Put another way, what it’s saying is “if you look at people who don’t come from the past and don’t have large status quo bias you will notice a trend”.
Is this falsifiable?
I suspect it is falsifiable. I might unpack it as the following sub claims
1 Degree of status quo bias is positively correlated to time spent in a particular status quo (my gut tells me there should be a causal link, but I bet correlation is all you could find in studies)
2 On issue X, belief that X[past] is the correct way to do X is correlated with time spent living in an X[past] regime.
2.5 Possibly a corollary to the above, but maybe a separate claim: among people who you would expect to have the least status quo bias position X[other] is favored at much higher rates than among the general population
For most issues 2 and 2.5 can probably be checked with good polling data. Point 1 is the kind of thing its possible to do studies on, so I think its in principle falsifiable, though I don’t know if such studies have actually been done.
2) is also what you would expect to see if X[past] was indeed better than X[other].
2.5) Not having status quo bias isn’t equivalent to being unbiased. A large number of the people that are least likely to have status quo bias are going to be at the other end of the spectrum—chronic contrarians.
I suspect it is falsifiable. I might unpack it as the following sub claims
1 Degree of status quo bias is positively correlated to time spent in a particular status quo (my gut tells me there should be a causal link, but I bet correlation is all you could find in studies)
2 On issue X, belief that X[past] is the correct way to do X is correlated with time spent living in an X[past] regime.
2.5 Possibly a corollary to the above, but maybe a separate claim: among people who you would expect to have the least status quo bias position X[other] is favored at much higher rates than among the general population
For most issues 2 and 2.5 can probably be checked with good polling data. Point 1 is the kind of thing its possible to do studies on, so I think its in principle falsifiable, though I don’t know if such studies have actually been done.
2) is also what you would expect to see if X[past] was indeed better than X[other].
2.5) Not having status quo bias isn’t equivalent to being unbiased. A large number of the people that are least likely to have status quo bias are going to be at the other end of the spectrum—chronic contrarians.
Note that which X is better may depend on circumstances (e.g. technological level).