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”.
I'd argue there is a formulation of luxury beliefs that makes sense and has meaningful public policy implications. Instead of "ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class at very little cost, while often inflicting costs on the lower classes", try "ideas and opinions that confer status (but no other benefits) and few non-status costs on the top third of people in capability to influence a particular policy while inflicting costs on folks in the other two-thirds." This is a bit wordy, so here's an example.
Let's say Anytown is trying to decide whether to spend a federal transportation grant on a bike lane for Main Street or late night bus service. The spandex mafia sets up a table outside Wegman's with a petition and gets a whole bunch of signatures from Wegman's shoppers for the bike lane. Some of the grocery-getters go home and posts their sincere belief on social media that a bike lane on Main Street would be a great way to fight climate change. The town council chooses the bike lane.
The problem with this whole scenario is that the Wegman's shoppers aren't meaningful stakeholders in this issue, as almost none of them would use late night bus service or the bike lane. It costs them nothing to support the bike lane and they gain status because bike lanes are trendy. At the same time, those Wegman's shoppers are also in the top third of the town's population in their capability to influence the town council. Many of them are friends (or friends of friends) with town council members, plus they have the time and mental bandwidth to talk about bike lanes with the petition guys and sign the petition.
Meanwhile, the folks who would use late-night bus service are in the other two-thirds. Many of them don't speak English, they're not friends with the town council members, and they probably have no idea that the town council is making this decision. The two-thirds is getting real costs (having no late-night bus service) imposed by the luxury beliefs of the one-third.
In this formulation, luxury beliefs don't have a clear left-right alignment. For example, "the most important issue in K-12 education today is whether Gender Queer is in the school library" is a luxury belief for both sides of the issue. The stakes are low for folks (like education reporters and teacher's unions) in the one-third, yet the issue crowds out time, attention, and money that should be going to K-12 education efforts that would actually help the students who make up the two-thirds.
The obvious implication here is that knowingly gaining status at the expense of others is bad, and if one hasn't thought deeply about an issue to understand the costs to those others and one has no real stake in the policy other than status, the right thing to do is forgo the status and butt out. Having a name for this unfortunately common type of situation along with a societally-agreed-upon-appropriate-response (i.e., don't get involved in the policymaking) is helpful.
This is such an excellent response! You significantly improve the framework by clearly distinguishing status benefits and material costs, and it's also much more obvious why these types of beliefs would be a problem.
There's meaningful analysis to be done on first-generation college students versus those from families with more established college traditions. So I don't think Henderson is completely off-base there... though I'm not sure said analysis would be as helpful to is cause as he might like.
That said, I agree with the crux of this essay, that Henderson's overall analysis is a mixture of true but trivial observations and radical but dubious claims about the implications thereof.
I spent almost all of this article itching to make the point you brought up in the second to last paragraph -- this is totally a reinvention of "check your privilege" but for conservative points instead of liberal ones. And I think this is a common pattern -- left and right have similar conceptual needs, but they refuse to use the same concepts, because left or right premises are implicitly baked into these concepts or because using them would admit there can be something to the other side's critiques. So you reinvent the same concept but only slightly different; just different enough to insist it is completely different. Sort of like how cancel culture is something the left does, or it doesn't exist at all but cyber bullying and online harassment are big problems, particularly if they are done to the left by the right.
I think there is something to the critique. The left takes pride in being the moral worldview of the well educated even as it insists the other worldview is the one of the privileged. But of course privilege and education are very correlated -- it's why those 1% economic policy views line up with many econ professors -- but the left's worldview even more strongly trickles down from academia, and while the left likes to think this just results in them knowing better, it also means the left worldview is shaped by privilege. Funny how the people not privileged enough to avoid the worst of the criminal justice system and the war on drugs are also the people living in the communities most harmed by crime and drugs, but fortunately well educated people in safe neighborhoods are available to argue both sides of what would be best for the underprivileged so there's no need to ask the most impacted for their uneducated opinions on these matters. This is the sort of thing Rob Henderson wants to talk about, but he can't call it privilege, as that comes from white skin not elite education and is the explanation for all right wing views not all left wing views, so he creates a functionally similar concept that incidentally has the same weaknesses.
