Original title: From Getting Ahead to Staying Ahead: Reference Points and Repeated Investment in Status Maintenance
Hibiki Kamoshita · September 2026
Because technology changes fast, landing a good job after school no longer keeps you there for life. Researchers built a model to study why people must keep investing in new skills just to hold onto their status. In this model, high social status slowly fades over time. People also adjust what they consider normal based on where they currently sit. This setup reveals that people in top positions fear losing what they have gained. Even when everyone has the exact same resources and costs, those at the top keep investing defensively to protect their rank. Better training can actually widen status gaps. As everyone chases new credentials, standards rise, shifting inequality from getting ahead to staying ahead.
You are climbing a mountain. After reaching a camp, you must keep climbing because the camp itself is on a glacier that slowly moves downward. Stopping means sliding back. In this paper, status is like that glacier: past success does not permanently secure your position. The higher you go, the faster you must move just to stay still, because the reference point of where you expect to be keeps rising.
As technology reshapes jobs, getting a degree isn't enough—even successful workers must keep investing just to hold their place. This paper shows that those at the top invest most defensively, and better training can ironically widen the gap between those who can keep up and those who cannot. Understanding this shift—from who gets ahead to who stays ahead—matters for corporate training and policy on lifelong learning.
The abstract does not state specific assumptions about the rate of status depreciation or the shape of the reference point updating function, nor does it present empirical tests. The model's predictions are derived theoretically, and the conditions under which training widens gaps are identified but not quantified. The abstract focuses on individual decisions and does not address institutional factors like employer training policies or network effects that also influence maintenance.
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From Getting Ahead to Staying Ahead: Reference Points and Repeated Investment in Status Maintenance — Hibiki Kamoshita — SocArXiv — doi:10.31235/osf.io/5werz_v1
Abstract licence: CC BY
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper. This is a preprint, so it hasn't necessarily been peer reviewed.