Luckily, it seems we also have some specific signals to tell us rich vs poor, specifically conditioned on taste. This might alleviate the effect significantly, though perhaps not fully.
The problem starts to look ill-posed if you look at all the factors, though. Of course better taste has to correlate some with actual wealth, as if it provides any value at all it will give those people better social connections, etc. This whole cluster of value-providing traits is in fact correlated—and specifically because they're correlated does this central dynamic
I don't follow why you think this dynamic exists because wealth and taste are correlated. I think the dynamic I am describing is independent of that, and caused by it being very hard to find a signal of taste say that you cannot buy with other resources at least somewhat. If in fact taste was anticorrelated with wealth in terms of underlying characteristics, a wealthy person could still buy other people's tasteful guidance for instance.
Luckily, it seems we also have some specific signals to tell us rich vs poor, specifically conditioned on taste. This might alleviate the effect significantly, though perhaps not fully.
The problem starts to look ill-posed if you look at all the factors, though. Of course better taste has to correlate some with actual wealth, as if it provides any value at all it will give those people better social connections, etc. This whole cluster of value-providing traits is in fact correlated—and specifically because they're correlated does this central dynamic