The following is a rough transcript which has not been revised by The Jim Rutt Show or Rob Henderson. Please check with us before using any quotations from this transcript. Thank you.
Jim: Today’s guest is Rob Henderson. Rob is a senior fellow of the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal. He’s also a columnist at the Free Press and the Boston Globe and has written for the New York Times and Wall Street Journal amongst others. He’s recently published a book, Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class. And he tells me the paperback’s just about to come out, so if you like what you’re hearing here, make sure you run over to Amazon or your local bookstore and get a copy.
He’s also got a very interesting newsletter on Substack called, with not too much originality, Rob Henderson’s Newsletter. And you can find more about that at robkhenderson.com, and you can also follow Rob on Twitter at robkhenderson with an at sign in front of it. And as always, there’ll be links to all this and more at the episode page at jimrusso.com. So with all that, welcome, Rob.
Rob: Thank you, Jim. It’s great to be here.
Jim: Yeah, this should be fun. I’ve been following your work for some time. I’ve been a Substack subscriber for quite a while. I was even a paying subscriber until about a week ago, and the useless motherfuckers at AMEX accidentally canceled it. So next week I’ll be a paid subscriber again.
Rob: Yeah, yeah, please do. Yeah, yeah. I appreciate all of my paid subscribers. And, yeah, Substack really has been just an amazing platform for independent writers and independent thinkers. And you mentioned I’m a columnist at all these various outlets and I’ve written elsewhere, but really there’s nothing like being able to write without editorial interference and sharing my thoughts directly. And all that being said, I’m really looking forward to this conversation.
Jim: Yeah. Today we’re going to… We’ll glance into some things in the book. We’re not going to really do an in-depth book episode today. But I really want to talk about is an idea that as far as I know, you’re the one that labeled and put a box around it. And that is what you call luxury beliefs. Before we get into the beliefs, which we will in excruciating depth, as is typical here on the Jim Rutt Show, let’s talk about first what you mean by luxury and who are the people that have these beliefs?
Rob: Yeah. Well, luxury beliefs are ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class while inflicting costs on the lower classes. And a core feature of a luxury belief is that the believer is sheltered from the consequences of his or her belief. And so luxury believers, the people who broadcast these views and express them, these are people who are generally affluent, educated, typically occupy the top 10% in terms of socioeconomic status. The top income decile, kind of the most fortunate upper and upper middle class people in our society, go to selective universities, live in safe and often gated communities and neighborhoods, but they wield disproportionate influence in politics and in our culture.
And I kind of had this winding indirect path to higher education and had my own unique experiences with upward social mobility. And through that experience of traveling along the class ladder, along with reading a lot about the history of social class in America and in Europe, the Western world more broadly, I came to recognize that luxury beliefs have to a large extent replaced luxury goods. So in the past, people who were high in social rank would exhibit their fortunate positions with material goods, luxury goods, expensive goods, and now they do it with these expensive, costly beliefs. And over time, this has downstream consequences for the rest of society. And I document this in various essays and in my book as well. And we can get into specific examples if you want. I can get into a little bit more of what exactly luxury beliefs are and how I developed this through sociological frameworks and so on.
Jim: Yep. We will get into all that. But first, and as regular listeners know, I generally don’t do any bio on my guests beyond my brief little sketches to make sure people realize this is not some guy found behind the dumpster. But in your case, your biography is actually quite critical, I think, to your gestalt and your point of view. Maybe could you give us a four and a half minute mini bio?
Rob: Four and a half minutes. Okay, that’s actually more generous than another podcast hosts have offered. But, yeah, just very briefly, and I describe this in my book as well, I was born into poverty in Los Angeles. My mother, she was from South Korea. She came to the US as a young woman, got very addicted to drugs and had a lot of personal issues in her life. Never knew my father growing up. I was placed into foster care when I was three years old. Spent the next five years living in seven different foster homes all over Los Angeles, very unstable and chaotic situation for a kid to be in. Eventually I was adopted by this working class family and we settled in this dusty, blue collar town in Northern California. It was kind of a white and Hispanic working class area of the state, part of California not a lot of people are familiar with, this little town called Red Bluff.
And as a kid, I witnessed a lot of divorces and single parenthood and addiction and financial catastrophes. And it was just a lot of trials and a lot of drama and a lot of heartache, both from my own perspective, but then also from the people I witnessed as a kid. Fast forwarding, I eventually fled as soon as I could. I joined the military when I was 17. I enlisted in the US Air Force, got out of there with some missteps and some… was not a straight line. But eventually I found my way to Yale on the GI Bill and I discovered what people who go to elite universities are like, and how it’s not just money that sets these people apart. They also have certain cultural attitudes and sociopolitical views that are very much at odds with a conventional opinion of ordinary people who work nine-to-five jobs and who are struggling to make ends meet and are like the kinds of people that I grew up around and the kinds of people that I served with in the military.
