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So does the existence of beliefs that are Veblen Goods imply the existence of beliefs that are inferior goods in the economic sense? Beliefs that, like canned green beans, one consumes more of as one's income (or status otherwise for beliefs?) decreases. What do people believe more when they are poor than when they are rich?
This occurs to me because I was wondering to myself whether streaming platforms behave more like normal goods or inferior goods in a recession. I'm of two minds. If I had to cut my budget, Netflix seems like a pure luxury, I could cut the expense and still have more movies to watch on antenna, old DVDs floating around, or streaming free/illegally, than I could watch if I was unemployed and watching 8 hours a day. That's before one even gets into the free entertainment I can get from books and emulators etc. So it's an easy one to cut. On the other hand, if I were down on cash, I can save a lot more money by not going out to dinner, not going to concerts, not going on trips, so I might hang onto streaming as something to do at a relatively low per-hour entertainment cost.
So what beliefs resemble an Inferior Good? I can think of a few:
-- Cynical Suspicion of Salesmen; "Everybody's trying to screw me!" If you are objectively stupid, and lack the ability to distinguish a good sales pitch from a scam, the adaptive strategy becomes to assume everything is a scam, the false positives cost you less than false negatives in the short term. "It's all a scam!" because everything ends up being a scam if you screw it up: if you invest in the wrong things investing is a scam, if you pick the wrong insurance then insurance is a scam, if you handle your divorce poorly then divorce is a scam. This often lapses into racism against market dominant minorities or social classes...
-- Tribalism; "You can only trust your own kind..." If you are a low social capital person, you want your immutable traits to be what gives you value. No matter how many stupid mistakes you make, you never stop being black or white or Jewish.
But pretty quickly I find I can make the opposite argument, that each of these is an elite "luxury" belief as well. So I'm not sure what to do with all our just-so stories.
What is the difference between a good sales pitch and a scam? As far as I can tell, nothing about the pitch itself, only the product. Certainly, it takes intelligence to understand those products, but discarding the sales talk is just correct. Salespeople are trying to screw you.
An intelligent person reacts to this by selectively ignoring, filtering, and rounding-down the sales-talk as the salesman is talking to you. You ask specific questions in such a way that he can't fudge it, you focus on specific concrete facts.
A stupid person reacts to this by refusing to interact with salesmen at all. He is incapable of filtering in real time, so he just shuts the whole thing down.
And, to a large extent, just as advertising budget is actually correlated with product quality in most cases, a professional sales presentation is correlated with a high quality product in many cases. Refusing to engage with salesmen opens one up to a different sort of self-scam I frequently see the proles around me fall for: the bargain that is a money pit. They buy a series of broke down cars out of someone's driveway because they don't trust stealerships, they buy a "fixer upper" house because they don't trust realtors, they half ass and jury rig all kinds of stuff around their house because they don't trust contractors, etc.
They can in fact fudge anything that isnt legal writ, and sometimes also not stuff youll notice within a week or so of buying it. Asking question can help when youre buying something like insurance, which was your example above, but for most stuff its "as seen".
"The salesman himself is radioactive" seems like a different thing that youre tacking on there. But if youre selectively ignoring the supermajority of what they say, that is "cynical suspicion" by any reasonable use of the word.
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Richard Hanania is constantly beating the drum about "low human capital" people believing in conspiracy theories, which seems like the most obvious example. Working-class Dale Gribble voters believing in the New World Order, UN black helicopters, microchips in Covid vaccines etc. are so common as to be a cliché; the rare elites who believe in conspiracies are "man bites dog" stories.
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