Yes! The "us poors vs them snobby elites" is a very familiar, intoxicating, and viscerally addicting framework. Rob Henderson can't help but tap into it.
The issue I have with the theory and Rob Henderson isn’t that the theory is flawed—many theories start with inconsistencies—nor that Henderson is self-serving—we all have our biases. The real problem is that he seems uninterested in further developing the theory. While one can only speculate on his reasons, I believe it’s because the theory, in its current state, best serves his career. It wouldn’t benefit him if, after evaluation, we had to discard it or admit that it’s merely a 21st-century version of Pierre Bourdieu’s “Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste,” applied to expressed policy preferences.
> 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?
On this specific point: I think the unstated premise is that the "upper class" didn't just change their behavior to be less marriage-focused; they also changed how they talk about marriage, and maybe as a result changed the policies (or social stigmas) that favored marriage. And those broader effects caused an increase in divorces and single parenthood that affected everyone.
Then, when the "upper class" quietly reverted their behavior, they didn't change how they talked, or undo the earlier legal or social changes, because it remained fashionable to deny that traditional marriage is important, or at least unfashionable to be a crusader for traditional marriage. So the anti-marriage (or lack of pro-marriage) societal forces remained.
I don't know if it's true, but I don't think it's incoherent.
My issue with this particular claim of his isn't that it's incoherent, but rather that it's a hand-wavy just-so set of assertions that doesn't even try to reconcile with its own evidence. Maybe I missed it but I couldn't find an explanation from Henderson about how exactly he thinks the mechanism works except for that brief podcast snippet.
I think they act like certain prosocial behaviors aren't per se better than other behaviors, but because they have naturally prosocial instincts they end up behaving that way anyways. This is the luxury part of the belief.
In that sense they're not hypocritical because they do think that people should do whatever they find best, and they find, say, marriage and 2 kids best, so they do it. But they don't necessarily think it should be the model for good behavior or enforced at all.
I think a more accurate framing of what the idea of luxury beliefs is trying to capture is the following: the PMC assumes that the value system dominating their institutions is a cause of their success, rather than something they can afford as a result of being successful.
I don't believe that qualifier adds anything substantive. Based on how he uses the meaning of "upper class", the luxury beliefs he cites as examples, the survey data he relies upon to relay his findings, etc it's clear that his definition is the result of careful and intentional gerrymandering.
Perhaps, but then I think you should say that you're assuming an intent to mislead from him, and extrapolating what you think he's trying to convey.
I'm sure that in another context if someone said "includes but is not limited to X", you wouldn't say "they're restricting this to only X".
I read that part as trying to convey a sense of "generational elitehood", and looking for consecutive generations that went to college is a reasonable way to point at that, though there are of course exceptions. If a child has blue collar working class parents who save up in order to send their kid to college, that kid isn't "generational elite" in the same sense as someone with academics as parents growing up in a culture where everyone is expected to go to college.
That's fair, I do indeed conclude he's being intentionally misleading but I thought I established why and also made my own opinion sufficiently clear in the rest of the post. I did consider whether I should add a note more explicitly acknowledging the "not limited to" but the demographic he describes was sliced way too thin for that to matter.
Since you brought up the "upper class", keep in mind that that PMC is the hegemonic class, int hat PMC attitudes are deemed normative.
That guy who owns a specialized electrical contracting outfit and a few rentals on the side may be making as much money as a Goldman MD, even though his formal education ended some time in high school. He also is NOT treated the same as the Goldman managing director.
This goes back well before the PMC existed as a meaningful class. The differences between established money and nouveau riche, and their mutual resentments, are something anyone who had to read The Great Gatsby in high school English would know about.
This is all awdwark. Fact: campus has been to the left of townies for decades. This obviously creates a left-leaning elite. One really does not need to state more than this.
I'd argue there is a formulation of luxury beliefs that makes sense and has meaningful public policy implications. Instead of "ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class at very little cost, while often inflicting costs on the lower classes", try "ideas and opinions that confer status (but no other benefits) and few non-status costs on the top third of people in capability to influence a particular policy while inflicting costs on folks in the other two-thirds." This is a bit wordy, so here's an example.
