The Adam Smith Institute's latest paper "The New Aristocrats" has featured in the Sunday Times and the Telegraph for its argument that virtue signalling is the new way to define yourself as part of the 'elite' in society. From the Times:
There’s a new “virtue-signalling”, identified in a report published last week by the free-market think tank the Adam Smith Institute, which means that nobody is buying flashy cars, clothes or jewellery to flaunt their status any more.
The new aristocrats, as the report’s author, the US professor Ryan Murphy, calls them, are the bohemian bourgeoisie and hipsters who live in rapidly gentrifying areas (the very ones where you are likely to find Waitrose and Poundland on the same street).
and from the Telegraph:
What do you do to impress these days? How do you flaunt your status in 2016? Because the rules are not what they were, according to a report from economists last week; you could say they’ve been flipped on their head.
Flashing the cash in these old familiar ways no longer impresses because – according to the Adam Smith Institute – too many people are in on the act, and so, the mood of what is successful has shifted.