Investment is a bet on what the future will look like and a vote on what the future should look like. These two observations are sometime in tension.
An interesting related observation, which I think I’m stealing from @patrickc, is that both the bets and the votes get distributed along things adjacent to the intellectual interests of whomever did really well in the last iteration of the game.
I think that people probably agree with that in the abstract but (and this is a recurring theme for me) don’t do the strategy implied by it, which is to make bets on who will do well in N+1 and get upstream of their intellectual interests starting immediately.
If you were totally unfamiliar with the culture of American nerds Silicon Valley’s investment choices would often be extremely curious until you a) learned what science fiction is and b) got familiar with some very specific writers and genre tropes.
Many more examples.
Many more examples.
You could also mention more traditional mainstays of culture like e.g. religion as affecting those intellectual interests, but the science fiction thing sticks out to me not because it is low status but because it had extremely leveraged, focused impact on the future through this
