All-In Summit: "Luxury Beliefs are Status Symbols" with Rob Henderson

okay um well buckle your seat belt um because I think this next thing is probably going to shake some of your thinking um if you guys have want to be uh provoked one of the most provocative books you can read uh is by a gentleman by the name of Charles Murley called uh I think it's called breaking apart anyways it's it's basically a study on sociology and uh there's a guy a younger version named Rob Henderson who I randomly met on the internet a few years ago and Rob's story is pretty incredible this is a guy that had a drug addicted mother he bounced around foster care his whole life he uh dropped out of high

school I think he joined the Air Force left the Air Force and then went to Yale and then got a PhD from Cambridge um but he has had an incredibly hard life but is an incredibly happy kind thoughtful human who's prettyy introspective about um just society and sociology and people um if you don't have a chance to follow Rob on Twitter I highly encourage you to do it he's got an incredible um newsletter um it's just fascinating stuff about human psychology and uh he's going to give us a little presentation then we're going to have a conversation so Rob Henderson [Applause] everybody let your winners ride rman [Music] David and instead we open source it to

the fans and they've just gone crazy with [Music] love I did graduate high school uh 2.2 GPA bottom third of my class uh so I've uh I've been developing this framework of luxury beliefs for uh a couple of years now uh so we'll just jump right in we'll start with a with a puzzle what do top hats have in common with defunding the police or romanticizing unmarried parenting or divorce or promoting careerism over attentive care for children and family uh before we get into it chth told you a bit about my unusual background I was born here in Los Angeles I grew up in foster homes here in LA and all around California uh

I fled as soon as I could uh enlisting in the military when I was 17 and then later attended Yale on the GI Bill and and a PhD from University of Cambridge and throughout uh well well Yale was a very different environment for me I learned at Yale that there are more uh students from families in the top 1% of the income scale than the entire bottom 60% and some of those personal experiences along with my sort of academic research uh led me to a discovery which is that luxury beliefs uh have to a large extent uh replaced luxury goods luxury beliefs are ideas and opinions that conf first status on the upper class while often inflicting costs on the lower classes now to be

clear I'm not saying that luxury goods no longer signify status uh rather are making the point that luxury goods have become a noisier indicator of status uh and as a result luxury beliefs have uh Arisen and as we as we'll see later uh a core feature of a luxury belief is that the believer is Comfortably insulated from the consequences of his or her belief so there are multiple components to this luxury belief idea but it starts with uh Vin he was an economist and sociologist in the late 19th century and in 1899 he published a book called the theory of the Leisure Class uh and one of the core insights of this book is that because we can't be certain about

the financial status of other people a good way to size up their means is to see whether they could afford uh expensive uh and costly Goods so in Bin's day these were things like Tuxedos and top hats and evening gowns pocket watches and monal uh partaking in expensive leisurely activities like golf or beagling uh attending uh expensive and and lavish events kind of like oh um so there's [Applause] a there's a great uh line in this book uh uh Vin uh somewhat tongue-in-cheek uh suggests that even even Butlers are status symbols he writes that the the chief use of servants is the evidence they afford of the Master's ability to pay um so these findings were later

echoed a few decades later uh by the French sociologist Pierre bdue uh in a classic uh work in sociology called distinction of social critique of the Judgment of taste and this uh in this book Pier berue coined this term cultural capital uh and the idea was that uh the upper segment of society would convert their material resources into uh uh uh Avenues to express and and perform uh social class through what he called the dispositions of Mind and Body uh uh developing intricate and expensive tastes uh knowledge of of uh wine and art and other rarified cultural domains uh taste Customs opinions habits he used

this term distance from necessity uh in other words only people who did not work bluecollar jobs manual labor could afford to invest the time and the resources uh into performing uh uh the class mannerisms of that top segment so one of the points that be uh pier bdue and Bin made was that in order for a symbol a status symbol to signify status uh it has to be rare it has to be exclusive difficult to obtain costly to purchase once a status symbol is freely available to the masses uh the elites will subsequently abandon it so there are historical examples of this uh one that I like uh here the in the Middle

