When I first felt that the quality of conversations around me was declining, I thought it was just because I had reached middle age. By your forties, you have heard most theories of life before. Worse, you and most of your peers are in startling physical decline and have partners, all of which dulls the erotic hunt that used to drive conversation. However, I have come to believe that bad conversation is a problem of our era.

Every generation has to solve the same conundrum: how to tell other people your status. You can’t just walk into a party and say, “Hi, I’m high status!” Probably the first prehistoric people who learnt to speak said things like, “You must come over and see our cave. Agg has done us some of his wonderful wall paintings.”

But for much of history, status spoke for itself. You inherited your parents’ status. You didn’t have to tell people you were high-born. They knew, or else they found out the second they heard your accent. Any doubts could be dispelled by using posh words. Nancy Mitford’s 1955 essay “The English Aristocracy” explained that aristos said “sofa” and “jam” but not “toilet” or “wealthy”. Paul Fussell’s 1983 book “Class” identified similar codes in the apparently more egalitarian US.

Gradually, a rival form of status emerged: buying stuff. Even low-born people could show they had made it by pulling up in a Jaguar — although Mitford types would still snigger.

But in western countries today, neither birth nor stuff conveys status any more. Birth lost out because we pretend we live in a meritocracy, and stuff because it became too cheap. “Luxury goods” lose status when secretaries in China can buy them. And so the quickest way to convey status has become, unfortunately, conversation.

The rewards for belonging to the 1 per cent are now enormous. This has made people desperate to show they belong, or else to fake it. The result is an epidemic of name-, place- and institution-dropping.

One percenters today announce themselves not by their clothes or accents but by their networks. “Working for the man” all your life (while wearing a necktie as a sort of human dog collar) is losing status. Your job title therefore matters less now than who you know. People pull out their smartphones over dinner not just because they are addicted, bored or keen to show their busyness but because the phone is the physical manifestation of their networks. (Facebook is the online manifestation.)

Tony Blair — an early adopter of 1 per cent habits — pointed the way with his “sofa government”. Blair ignored most of his ministers. He ran things with people he knew. Only informal relationships mattered. That’s why his opening words at his first cabinet meeting in 1997 were, “Call me Tony.”

Inevitably, Blair has become a fixture at the characteristic elite gathering of our time, Davos, a place where work and socialising are indistinguishable.

In a networked age, the key status marker is name-dropping. The speaker will often follow the name-drop with a telltale pause (“as I was telling Merkel, errr . . .”), revealing that in his mind, the sentence is complete.

Then there is “place-dropping”. This too has ancient roots. In 1963 the Chicago Tribune was already jokily advising readers that if somebody boasts about his holiday to France, you should reply that you went to Greenland.

But “place-dropping” has spread way beyond holidays. Today’s 1 percenter has a carbon footprint that climate sceptics can only dream of. Familiarity with major capitals is assumed, so the canny conversationalist instead uses gambits like, “In Brisbane I always . . .” The journalist Spud Hilton, in an analysis of place-dropping, identifies the correct response: “Yeah, me too.”

Networks define themselves by exclusion. Poor people are so far beneath the elite’s sight that they aren’t worth overtly excluding. That’s why 1 percenters rarely mock “white trash” or immigrants. Racism, after all, is a marker of being not international and therefore not elite. Instead the elite mocks people who are provincial or national, such as Sarah Palin.

The third essential conversational status-marker: institution-dropping. The institution might be your kids’ school (a limitless source of tedious conversation in London or New York — now I’m place-dropping too) or your old college.

Jill Abramson, former editor of The New York Times, saved herself the conversational effort by having “H” for Harvard tattooed on her back. Such institutions “are the last vestige of elitism because you cannot fake them and they are really not democratic,” says Elizabeth Currid-Halkett, author of the forthcoming “The Sum of Small Things: Culture and Consumption in the 21st Century.”

Because everyone is anxious to state their status, speaking time in today’s conversations is limited. The savvy speaker will therefore package name, place and institution-dropping into efficient phrases like, “You know who introduced me to the Seychelles? Barry Obama, back at Harvard!”

In Mitford’s circles, “talking shop” was considered an unforgivable bore. We need new social codes to sanction name-dropping. But probably it’s a lost cause, and every age gets the conversation it deserves.

Financial Times