Yet Another Critique of "Luxury Beliefs"

I know little about

Rob Henderson

except that he wrote a well-received memoir and that he really really really wants you to remember that he invented the concept of “luxury beliefs”. In his own words, these are:

ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class at very little cost, while often inflicting costs on the lower classes

The concept has metastasized and earned widespread adoption — particularly among social conservatives and right-wing populists. It might sound sophisticated, but it’s fundamentally flawed. Its vague and inconsistent definitions necessitate a selective application, and it’s ultimately used to launder mundane political preferences into something seemingly profound and highbrow.¹

It’ll be most useful to break down Henderson’s concept into parts and go through it step-by-step.

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1. Fashionable beliefs are always in style

First, there’s absolutely nothing groundbreaking or controversial about the idea that human beings adopt beliefs for social gain. If your entire community believes in creationism or astrology or Taylor Swift or whatever, it might be worth it to play along just to avoid ostracism.

Yet Henderson writes about this in a very confusing manner, conflating different meanings of ‘beliefs’ and ‘costs’. There’s a huge difference between saying you believe, behaving as if you believe, and lobbying for your beliefs, but Henderson uses them all interchangeably.² For example, here’s him conflating two personal choices, with one policy choice in one sentence:

Advocating for sexual promiscuity, drug experimentation or abolishing the police are good ways of advertising your membership of the elite because, thanks to your wealth and social connections, they will cost you less than me.

And his favorite anecdote (which he repeats over and over and over again) involves his classmate straight-up bullshitting:

For example, a former classmate at Yale told me “monogamy is kind of outdated” and not good for society. I asked her about her background and if she planned to marry. She was raised in a stable two-parent family, just like the vast majority of our classmates. And she planned on getting married herself. But she insisted that traditional families are old-fashioned and that society should “evolve” beyond them.

This is a boring story about someone who says one thing but does another. It’s a well-worn parable about moral aspiration and virtue signaling, and you can slot in whatever cherished endeavor you may have (praying, eating fewer carbs, recycling more, donating to charity, volunteering at nursing homes, adopting orphans, editing Wikipedia, etc.) and the fable’s lesson would remain untouched. I cannot fathom what Henderson finds so uniquely compelling about his particular version of the parable, except that it features a blatantly hypocritical leftist. Had his classmate been a Republican oil tycoon who extolled the virtues of going to church but didn’t go himself, would Henderson be repeating that story for so many years after the fact?

His meaning of “cost” also gets smeared into a slurry. Sometimes Henderson is referring to the cost of acquiring a belief (such as paying elite tuition to learn about ‘cultural appropriation’), sometimes it’s about the material consequences of behaving in accord with that belief, and sometimes it’s one and the other.³

Adopting a belief for social cachet is more likely when the belief is less materially consequential. Anyone who behaves as if gravity is not real will suffer very concrete consequences at the next ledge they have no qualms stepping off of, whereas not believing in the planet Jupiter is unlikely to ever matter.

Bryan Caplan

came up with “rational irrationality” specifically to explain why voters of all stripes hold such nonsensical policy beliefs — it’s much easier to hold fanciful positions when one’s vote statistically will never affect the outcome. And if your individual vote, hashtag, retweet, proud dinner party proclamation, or protest chant is never going to matter, why not use it to pursue more tangible benefits? That’s probably what was going on with the fake polyamorist; simply saying she supported polyamory cost her nothing, but maybe earned her brownie points among her friends.

Claiming to believe in something just to fit in is very often an easy calculus, but it’s by no means unique to any particular demographic.

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2. Who is Upper Class?

To identify which beliefs meet the luxury belief criteria, we must determine who counts as upper class. Henderson offers a peculiar definition, basing it on a thinly-sliced educational demographic rather than on wealth or income:

The upper class includes (but is not necessarily limited to) anyone who attends or graduates from an elite university and has at least one parent who is a university graduate.

Notice the conjunction. It’s not enough to just attend an elite university, you also must have a college graduate parent. This “continuing-generation educational elites” cohort is oddly specific, and presents a challenge with positively identifying it within social research surveys, but maybe there’s a good reason for this gerrymandered corral.

Part of Henderson’s justification is straightforwardly self-serving however. His preferred definition conveniently excludes him — the best-selling author Yale alumni — from the upper class label he demonstrably disdains (emphasis added):

People with parents who are university graduates are often better equipped to gain and maintain status — they tend to be more adept at navigating organisations, smoothly interacting with colleagues and positioning themselves for advancement. Consistent with this, in 2021 the Pew Research Center found that among US households headed by a graduate, the median wealth of those who had a parent with at least a bachelor’s degree was nearly $100,000 greater than those who don’t have college-educated parents.