Ages in Europe SP spices were difficult to obtain and costly to purchase only the elites could afford them but as European societies colonized India and the Americas and other regions of the globe Globe the cost of spices subsequently declined and uh the mass public commoners in Europe were able to obtain spices and in response many European Elites decided that spices were vulgar and um under the reign of Louis the 14th Court chefs banned Sugar and Spice from all meals except for desserts um there's another example here uh dueling in the American colony so dueling was initially uh a practice primarily engaged in by Aristocrats it was you know it was something that only

gentlemen partook for Honor uh famously one of America's founding fathers Alexander Hamilton was killed in a duel against Aaron Burr uh but gradually this practice that was initially confined to the elite spread uh throughout the colonies and as a result uh the elites abandoned this practice and then it was subsequently outlawed in the late 19th century so distinction uh is the key motive here now A couple of years ago there was a great book uh by the author Michael Knox Baron called wasps the splendors and miseries of an American aristocracy and in this book Baron writes about white Anglo-Saxon Protestants so this was the American

ruling class from roughly the mid 19th to the mid 20th centuries and baron points out that wasps had mixed feelings about their fellow Americans uh he writes that many wasps viewed ordinary Americans as sunk in moronic darkness and he writes that it is a question whether a high wasp ever supported a fashionable cause without some secret knowledge that the cause was abored by the bulgarians uh in other words many wasp would support certain movements and causes and express certain beliefs uh because they were so at odds with conventional opinion and it made them look sophisticated and interesting and it allowed them to distance themselves from the

commoners um and so sometimes when I talk about luxury beliefs when I talk about status people will say Rob is it really true that Elites care so much about status is it really something that's so important to them and the answer is yes um the sociologist Emil durkheim understood this when he wrote the more one has the more one wants since satisf actions received only stimulate instead of filling needs and this is supported by two recent studies both published in 2020 by two independent groups of researchers this is a replicated finding uh the result was that relative to lower status individuals higher status individuals have the strongest desire for wealth and

Status so these researchers collected uh objective measures of status things like uh socioeconomic status level of income occupational Prestige uh educational attainment and found that people who are at or near the top of these measures were the most likely to agree with statements like it would please me to be in a position of power over others I enjoy having influence over those around me and similar uh statements involving wealth as well so this is something uh that that's important to understand the strong desire for status the strong desire for distinction so that's one component of luxury beliefs the other is that this top segment of society also

wields disproportionate influence over culture and over policy there was a study in 2014 that received a lot of attention which found that strong support from high-income Americans doubles the likelihood that a policy will be adopted so these are Americans in the top income desile roughly people who ear in $177,000 or more per year uh this group wields a lot of influence but it's important to understand that this group um is often insulated from uh the detrimental effects of some of their policy preferences if the outcomes uh do not are not favorable um so this is important too they're insulated from from the consequences of their preferences so what is an example of a

luxury belief well in 2020 the defund of the police movement gained a lot of momentum uh and in early 2021 yugov uh ran a survey they collected data from a representative sample of Americans and found that the well they found overall Americans were very much against defunding the police but when they broke down the results by income category they found that the highest income Americans were by far the most supportive of defunding the police there was another survey of of just Democratic voters and found that white Democrats were far more supportive of defunding the police than Black and Hispanic Democrats uh and so as a result despite the fact that most

people didn't want this uh many cities across the US subsequently reduced spending for police departments uh here in LA in New York Chicago Seattle and and many other cities as well and this has contributed to the violent crime wave that we've seen over the last couple of years so these are figures from the US Census P Bureau before 2020 um which helps to understand who are the primary victims of crime so so in the US relative to those who earn $775,000 or more per year the poorest Americans are seven times more likely to be victims of robbery seven times more likely to be victims of aggravated assault and 20 times more likely to be victims of

sexual assault um and again this is before 2020 if anything these differences are probably more pronounced uh so it's important here to understand that uh that that to not stop crime is to actually victimize uh the poor this is luxury belief here's another luxury belief torching your own social capital over the last couple of years it's become trendy among cultural Elites to uh uh promote this idea of Burning Bridges social ties over disagreements over social or political views and if you're an upper upper middle class person if you're Highly Educated uh geographically mobile uh in all likelihood you can probably afford to burn a lot of social Bridges and in all

