost the same as your average house in Sandymount. Cars like the €1 million Porche Carrera GT, the Aston Martin DB9 or the Maserati Quattroporte - cars that can go from zero to past the speed limit in four seconds. Begrudgers take note.

For those not at the top of the corporate ladder or who measure their net value in five- or six-figure sums, issues of status and anxiety are more obviously tied with the job the person has. Being good at a job that is rewarded and respected is good for one's sense of well-being.

That said, lots of people just don't like being employees, resenting the loss of liberty involved irrespective of the fact that it is consensual or well rewarded.

Also, the dictatorship of the proletariat may not have been such a good idea, but Karl Marx was just pointing out the obvious when he wrote, at great length, that (private sector) employers hire employees so they can profit from their labour.

According to De Botton, in 1800 only 20 per cent of the US workforce was employed by another person. By 1900 the figure was 50 per cent, and by 2000 it was 90 per cent. The picture here has no doubt shifted much in the way the US picture has.

The arrival of industrialisation and the growth of the percentage of the population employed meant more people became dependent on the success of an employer than was heretofore the case. Furthermore, the success or otherwise of a person in their working life became more dependent on their ability to work the promotional ladder game.

The fact that these issues were ones over which people had only a limited amount of control meant they became a potential source of anxiety.

Success in the workplace is all the more crucial to a person's sense of status when society is as materialistic as Irish society is now. Back in classical Greece, the lowest-status citizen was one who worked for another citizen. A thousand years ago, people believed the poor were poor because they were honest, and were more likely to get into heaven than the rich.

That the link between the marketplace and the general view on status should be so strong is not at all surprising. However it is interesting, is it not, to note how malleable we all are?