Let's say Anytown is trying to decide whether to spend a federal transportation grant on a bike lane for Main Street or late night bus service. The spandex mafia sets up a table outside Wegman's with a petition and gets a whole bunch of signatures from Wegman's shoppers for the bike lane. Some of the grocery-getters go home and posts their sincere belief on social media that a bike lane on Main Street would be a great way to fight climate change. The town council chooses the bike lane.
The problem with this whole scenario is that the Wegman's shoppers aren't meaningful stakeholders in this issue, as almost none of them would use late night bus service or the bike lane. It costs them nothing to support the bike lane and they gain status because bike lanes are trendy. At the same time, those Wegman's shoppers are also in the top third of the town's population in their capability to influence the town council. Many of them are friends (or friends of friends) with town council members, plus they have the time and mental bandwidth to talk about bike lanes with the petition guys and sign the petition.
Meanwhile, the folks who would use late-night bus service are in the other two-thirds. Many of them don't speak English, they're not friends with the town council members, and they probably have no idea that the town council is making this decision. The two-thirds is getting real costs (having no late-night bus service) imposed by the luxury beliefs of the one-third.
In this formulation, luxury beliefs don't have a clear left-right alignment. For example, "the most important issue in K-12 education today is whether Gender Queer is in the school library" is a luxury belief for both sides of the issue. The stakes are low for folks (like education reporters and teacher's unions) in the one-third, yet the issue crowds out time, attention, and money that should be going to K-12 education efforts that would actually help the students who make up the two-thirds.
The obvious implication here is that knowingly gaining status at the expense of others is bad, and if one hasn't thought deeply about an issue to understand the costs to those others and one has no real stake in the policy other than status, the right thing to do is forgo the status and butt out. Having a name for this unfortunately common type of situation along with a societally-agreed-upon-appropriate-response (i.e., don't get involved in the policymaking) is helpful.
This is such an excellent response! You significantly improve the framework by clearly distinguishing status benefits and material costs, and it's also much more obvious why these types of beliefs would be a problem.
Yes! Great point. That is what I had hoped luxury beliefs was referring to before I read the book.
There's meaningful analysis to be done on first-generation college students versus those from families with more established college traditions. So I don't think Henderson is completely off-base there... though I'm not sure said analysis would be as helpful to is cause as he might like.
That said, I agree with the crux of this essay, that Henderson's overall analysis is a mixture of true but trivial observations and radical but dubious claims about the implications thereof.
I agree completely there are interesting insights to gain from examining familial privilege.
> "... he really really really wants you to remember that he invented the concept of 'luxury beliefs' ... "
Really? 😉🙂
Been a long time since I read it, but seems Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class was there ahead of him, and probably with more justification.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Theory_of_the_Leisure_Class
Veblen is a time-travelling plagiarist
I spent almost all of this article itching to make the point you brought up in the second to last paragraph -- this is totally a reinvention of "check your privilege" but for conservative points instead of liberal ones. And I think this is a common pattern -- left and right have similar conceptual needs, but they refuse to use the same concepts, because left or right premises are implicitly baked into these concepts or because using them would admit there can be something to the other side's critiques. So you reinvent the same concept but only slightly different; just different enough to insist it is completely different. Sort of like how cancel culture is something the left does, or it doesn't exist at all but cyber bullying and online harassment are big problems, particularly if they are done to the left by the right.
I think there is something to the critique. The left takes pride in being the moral worldview of the well educated even as it insists the other worldview is the one of the privileged. But of course privilege and education are very correlated -- it's why those 1% economic policy views line up with many econ professors -- but the left's worldview even more strongly trickles down from academia, and while the left likes to think this just results in them knowing better, it also means the left worldview is shaped by privilege. Funny how the people not privileged enough to avoid the worst of the criminal justice system and the war on drugs are also the people living in the communities most harmed by crime and drugs, but fortunately well educated people in safe neighborhoods are available to argue both sides of what would be best for the underprivileged so there's no need to ask the most impacted for their uneducated opinions on these matters. This is the sort of thing Rob Henderson wants to talk about, but he can't call it privilege, as that comes from white skin not elite education and is the explanation for all right wing views not all left wing views, so he creates a functionally similar concept that incidentally has the same weaknesses.