Eventually got a PhD at the University of Cambridge in the UK. And throughout those experiences, like you said, it sort of anchored me in a certain perspective. And so those personal experiences along with in-depth reading into the history of class, the sociology of status, what it is that sets people apart when they are so ambitious and so interested in distinction and striving and attempting to signal their superiority. And it used to be through goods. More and more, it’s through luxury beliefs.
Jim: I really resonated with your story ever since I first caught wind of it. I don’t know, maybe in 2022, maybe, something like that when it first started coming out and about. My background isn’t anywhere near as extreme as yours. It has some similarities, but also a huge difference, which is time, right? I was born in 1953 and my father dropped out of high school after 9th grade. And my mother left home when she was 14, somehow or other, graduated from high school a year early, took a bus from the swamps of northern Minnesota to Washington, D.C., lied about her age, got a job as a telephone operator at the Ma Bell, Old AT&T.
My dad worked on the railroad for a while, and during World War II, went to the South Pacific with the Marine Corps, hit the beaches three times, lived to tell the story, came back, decided that railroad work was too boring. Came to D.C., originally from inner city Patterson, New Jersey, and got a job on the Washington, D.C. police department. He was a career police officer. So I grew up in a solidly upper working class, lower middle class community outside of D.C.. And this is interesting, the economics might not have been too different from where you grew up, but the social capital was utterly different.
I look back later, say when I was in elementary school, what was the economic class in our census track and we’re about the 35th percentile economically, which is not poor and it’s sort of barely middle class, right? But 95% of the people were married. The kids of the people that they were married to, well, there are definitely people that drank a little bit more than they should have. There was no drugs at all. There was no dating apps. There was relatively wholesome.
I mean, it was rough and ready. I mean, you better knew how to fight on the streets, right? And I considered that to be a very useful part of my education, but it wasn’t at all decadent. And yet I suspect the… As I said, if you were to go out and look at your Red Bluff, it might well have been 35 percentile or so. And then I was a relatively smart kid and went off to an elite college as well, to MIT. And it was an amazing cultural shock, even though I really had hardly met a college-educated person except for a school teacher, a doctor or a priest. Raised Catholic, and so in those days most of the priests were college-educated, amazingly. They were a bunch of drunken Irishmen, but they’d all been to college. But I will say MIT wasn’t near as bad as… not as bad a cultural shock as Yale would’ve been, because it was probably at least 35% who were first-generation college students there. And many of the parents were small business people or engineers, whatever, not quite so much the white-shoe crowd that you get at Yale.
Rob: Yeah, I’ve heard this from multiple people. I mean, interestingly from Jordan Peterson, he also pointed this out. But he grew up in a working-class part of Alberta in Canada. Other older people who grew up working-class or lower-middle-class, they tell me that in terms of financial precarity and kind of being broke and struggling to make ends meet, it wasn’t that different from what I experienced in Red Bluff. But the difference was 60 years ago, the families were still largely intact. People were still raised by their mothers and fathers. The kind of neighborhood stability was so different compared to what we see today.
I mentioned in Red Bluff, where I grew up, I had five close friends in high school. None of us were raised by both of our birth parents, and that’s the norm now in a lot of working-class communities. I cite this statistic in Troubled, which was that in 1960, 95% of American children were raised by both of their birth children, regardless of socioeconomic status. Rich or poor, most kids were raised by two married parents, their mothers and fathers.
If you fast-forward to 2005 for upper and upper-middle-class children born into those upper and upper-middle-class families, 85% of those kids are still raised by both of their birth parents. So there was a slight drop-off, 95% in 1960, 85% by 2005. But for working-class families, they plummeted from 95% to 30% by 2005. And that was roughly the time that I was growing up in my hometown. And so you see this now, to see a kid raised by two married parents, especially their birth parents, that’s very much an anomaly now in these neighborhoods.
And that to me is a question or a puzzle that cries out for an explanation because it can’t be financial factors alone. I know a lot of people, a lot of people especially on the political left, who would like to pinpoint poverty or income inequality as the explanation for why families look so different the lower down the socioeconomic ladder you go. But it can’t be income because there were poor people when you were growing up, Jim. There were poor people 60 years ago, 70 years ago, 80 years ago. As far back as the Great Depression and further back, poverty was very much the norm for large swaths of the US for a long time and yet families were not in the state that they are in today. And that’s something that I explore in a lot of my writing.
