What's Really Wrong with "Luxury Beliefs"

A critique of Rob Henderson, with a callback to Charles Murray

I’ve yet to meet Rob Henderson, but I’ve watched some of his cultural criticism, and he seems like a great guy. Troubled, his best-selling autobiography, is both moving and harrowing. Qua social scientist, though, Henderson’s claim to fame is “pioneering the concept of ‘luxury beliefs.’” As he explains in this excerpt:

Gradually, I developed the concept of “luxury beliefs”, which are ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class at very little cost, while often inflicting costs on the lower classes.

If you’re in a rush, it’s easy to conclude that Henderson is just reinventing (or relabeling) my notion of “rational irrationality” — the idea that people are much more irrational on topics where error has near-zero private cost. But on closer look, the parallels are illusory. In fact, our chief conclusions are almost diametrically opposed.

He’s correct, I grant, that elites suffer almost no negative consequences from their crazy political views. But this fact has nothing to do with their elite status. Why not? Because selfishly speaking, virtually no one ever suffers any negative consequences of any political view they happen to hold.

To see why, imagine that in the next election, you vote for the opposite of everything to believe in. What happens? The answer, regardless of your station in life, is: The same thing that would have happened anyway. Why? Because, the superstars of politics aside, the probability that one individual flips an electoral outcome is roughly zero.

So yes, a Harvard Ph.D. who denies the efficacy of criminal deterrence suffers no consequences of his error. But a high school dropout who believes the same thing also suffers no consequences of his denial. In both cases, individual influence on crime policy is roughly zero.

My point: It is bizarre to call something a “luxury belief” when everyone, no matter how poor or humble, can easily afford it. People don’t buy their political beliefs at exclusive restaurants. They get them gratis at all-you-can-eat buffets.

Henderson is correct, of course, to claim that pro-crime policies are objectively much worse for the poor than they are for the rich. Even if bad policies doubled victimization rates for all groups, doubling a high rate is much more harmful than doubling a low rate. But to calculate the personal cost of support for pro-crime policies, you have to multiply the cost to you if such policies prevail by the probability that you personally cause such policies to prevail. Since the latter probability is almost always zero, the selfish cost of support is almost always zero regardless of income.

Imagine a wealthy man declares, “I donate blood because I might need it one day.” Why is this a silly claim? Because he’s rich? No! This is a silly claim because no individual, regardless of income, noticeably affects the blood supply. The selfish benefit of blood donation, like the selfish cost of absurd political beliefs, is near-zero for rich and poor alike.

The luxury beliefs story starts making some sense when Henderson moves from politics to lifestyle. The belief that “illegal drug use is low risk” is genuinely less costly if your rich parents are ready to bail you out. In his words:

A well-heeled student at an elite university can experiment with cocaine and will, in all likelihood, be fine. A kid from a dysfunctional home with absentee parents will often take that first hit of meth to self-destruction.

Fair enough, but the natural prediction is that the rich will freely experiment with drugs, while the poor with prudently gasp, “Too rich for my blood!” and abstain. That’s how luxury goods work: The rich consume far fancier cars, clothes, and vacations than the poor. Luxury beliefs should work the same way. As I’ve explained before at length, you can’t sensibly blame X on poverty if poverty is a strong reason to avoid X.

The same goes for Henderson’s other lifestyle beliefs. This passage sounds reasonable enough:

Most personal to me is the luxury belief that family is unimportant or that children are equally likely to thrive in all family structures. In 1960, the percentage of American children living with both biological parents was identical for affluent and working-class families — 95 per cent. By 2005, 85 per cent of affluent families were still intact, but for working-class families the figure had plummeted to 30 per cent…

In 2006, more than half of American adults without a university degree believed it was “very important” that couples with children should be married. Fast-forward to 2020, and this number has plummeted to 31 per cent. Among university graduates, only 25 per cent think couples should be married before having kids. Their actions, though, contradict their luxury beliefs: the vast majority of American university graduates who have children are married.

If you take luxury beliefs seriously, however, the following puzzles should vex you.

1. If people can use hypocrisy to disarm dangerous luxury beliefs, how are they costly for anyone?

2. If elites are especially hypocritical, isn’t there a crucial intensity-weighted sense in which they are consuming a lower quantity of luxury beliefs?

3. If non-college adults remain a little more pro-marriage in theory, why are they vastly less pro-marriage in practice?

Notably, Charles Murray’s Coming Apart grapples with the same class divide in social dysfunction as Henderson, but offers a much more coherent explanation. Long Murrayian story short: Tradition and social pressure for responsible behavior used to be strong, so all classes lived fairly responsibly. As tradition and social pressure relaxed, high-status people had the intelligence and impulse control to keep living responsibly, but low-status people didn’t. That’s why the high-status continue to have high family stability and low substance abuse, while the low-status now have low family stability and high substance abuse.

Like Henderson, Murray is annoyed at elites who fail to preach the bourgeois lifestyle they practice. But instead of building on the shaky foundation of luxury beliefs, Murray straightforwardly blames elites for lack of noblesse oblige. If you’re doing well by the power of bourgeois virtue, you ought to altruistically aid the less successful by loudly sharing the secrets of your success.

Henderson and I agree that (a) people are much more likely to embrace absurd beliefs when the selfish cost is low, and (b) individuals’ absurd beliefs do immense collective harm. What he misses, though, is that the selfish cost of absurd political beliefs is near-zero for virtually everyone. Furthermore, since the selfish cost of absurd lifestyle beliefs normally falls with status, we should expect dysfunction to rise with status. Tacking on elite hypocrisy to explain why the opposite holds in the real world is a desperate epicycle. And a totally unnecessary epicycle, because Charles Murray elegantly explained the whole situation over a decade ago.

P.S. Georges Pratt’s critique of Henderson’s theory of luxury beliefs is also good despite the low overlap with my critique. The same goes for Ruxandra Teslo’s critique.