likelihood you'll be just fine but if you're a person who lives at or near the margins of society uh it would be uh unwise to burn your relationships with friends families employers colleagues neighbors and so on and so expressing this luxury belief may make you look dedicated to your cause of choice uh but if this belief uh spreads throughout Society um this would this would uh have detrimental effects for uh people who are less fortunate but for me the luxury belief that has had the most wide ranging uh societal consequences uh has been uh the denigration of the two parent family so here a couple of headlines uh let's Call the Whole Thing Off the author is ending her marriage

isn't it time you did the same uh and the nuclear family is no longer the norm good by the way I I don't mean to pick on the New York Times here I've written there and I've had friends who' have written there but but these are headlines that many cultural Elites these are ideas that cultural Elites believe should be introduced into society among the educated public uh to be implemented uh into culture and into policy so the erosion of the family structure so in N uh in 1960 95% of American children regardless of social class were uh raised by both of their parents uh and for the upper class for the upper 20% of Americans uh it dropped slightly by 2005 to 85% so it

was 95% dropped slightly to 85% for poor and working-class Americans those in the bottom 30% it was 95% in 1960 and it plummeted to 30% by5 uh now if you visit working class Blue Collar communities in the US it is an anomal to see children raised by both of their parents um where I grew up I had five close friends in high school and of the six of us none of us were raised by both of our parents there was me raised in foster homes I had two friends raised by single moms one friend raised by a single dad I had another friend who was raised by his grandmother because his mom was addicted to drugs

and his dad was in prison that is a pretty common snapshot of like what uh neighborhoods look like uh in poror and workingclass communities now now there's an element of duplicity here for this luxury belief in and some others as well which is when you ask college graduates about their opinions on family formation and family structure um only a minority only 25% of college graduates think couples should be married before having kids that's what they say um in other words 75% of college graduates either hold a neutral position or think that uh maybe they shouldn't be married before having kids but then what do they actually do well the vast majority of

children born to college graduates are raised uh by two married parents uh only about one in 10 children uh born to a college educated mother is born out of wedlock uh so there's this mismatch between words and deeds and here you can see uh the sort of shocking rise and out of weblock births and this is primarily concentrated again among the poor and the working class it continues to rise so up until about 1920 it was below 5% it skyrocketed since 1960 it continues to climb so we're we're in unforeseen territory now where children in impoverished environments who could stand to benefit the most from two attentive parents are the least likely

uh to have them and sometimes when I talk about the issue of the family people want to discuss the economics of this uh there was a study a few years ago which found that if you wanted to equalize life outcomes for children raised in single parent homes uh this uh would require a dist a redistribution of $59,000 a year to single parents to equalize educational and occupational outcomes for uh children to match those of of two parent uh families and I think this is an interesting study and I think uh economics shouldn't be downplayed but I think it does do uh highlight the sort

of narrow way that many Elites think about family um one way to think about this is if you were to ask a child who has two attentive parents hey we're going to take one of your parents away but it's okay because we're going to give you $59,000 a year I think very few kids would accept that deal um there's more to life than just educational occupational outcomes uh there's a there's a sort of a blind spot here about the social and emotional penalties children receive when they don't have uh two parents available um so wrapping up here um luxury beliefs are the new status symbols ideas movements causes um P Board do in another one of his great

books the forms of capital wrote the best measure of cultural capital is undoubtedly the amount of time devoted to acquiring it uh so only through the the process of going to an expensive University Len listening to the right podcasts reading the right books being immersed in the right environments knowing that you're supposed to say unhoused instead of homeless you know the updating your vocabulary these are ways for you to signify I'm a member of this upper segment of uh Society um in an interview a couple of years ago the NYU Professor Scott Galloway uh said the strongest brand in the world is not Apple the strongest brands are MIT Oxford and Stanford academics decided we