Jim: Yeah, absolutely. And as I described, our family was at the boundary between upper working class and lower middle class. When I was, say, in elementary school as my father rose in the ranks of the police department, I think by the time I was in 10th grade, I was in assiduous reader of almanacs and such. And at times in 10th grade, our family income was exactly at the median number, which put us a little bit ahead of most people in our neighborhood, but not much. And he was still in 9th grade dropout and used a little bit mangled grammar and what have you. But he was a great guy, super conscientious and all that sort of stuff, and most of the other parents were too.
Today if you went to that kind of neighborhood, it would be quite the different story. And then to your point about true poverty, all my grandparents truly poverty-stricken. My mother grew up on a beat-ass tenant farm in the swamps of northern Minnesota, did not have electricity, did not have indoor plumbing, did not have central heat where it gets 50 below zero in the wintertime. And literally they had the outhouse 50 yards away and a rope running out there so during a blizzard, they could find their way out and back. But, again, married. Both sides, married unto death. Nine kids on one side, six on the other. And as my mother said, “Yeah, I guess looking back at it, we were poor, but it didn’t really seem that way.” Right?
Rob: Yeah. Yeah. I think it’s such an important point. I spoke with this gentleman who was in his eighties recently, so he graduated from my high school, Red Bluff High. He was class of 1955, I believe, and I asked him, “What was Red Bluff like in 1955?” And the picture he painted was just completely foreign to me, even what the students were up to. He said, “Yeah, there was a bit of smoking,” and that was kind of the most outlandish or rebellious thing you would see kids do. Maybe they’d smoke some cigarettes and drink. You catch the occasional kid with a beer or something, but that was as extreme as it got. And now a lot of these high schools, it’s just drugs and guns and all kinds of… It looks a lot worse nowadays. And part of that is I think because of lack of parental oversight in families and so on.
It was funny, your point earlier about the difference between MIT and Yale. I think, yeah, you can see this. I mean even now, MIT was like the first elite university, I think, to return to sensibility when they reinstated the SAT and their admissions policies. I think they’re just sort of more grounded in that STEM tradition, and I think they’re slightly less tilted towards using affirmative action in some of their admissions policies compared to some of the Ivies. A couple of years ago, I took this 23 and Me genetic ancestry test and discovered that I’m half Mexican on my father’s side. So I’d mentioned, I never knew anything about my dad. And I took this test and I discovered that my father was Mexican, and my first thought was, “Man, I wish I had known that when I was applying for college. I think that would’ve…” Everything ended up working out, but every little bit helps. It is sad that’s the state of things now, these kind of race-based policies, which appear to be getting sort of curtailed and rolled back. We’ll see how things unfold in the next couple of years.
Jim: Yeah, you’re right about MIT. Well, and part of the reason, as my good friend Jordan Hall likes to say, reality is a checksum on your thinking in STEM, unlike in the liberal arts, and even worse, the humanities. Yale English Department, there’s some real screwballs there, and how the hell do you do a checksum on their work to see if it makes any sense?
Rob: Yeah. Yeah. I mean it is true. As far back as Harold Bloom and Camille Paglia, and so many of the… they were also sounding the alarm on the state of the humanities in these elite universities, Yale in particular. I think there’s a reason why STEM… The harder the science and the more technical the field, the less ideological lunacy you’ll observe.
Jim: Yeah. I mean, do we really care what the fuck is in some humanities journal? Nah, but if a bridge falls down, is that a good thing? No, though I’m probably being a little bit of a Philistine there because actually what is in our academic journals does matter, right? It actually does. And, well, we can get into that.
Rob: I mean, so many of the social movements we see they’re conceived and born in elite universities. The whole defund the police thing that was so popular a couple of years ago, that was initially a boutique bizarre idea that was bandied about in elite universities, the whole decarceration movement, abolishing prisons, undermining law enforcement. I mean, you’re right, initially it’s this kind of niche obscure idea that academics love to talk to each other about, but somehow it leaks out into elite media and prestige news outlets and then gradually, despite the fact that the majority of Americans don’t agree with it, we get coerced into mouthing slogans and supporting bizarre policies. So the bridge falls down and we see the immediate aftermath of it. But with these academic ideas, it takes years and generations before we start to see the rot seeping in.
