“effecting some change in the subjects that makes them more capable of sending the costly signal of graduating from college, which is an absolute improvement”
It depends. Consider a government subsidy for college tuition. This increases the number of people who go to and then graduate college, but it also makes the signal less costly.
But I basically agree with “it’s more complex than it seems to determine what’s actually positional”. The difficulty of determining how much of an observed benefit is absolute vs positional is a lot of what I’m talking about here.
“effecting some change in the subjects that makes them more capable of sending the costly signal of graduating from college, which is an absolute improvement”
It depends. Consider a government subsidy for college tuition. This increases the number of people who go to and then graduate college, but it also makes the signal less costly.
But I basically agree with “it’s more complex than it seems to determine what’s actually positional”. The difficulty of determining how much of an observed benefit is absolute vs positional is a lot of what I’m talking about here.