This bonus of being a “continuing-generation” (as opposed to a “first-generation”) college graduate has been termed the “parent premium”. I don’t have the parent premium. For extended periods of my youth, I had the opposite. It’s impossible to say that every individual in a particular class or category has the exact same features across the board. Still, graduates of elite universities generally occupy the top quintile of income, often wield outsized social influence and are disproportionately likely to hold luxury beliefs that undermine social mobility.

The substantive justifications for equating “upper class” with the much more specific “continuing-generation educational elites” rests on three criteria: 1) high income 2) high social influence and…3) a tendency to adopt ‘luxury beliefs’.⁴ That last clause is one of the purest examples of circular reasoning I’ve ever encountered; luxury beliefs are beliefs held by the upper class, and the upper class are those who hold luxury beliefs. Social influence is a perfectly reasonable criteria in this context, but it’s also extremely difficult to quantify.

Inevitably, Henderson resorts to hand-picked anecdotes about his annoying Yale classmates or income-based survey data as good-enough proxies for “upper class” (Henderson’s version) beliefs. Although he initially detours from a wealth-based definition, he ultimately relies on it.

For example, his support for the claim that the “upper class” (again, Henderson’s version) is more likely to advocate for defunding the police is based on a YouGov survey that shows 32% support among those earning $100K or more, versus 22% support among those under $50k.⁵ To support the claim that this demographic is particularly well insulated against the putative effects of defunding the police (read: higher crime), he uses a $75k income cut-off. Sometimes he gets really lazy and just cites the spread on drug legalization support between those with any college degree, versus those without one.⁶

Henderson doesn’t specify what exactly counts as an elite school, but we can make some rough estimates. Graduates from only the top 50 schools would make up about 5% of all college graduates, but if you slice that further to exclude “first generation” graduates such as Henderson, maybe it’s only 3%.⁷ About 37% of all Americans have a college degree, and if the elite graduate ratio is consistent (again, Henderson doesn’t provide metrics) then it means that roughly about 1% of Americans would fit his specific criteria of “upper class”.

In other words, he’s drawing inferences regarding what the exclusive top 1% education elite believe by using data about what up to 37% of all Americans believe. I wonder if his strange methodology could be motivated by something else! (Spoiler alert)

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Henderson could’ve easily avoided making such impressive leaps. An alternative avenue Henderson could have pursued would be to examine another elite cohort: the top 1% wealthiest. Collecting this data is certainly not easy (folks are understandably cagey about their personal finances) but it’s certainly closer to the mark than divining through the fog of confounding variables. This 2013 study confirmed that the very wealthy indeed are extremely politically active — much more likely to have contacted their Senator for example — which would have satisfied Henderson’s influence checkbox. However, here’s just one sample of this cohort’s political beliefs compared to the general public on welfare assistance:

Well shit. This is awkward.

The uber-wealthy’s slant towards economic conservativism is reflected across other policy questions — the wealthiest 1% tend to be much more in favor of low taxes, government deregulation, and reducing welfare spending. This cohort is much more likely to be Republican (58% vs 27%) but even super wealthy Democrats are more conservative than the average Democrat. That the very wealthy tend to lean conservative has been a long standing trend in American politics, as evidenced by examining the voting habits of the top 4% of income earners over the last 60 years. If Henderson believes that surveys with $100k income buckets offer such compelling insights, what does he make of the fact that in 2020 those earning $100k or more voted for Trump over Biden 54% versus 42%? It’s almost exactly the opposite for voters earning less than $50k (44% vs 55% respectively), so will he ever argue that supporting Trump is a luxury belief?

This roundabout reasoning makes a lot more sense when you notice Henderson’s prime examples of luxury beliefs (polyamory, drug legalization, open borders, police abolition, etc.) are almost exclusively curated from the “woke college student” bucket. The only explanation I’m left with is Henderson really wants to complain about insufferable far-left college students (and there’s plenty to complain about there!) but needs to shoehorn his grudge to fit a populist class critique. Instead of starting from a blank slate and cataloguing the beliefs the upper class holds, he identifies the political opinions that annoy him the most, and then works backwards to search for any positive income correlation that fits his preconceived narrative.

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3. Impoverished Lemmings

Let’s assume away all of the above problems, Henderson doesn’t always provide a mechanism to explain how a harmful belief adopted by one group ends up harming another. The mechanism is obvious enough if any policy preferences makes it into law, but Henderson frequently conflates legislation and cultural shifts together:

Throughout the remainder of that year and into 2021, murder rates throughout the US soared as a result of defunding policies, officers retiring early or quitting, and police departments struggling to recruit new members after the luxury belief class cultivated an environment of loathing toward law enforcement.

