By their appearance, people send signals that have value in the job and marriage markets. What if someone doesn't have to be rich or disciplined to be thin? A signal is only useful if it sends the right message. In Spence's model, the signal works only if college educations are hard to come by and are acquired only by strong candidates.
Let’s look at another example to see how quickly the value of a signal can be lost. When email was new, it was clear that if someone addressed you by name in the subject line or body text, a real person was trying to get your attention. After all, they had created a message just for you. Then it became possible for senders to easily screen a long list of people. For a while, email users were fooled: they clicked, expecting an important message, and instead received a generic ad. But they whatsapp number list soon learned.
a shift in perceptions of thin people is already underway. Posters on the “nyc influencer snark” subreddit, a forum dedicated to sniping at the bad taste of D-List TikTok stars and Instagram influencers, accuse everyone of being on the jab. Often it’s gossip, but sometimes they provide proof (or “receipts”). Two months ago, “Nycundercover,” a regular poster, posted a screenshot of Serena Kerrigan, who has 217,000 Instagram followers, standing in front of her refrigerator. “Not that proof was needed, but now she doesn’t even bother hiding her Ozempic use,” they wrote, above an image annotated with a red arrow, pointing to the telltale cap of a GLP-1 pen.