Luxury beliefs are status symbols (2022)

Seems like the rich are spending lots on fancy cars and big houses. I’m not sure saying you support x or y belief is quite the same signal as a sports car.

The terrible argument, built over several pages, is that "defund the police" as a political conviction is a status symbol, because rich people live in gated communities and don't need police.

It ignores the evidence is a 10% increase in a single poll, in which the majority was not of the inverse opinion that police is without fault, they just had a slightly different outlook on necessary police reform being possible in the current structures. It's yet another deliberate misunderstanding of "defund the police" (not a maybe understandable accidental misunderstanding).

Would be interesting to have this poll broken down by race, putting those most affected by broken windows policing and police violence first. And also those who coined the term.

“A survey from YouGov found that Americans in the highest income category were by far the most supportive of defunding the police.”

“By far” means “10% more” in the actual graph the author cites, which comes from an online poll that had 1500 respondents. I’m no statistician but that seems like a small difference and small sample size to be the key piece of “data” here.

This article follows most tropes of behavioral science blog articles: broad moral statements taking a vaguely contrarian stance, analogies comparing humans to random animals (gazelles?), and “gotcha” survey data with questionable sample sizes. I find it difficult to take it seriously.

That was not convincing.

The article only touches two unorthodox beliefs: that we should defund the police (really a preference, not a belief) and that success is largely attributable to luck.

But the elites are more likely to believe conventional wisdom on climate change, on whether vaccines work, on whether the Holocaust happened, on whether digesting genetically modified organisms changes the consumer's DNA, any number of things. Heterodox beliefs in these areas do seem consistent with the hypothesis of in-group signaling, but not with signaling status.

Wanting to defund the police is likely correlated with not needing the police -- but that's likely simple ignorance, not status signaling.

Why the elites would be more likely to say luck is important is not obvious to me, but a single example does not justify the sweeping generalization that this article makes.

Sorry I was being oblique to signal some snark. You're sort of hitting my point directly: "luxury beliefs" are just whatever you personally believe to be (a) wrongly held and (b) limited to only the aristocracy (ie. not the opinion of "real Americans"). But concretely demonstrating both is kind of difficult and largely relies on your own subjective experience. It's a political cudgel, not a proper tool of inquiry.