Luxury Beliefs Are Status Symbols

Luxury beliefs have, to a large extent, replaced luxury goods.

They found that individuals with higher income or a higher social status were the most likely to say that success results from luck and connections rather than hard work, while low-income individuals were more likely to say success comes from hard work and individual effort.

Luxury beliefs are ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class, while often inflicting costs on the lower classes.

A difference, though, is that human signals often trickle to the rest of society, which weakens the power of the signal. Once a signal is adopted by the masses, the affluent abandon it.

But today, because material goods have become a noisier signal of one’s social position and economic resources, the affluent have decoupled social status from goods, and re-attached it to beliefs.