no longer public servants were luxury goods these are the places where luxury beliefs are birthed people pay money they they convert their economic capital into cultural capital they learn the right opinions to express in these institutions uh but again luxury belief holders are often insulated from the consequences of their beliefs so as costly as these beliefs are to obtain for the affluent in terms of Downstream consequences they're even more costly for everyone else and I'll leave it at that pre-order my book thank [Applause] you you ended with something that um is is something that's very important to me that I that I talked to you about before

which is um the destruction of the nule your family and the impact that has had on us Society um I think it's important to just expand a little bit more and I'll give you this provocative lead in which is talk about you know maybe LBJ and the Great Society and the war on poverty and you know there's a very famous website what the [ __ ] happened in 1971. comom like all of this stuff just just discuss that again maybe in a little bit more detail for us well yeah I mean there has been a sort of this this backfiring effect I think um we we dis we we focus a lot we concentrate a lot on the economic circumstances of of families and how this may contribute to deprivation dysfunction negative

outcomes for kids but um one thing that I've learned through reading a lot of Developmental and evolutionary psychology research some of the things that I write about is that childhood instability is is worse uh than childhood poverty for uh uh future outcomes uh so in terms of criminality or educational attainment um growing up in a very unstable environment is actually worse uh than than um uh impoverishment and even when you control for income um instability is still strongly associated with negative outcomes for kids in other words a kid who's raised uh by uh a rich family but say there's a lot of divorce and addiction and a lot of uh uh trauma in

in that family environment that kid will grow up to most likely have worse outcomes than a kid who's raised in a poor family with two parents who uh prioritize attentive care and stability uh and so I think we yeah we Retreat to discussions of Economics because no one wants to talk about values no one wants to talk about family anymore I think the Great Society was kind of an example of this of oh we're going to solve this all through economics it's this kind of vulgar materialism uh when you know now we're seeing the the sort of uh Downstream consequences since since the late 60s yeah I mean the the data point that that may be shocking for some

people is in you know black families as an example the economic incentive to not get married um on uh you know today dollar adjusted basis was like 92 ,000 to a black woman to not get married and have a child um explain what that means how that meaning like you know Lynden Johnson's welfare movement was about uplifting a lot of people but unfortunately it created these uh deep negative consequences that took years to build up through economics through economic incentives it was paying you to not be married and so what what happened people didn't get married and so it started to create these effects that have been compounding and and again in

this weird way in which we work if you you have the right label you know like for example freeberg has made this statement but like you know we can't talk about how bad the inflation reduction Act is it's because it's called the inflation reduction act same way at LBJ you know it was this was the war on poverty and so all of a sudden you sounded like some you know um insensitive LTE if you're like well I'm against the war on poverty well no you're not who would be against that so we never really had a chance to talk about it um you know graem Allison actually had some points about this yesterday as well when we were talking the one we've talked about about Rob

um the framing of um people who are homeless versus people who are addicted to drugs you know and this sort of why would you arrest somebody who is homeless and who is and they actually have a home and they're choosing to live on the street and and they have resources and we pay for this in San Francisco and the the issue here I think is in Framing and incentives because you actually get paid to come to San Francisco where we also have the lowest cost of deadly fentanyl I think there there's kind of a misunderstanding of how uh relationships and and societies often work often material Prosperity coincides with no longer needing to build relationships anymore or it uh

sort of redirects uh the incentive structure such that you you no longer want to work or do certain things anymore um I mean it's funny when I when I talk to sort of more aflan Americans and and you know talk to them about what's going on with uh the the sort of what the underclass in in the US they'll suggest that a lot of these uh problems a lot of these communities are afflicted by by poverty but then when I travel to developing countries uh non-industrialized countries poor countries and and I talk to them about what's going on in the states they say that it's because America is too rich

that's the problem you know you don't need to build relationships anymore I mean often if you visit I mean I was in I was in Malaysia recently and the you know the the poor neighborhoods there are you know they're far different than the poor neighborhoods that that I grew up in in terms of just sort of material uh um uh scarcity and yet um people know their neighbors they get married they take care of their family and their friends and a lot of this is because uh you know in America even if you're poor you're the material Prosperity is relatively higher than a lot of other countries and therefore you no longer need to build relationships quite as much as as you used to um there was a

line in the New Yorker a couple of years ago uh sort of this this is a profile piece on poverty in America but one line that stood out to me was that um know before the Great Society being poor meant being hungry and now being poor means being on food stamps which isn't a pleasant thing to be on food stamps but it no longer means that you're actually starving the way that you would in the past so material prosperity and inequality mean something different now where does society go at the limit of all of this yeah I think one thing that we could do is um so so Melissa Kierney she's a professor of Economics at the

