Are Political Correctness Police Really Outraged, or Are They Signaling Their Social Standing?

Over at the Institute of
Economic Affairs Senior Research Fellow Kristian Niemietz wrote an
interesting
blog post on the economics of political correctness that is
well worth checking out.

Niemietz explains how those obsessed with political correctness
use moral superiority as a “positional good,” which is a “good that
people acquire to signalise where they stand in a social
hierarchy.” In the post Niemietz uses expensive wine and a degree
from a reputable university as examples of positional goods: the
motivation for purchasing them may not be the taste of the wine or
what is learned in pursuit of a degree but rather the fact that
having expensive wine and a degree from a good university signal
your social standing:

I may buy an exquisite variety of wine because I genuinely enjoy
the taste, or acquire a degree from a reputable university because
I genuinely appreciate what that university has to offer. But my
motivation could also be to set myself apart from others, to
present myself as more sophisticated or smarter.

Niemietz goes on:

…if you see me moaning that the winemakers/the university have
‘sold out’, if you see me whinging about those ignoramuses who do
not deserve the product because they (unlike me, of course) do not
really appreciate it, you can safely conclude that for me, this
good is a positional good. (Or was, before everybody else
discovered it.) We can all become more sophisticated wine
consumers, and we can all become better educated. But we can never
all be above the national average, or in the top group, in terms of
wine-connoisseurship, education, income, or anything else. We can
all improve in absolute terms, but we cannot all simultaneously
improve in relative terms.

What has this got to do with political correctness? Niemietz
argues that those who enjoy acting like members of a political
correctness enforcement brigade behave like people who couldn’t
tell the difference between vinegar and a glass of $400 wine but
buy the $400 bottle in order to signal how sophisticated they are.
And, like the owners of $400 bottles of wine who panic when others
people start buying the same bottle, those obsessed with political
correctness panic when more people start agreeing with them:

PC-brigadiers behave exactly like owners of a positional good
who panic because wider availability of that good threatens their
social status. The PC brigade has been highly successful in
creating new social taboos, but their success is their very
problem. Moral superiority is a prime example of a positional good,
because we cannot all be morally superior to each other. Once you
have successfully exorcised a word or an opinion, how do you
differentiate yourself from others now? You need new things to be
outraged about, new ways of asserting your imagined moral
superiority.

You can do that by insisting that the no real progress has been
made, that your issue is as real as ever, and just manifests itself
in more subtle ways. Many people may imitate your rhetoric, but
they do not really mean it, they are faking it, they are poseurs
(here’s
a nice example). You can also hugely inflate the definition of
an existing offense (plenty of nice
examples here.) Or you can move on to discover new things to
label ‘offensive’, new victim groups, new patterns of dominance and
oppression.

So, next time you see people declaring their outrage at whatever
the next political correctness fad is, consider if they really are
upset, or whether they are feigning outrage to signal their social
standing.

Disclaimer: I used to work at the IEA.