Yes! The "us poors vs them snobby elites" is a very familiar, intoxicating, and viscerally addicting framework. Rob Henderson can't help but tap into it.
The issue I have with the theory and Rob Henderson isn’t that the theory is flawed—many theories start with inconsistencies—nor that Henderson is self-serving—we all have our biases. The real problem is that he seems uninterested in further developing the theory. While one can only speculate on his reasons, I believe it’s because the theory, in its current state, best serves his career. It wouldn’t benefit him if, after evaluation, we had to discard it or admit that it’s merely a 21st-century version of Pierre Bourdieu’s “Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste,” applied to expressed policy preferences.
The abortion thing is such an important point.
> 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?
On this specific point: I think the unstated premise is that the "upper class" didn't just change their behavior to be less marriage-focused; they also changed how they talk about marriage, and maybe as a result changed the policies (or social stigmas) that favored marriage. And those broader effects caused an increase in divorces and single parenthood that affected everyone.
Then, when the "upper class" quietly reverted their behavior, they didn't change how they talked, or undo the earlier legal or social changes, because it remained fashionable to deny that traditional marriage is important, or at least unfashionable to be a crusader for traditional marriage. So the anti-marriage (or lack of pro-marriage) societal forces remained.
I don't know if it's true, but I don't think it's incoherent.
My issue with this particular claim of his isn't that it's incoherent, but rather that it's a hand-wavy just-so set of assertions that doesn't even try to reconcile with its own evidence. Maybe I missed it but I couldn't find an explanation from Henderson about how exactly he thinks the mechanism works except for that brief podcast snippet.
I think they act like certain prosocial behaviors aren't per se better than other behaviors, but because they have naturally prosocial instincts they end up behaving that way anyways. This is the luxury part of the belief.
In that sense they're not hypocritical because they do think that people should do whatever they find best, and they find, say, marriage and 2 kids best, so they do it. But they don't necessarily think it should be the model for good behavior or enforced at all.
I think a more accurate framing of what the idea of luxury beliefs is trying to capture is the following: the PMC assumes that the value system dominating their institutions is a cause of their success, rather than something they can afford as a result of being successful.
> Notice the conjunction. It’s not enough to just attend an elite university, you also must have a college graduate parent.
I think you're being unfair here, he says "is not limited to".
I don't believe that qualifier adds anything substantive. Based on how he uses the meaning of "upper class", the luxury beliefs he cites as examples, the survey data he relies upon to relay his findings, etc it's clear that his definition is the result of careful and intentional gerrymandering.
Perhaps, but then I think you should say that you're assuming an intent to mislead from him, and extrapolating what you think he's trying to convey.
I'm sure that in another context if someone said "includes but is not limited to X", you wouldn't say "they're restricting this to only X".
I read that part as trying to convey a sense of "generational elitehood", and looking for consecutive generations that went to college is a reasonable way to point at that, though there are of course exceptions. If a child has blue collar working class parents who save up in order to send their kid to college, that kid isn't "generational elite" in the same sense as someone with academics as parents growing up in a culture where everyone is expected to go to college.
That's fair, I do indeed conclude he's being intentionally misleading but I thought I established why and also made my own opinion sufficiently clear in the rest of the post. I did consider whether I should add a note more explicitly acknowledging the "not limited to" but the demographic he describes was sliced way too thin for that to matter.
Since you brought up the "upper class", keep in mind that that PMC is the hegemonic class, int hat PMC attitudes are deemed normative.
That guy who owns a specialized electrical contracting outfit and a few rentals on the side may be making as much money as a Goldman MD, even though his formal education ended some time in high school. He also is NOT treated the same as the Goldman managing director.
not treated the same by whom?
Pretty much anyone.
This goes back well before the PMC existed as a meaningful class. The differences between established money and nouveau riche, and their mutual resentments, are something anyone who had to read The Great Gatsby in high school English would know about.
What you're basically saying is that there are social classes?
Always have been, always will be. And money's just part of the equation. (I doubt we disagree on any of that, though.)
This is all awdwark. Fact: campus has been to the left of townies for decades. This obviously creates a left-leaning elite. One really does not need to state more than this.