University of Maryland she just released a book called the two parent privilege and she points out a lot of the sort of the economic issues and I think that's you know it's it's fine but I again I think that's kind of a narrow-minded way of looking at this but one thing that she points out that I really like is that Elites could do sort of more to to promote values to sort of what uh uh preach what you practice uh there are ways that we could just speak more about this I think a lot of a lot of people who agree with a lot of my writing and the things that I say their reluctance to express this publicly it's kind of you know one reason why they like me is because I'll say it but I think uh you

one one sort of obligation or Duty you have if you are a fortunate member of society is to accept that you may take some slings and arrows for values that you know are good um you know if you've lived a fortunate life um that yeah there's there's that kind of niis ble that I think that we've we've lost if there's a message to folks here about how we should be telling other people what some of those High Lev values are what would you tell us to be promoting more that we don't I mean I think yeah the marriage attentive care for for children um I think that that is that is a big one um I mean it's really interesting when I talk about uh

marriage a lot of people immediately pivot and they say well are you saying that it's bad to be a single parent are you trying to what denigrate single moms and this seems to be the only domain where people make this suggestion if if you say we should we should applaud college graduates no one ever says oh does that mean we're insulting people who didn't go to college is that what you're saying and no that's not what we're saying you can you can praise one thing and confer status on on an activity and that doesn't necessarily imply that you're trying to denigrate everyone else um so I think this is something that we could do focus more on sort of family uh uh early

uh development issues uh for for young kids um again childhood instability is a far greater predictor than poverty and yet we we spend so much time talking about economics um where do you put some of these social movements that you know um now take up and occupy a lot of space in society um where do those fit in in this construct of yours yeah a lot of the movement cancel culture you know Etc like how do you how do you how do you bucket sort all that stuff I mean a lot of that is those are many of them are luxury beliefs um if you look at data uh in terms of self-censorship is one that I've that I've been been writing about and concentrating on if you look at the

data for Americans who report self-censoring for fear of uh damaging their employment prospects or getting fired um it actually increases the more educational attainment someone has so for people who uh the highest level of education is a high school diploma about 25% of Americans say that they self-censor um whereas for people with college graduate or for for college degree it's 33% and then for people with postgraduate degrees it's 44% well because they have more to lose and they know and they can anticipate what's going to happen right because because cancel culture and all these things are actually worse we had this conversation with v on the podcast where I asked him

because he's been very outspoken about his religious beliefs and I asked him a two-part question do you think there's anything wrong with being gay and then no and then hey what do you think of trans and and the fact that trans issues have become such a prominent issue in this election when it affects such a small number of people is perplexing well I think yeah moral movements often become intertwined with with status so for a long time there's the gay marriage issue and because you know I I I I I cited that the book on wasps you know if if a cause is abored by the bulgarians you know and and so for a long time that was the case with with gay marriage but

then once uh um uh great you know the majority of Americans supported this cause I think a lot of Highly Educated uh activists decided to move on to this next issue and so there's there's just kind of you know any any time an opinion is at odds with conventional opinion it becomes more enticing to to promote because it signifies that you're not a commoner is that because of social media and is it waning some of it is I think because of social media um social media scales um right you you know you can't uh you can't punch a thousand people the face at once but you can get a thousand people to attack one person online all at the same time and damage their

reputation uh so I think that does have uh something to do with it so people become afraid of expressing certain opinions um but but is it I mean I I don't think that it's going to I think we're sort of we are seeing a bit of a when you know some people call it the vibe shift it's it's slowly changing people are speaking more openly and criticizing cancel culture more um but I think part of the reason why it's dying is because a lot of people have already been cancelled uh you know well it's also so exhausting you know it's like really we're we're going to attack another person because their beliefs are slightly different and I think it's one

