Appeal to wealth (argumentum ad crumenam)

Biological Parallel

Peacock tails are metabolically expensive—only healthy males can afford the resource drain and predation risk. Peahens use tail quality as an honest signal of genetic fitness because the handicap principle makes cheating costly. The appeal to wealth exploits this same logic: we assume expensive displays indicate underlying quality because, ancestrally, conspicuous consumption was an honest signal (you can't fake surplus when food is scarce). Modern credit and wealth inequality broke this correlation, but the heuristic 'costly = quality' remains evolutionarily entrenched.