The need for the sleight of hand can be explained by the fact that Henderson routinely struggles with charting a legible cause and effect trajectory. Take for example his attempt at connecting his classmate’s faux polyamory opinion to declining marriage rates. See if you can follow his logic:

What’s really interesting is if you sort of trace this, starting in the 1960s, 95% of kids born in the US were raised by both of their birth parents, regardless of social class. But then starting in the ’60s, you know, they did introduce more and more sort of newfangled ideas around marriage being outdated or promoting open marriages or single parenthood. This is kind of in the wake of the sexual revolution, by the 1970s divorce and single parenthood had spiked kind of across the board, and even for kind of upper class families, single parenthood and divorce and these kinds of things were on the rise as well. But by the 1980s, they had reverted back to their original figure. The upper class got high on their own supply and said, “Let’s try this kind of new age, new way of life.” Then they kind of realized that, “Oh, actually, this isn’t so great for my kids and for my family, and for the kind of life I want to live. Maybe it’s fun, but it’s not the optimal way to live.” So they kind of returned back to those sort of conventional bourgeois lifestyles, and the lower classes marched in lockstep. Single parenthood and divorce and all those things increased for them, and they just never returned. They just sort of continued to fragment and never recovered, and it continued to sort of get worse and worse.

So in the 60s, upper class folks decided marriage was no longer cool, but then after experimenting with open marriages and single parenthood, the upper class realized they were wrong and reversed course back to thinking marriage was cool again. Meanwhile, lower class folks somehow also got deluded into abandoning marriage, but then somehow kept missing the last memo.

Rob, what the fuck are you talking about?

If the lower class copies one upper class trend but not another, isn’t that evidence they’re not impressionable lemmings aping everything they see? The problem is that if Henderson concedes this point then his annoying classmate is relegated to just a blatant hypocrite, instead of someone at the root of societal ruin.

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Resurrecting Class Critique

Here’s the definition that started all this again:

ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class at very little cost, while often inflicting costs on the lower classes

Adopting beliefs for status is a universal human experience. People have played along with whatever the dominant religion was to avoid death and torture since the beginning of time. Inconsequential political beliefs are particularly prone to conformity, and that can include donning a keffiyeh because all your classmates have one, or pretending that the 2020 election was stolen in order to have a fighting chance with Republican voters.

Fashionable beliefs are real, and perhaps it’s worth examining whether society’s elites have a comparative advantage within this arena. There’s already libraries overflowing with Marxist critiques built around the ruling capitalist class propping up ideologies to enlarge their own power, at the expense of the working class relegated to a position of perpetual servitude. Or maybe it’s how the patriarchy reinforces expectations that cost its ruling class nothing, but burdens feminist autonomy.

Plenty of others already pointed out how Henderson’s most cited examples — police abolition and drug legalization — themselves qualify as luxury beliefs because their cost is borne heaviest by the lower class. The upper class has the resources to hire expensive defense attorneys and a bolstered ability to negotiate with the legal system given their professional network, which makes them better positioned to avoid the downsides of a punitive criminal justice system. The drug of choice might change but illicit drug use is fairly consistent across income brackets, but it’s much easier for the upper class to avoid police attention if they’re snorting cocaine at a mansion compared to smoking weed on a stoop.

So is being in favor of free markets, abortion restrictions, and a harsh criminal justice system all examples that Henderson can concede are valid examples of luxury beliefs? No, of course not. Those beliefs don’t count because Henderson said so.

Luxury beliefs have always been a transparently self-serving rubric. He wanted to sneer at snooty Yale graduates, so he made up a class definition that encompassed all elite university students unless their name is Rob Henderson. He sees the merits of his preferred policy positions as self-evident, and anyone who disagrees is pretending to do so only because they’re insulated from the consequences of their obviously misguided opinions.

Rid of its detritus, “luxury beliefs” offers a very familiar identity politics template of equating privilege with inherent moral guilt and a pretextual self-serving agenda — just one adorned with a superficial conservative aesthetic. It’s the classic Russell conjugation parable: my ideas are true and righteous, my opponents’ are wrong and malevolent.

What an fabulously naive and self-serving world view.

1. Henderson’s concept has received plenty of criticism from a range of voices, such as Freddie deBoer, Bryan Caplan, George Prat, and Ruxandra Teslo, much of which I’m building upon.

2.

Noah Smith

came up with a similar taxonomy.

3. David Marx also noticed this switcheroo: “So Henderson performs a subtle sleight of hand: When he writes that a luxury belief “inflicts costs” on the lower classes, he has shifted the meaning of the word from acquisition requirements to negative long-term effects.”

4. These are the most specific justifications I could find from Henderson.

5. Interestingly the gap between urban (30%) and rural (12%) is much more stark, but Henderson doesn’t mention it.

6. I spent way too long trying to track down this alleged survey on drug legalization and came up empty. The closest I could find was a 2019 Pew survey which indicated that support for marijuana legalization was lowest among those with just a college degree. Every other education cohort (postgrads, college dropouts, high school grads, etc.) supported it at 67-68%, but those with a college degree clocked in “only” at 63%.

7. An average of 4,000 graduates per school is 200,000 elite school graduates, divided by the 4 million people graduating from college ever year.