of the things we've tried to do on the on the podcast is say hey let let's just have a conversation about these issues um and and be thoughtful about it and we don't want to hurt anybody's feelings but we do need to talk about some of these things in an intellectually honest way whether it's homeless whether it's black lives matter January 6 whatever we try to have an intellectually rigorous open-minded discuss discuss and it feels to me like that has started to tip over I I I see it very distinctly that you can only you know be cancelled for your opinion if you allow them to cancel you momentum is such that you try something for long enough when it eventually doesn't work you try something else I

think Society has a resilient way of just doing that and so maybe people are realizing that cancel culture will not solve the problems that they care about I think it's well said and there has to be a different way Robin in in the developed world does the rise of luxury beliefs give rise to the populist movements um I remember I would travel in the midwest a lot I work with farmers and Rural communities I would go out to these rural communities I meet with farmers and there was always ridicule about how Californians were arguing about the gender sign on bathrooms when their local conversation was can I make money this year and I hate being

dependent on the government and I would hear this everywhere I would go in rural communities in the US and I was like Donald Trump's going to win I mean he's just he is the voice of this group um but it seemed to me that that is what really triggered the sentiment for populism it's not just about not having enough money but it's about seeing the inanity in some the view the perceived inanity of um these luxury beliefs uh from a group that that isn't afforded that luxury yeah well I think a lot of workingclass people can sense that you know many many members of that Elite segment of society don't really have their best interest in mind they can see

sort of it's it's not even just that they don't share your values they're sort of intentionally promoting values that could undermine your your your communities and there is that kind of disain um and so yeah yeah just briefly returning I think even even social media may actually be contributing to some extent I mean now people can go online and just see how um yeah how how mentally Limited a lot of Elites are uh just by looking at their Twitter profiles or the things that they say things that they write about whatever um uh Expressions that they have online and I think this is also sort of uh you know sort of behind the curtain moment of wow

exactly this is like that this is who's leading the country this is uh or this is who who leads the most prestigious institutions uh and so yeah I think there is a there there's a bit of that uh as well can you talk about a little bit um just back to family and marriage for a second you wrote something about um you know large numbers of sexual partners a sort of dating culture the hookup culture can you just tie those two things together and one observation that I had and maybe it was because I read your stuff I then noticed that there seems to be these small green shoots of people who are being celebrated from getting married quite

early now they tend to be stars but there is this interesting Trend uh and I thought wow this could be one of these things where you're now starting to model a very different set of choices when you're 23 and 24 where you know nobody would have thought today you would get married at and this obsession with matchmaking and maybe a better way than swiping right would be to be thoughtful about uh the values your partner has yeah yeah I think there is an element of status here I mean when Tinder and a lot of the dating apps took off in around 2012 uh in 2012 most Americans didn't uh have have cell phones yet or or or smartphones rather uh but then now that

everyone has a smartphone and now that everyone's on the dating apps it has lost a bit of that exclusivity a lot of that sort of signifier of status and I think this is one reason why we're seeing a lot of a lot of affluent people sort of uh shift back to trying to meet online um or or rather in person um to meet in person um and yeah I think uh promiscuity all of these things I I had a friend um a couple of years ago who you know he told me uh you know Rob when I so so he was a student at a at an elite University and he said when I set my uh dating app radius to one mile just right out right around the university um you know most of the the female profiles

he saw these were fellow students and and he said something like a third of them in the Bios they said you know I'm you know poly or or casual or not looking for anything serious and then when he extended the radius uh to the outskirts of the University which is a more sort of bluecollar area uh same age range you know you know was it 20 to 24 year old women or something he said that the majority of the women he saw were single moms uh and so sexual promiscuity looks very different depending on uh your social class how much money you come from and and so on um okay uh we need to wrap you can follow Rob Henderson on uh Twitter and sign up to substack substack yeah well

done Rob all right again David thank you thank thank let your winners [Music] ride we open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it love you queen of what