Jim: And let’s return back to this idea of luxury goods, actually a good. You mentioned, I don’t remember which one, in your Substack some place, Veblen and the idea of status goods. And I think you made the point that it’s harder to play the status game these days in goods. That’s one of the things I like to say is, “Where the hell is the Rolex of iPhones?” There isn’t one. And so we ended up playing positional goods games or other kinds of games. And I will say the one thing that in my own thinking about this… I gotten part of your idea, but the part I did not get was this, that these aren’t just… My take was, “Oh, they’re just lazy hedonists and they do bad things because it doesn’t hurt them too much. But when people not so affluent do bad things, it does hurt them.” And that was as far as I’d gotten. You added a whole extra level, which was this idea of a luxury good essentially in the form of a belief. Why don’t you expand on that a little bit? Then we’ll get down to more details.
Rob: A luxury belief is a luxury because these are… They’re costly in two different ways. So they’re costly to obtain in the sense that if you want to acquire a luxury belief, especially the latest luxury belief, you have to oftentimes be educated at an expensive university. You have to have the kind of white collar job that allows you to consume a lot of media, especially from the quote, unquote, approved sources, corporate media, legacy media outlets. You got to get your daily update of what’s fashionable opinion today. It’s kind of that old Soviet idea of reading the daily regime newspaper in order to understand what the line is so you can toe the line for that day, what’s politically a correct opinion, listening to the right podcasts, reading the right books.
And if you are working a nine-to-five, clocking in, clocking out, you’re on your feet all day, you’re working in some kind of blue collar job or that kind of capacity, you’re not going to be able to keep up with, “Okay, well now what’s the right term I’m supposed to use for this social category?” Or, “What am I supposed to believe about XYZ or this geopolitical event or this politician versus that?” And you have to be fortunate. You have to be sort of educated and affluent, or come from an educated and affluent family in order to acquire the beliefs.
And of course the beliefs themselves, because it’s a sociological idea, it’s never going to be the case that only rich people hold these beliefs and you’re never going to be able to find a poor person who holds a luxury belief. Of course, because the beliefs are out there and because these categories can be fluid, sometimes you will meet a working class person who expresses a luxury belief, but that doesn’t invalidate the idea. Just as a Ferrari is a luxury good, the majority of people who drive Ferraris are rich. But occasionally you will see someone who’s working class or financially less advantaged or rich in some way who does drive a luxury vehicle, wears Burberry or wears some other kind of fashionable and expensive good, but that doesn’t mean that that good is not a luxury good. Same thing with luxury beliefs.
I should also clarify here that just because an affluent person expresses any particular belief that doesn’t that belief a luxury belief. If a rich person says any conventional opinion, “It’s good to have traffic laws,” “Oh, that’s a luxury belief because you’re rich and you said it.” That doesn’t make any sense. A luxury belief has a very specific definition. Does it confer status on the affluent person who’s expressing it and does it inflict costs on people who are less fortunate than themselves? So that’s the second way that a luxury belief is costly. It’s costly to acquire, but it’s also costly for the people who are sort of lower down the socioeconomic ladder than them, because once that luxury belief is implemented into policy or becomes popular in the general culture, then people who are less educated, less affluent and disadvantaged or unlucky in a variety of ways, they are the ones who are going to pay the price for it. And that’s how the belief is a luxury belief.
Jim: Yeah, I think the canonical one, for me at least, and it’s the first one I noticed when I was about 17. Again, this was in upper working class, lower middle class where 95% of couples were married and the kids… with their kids and all this kind of stuff. In the late ’60s, upper middle class hippie chicks started having kids out of wedlock. And we were all, “What the fuck?” That was just considered a absolute taboo. I would say my high school graduating class, a majority were married by the time they were 22. And while there were the occasional out of wedlock births, it was like, “Oh, that ain’t so good.” And there was a girl who disappeared when she was 14 to go visit her aunt for a year, and most of the kids were given up for adoption. But the idea of being a single mother was something that just seemed like it was really a bad idea as far as we were concerned. And yet it became a trendy thing starting in the late ’60s.
Rob: What’s really interesting is you can sort of trace… So that luxury belief, single parents, all families are the same. We can’t say that one type of family structure is more advantageous for kids than another, complete non-judgmental attitude. You sort of see that it was initially popularized in the 1960s. There was this kind of social revolution, sexual revolution, and the rise in single parenthood out of wedlock birth rates, divorce rates, that spiked across every social class, among educated and affluent people as well as the poor. It spiked in the ’60s and ’70s. By the 1980s among upper and upper middle class people, it actually started to revert back to baseline, back to their pre-1970s figures. So it’s as if among the upper and upper middle class, they experimented with this for a decade, a decade and a half, realized that actually this isn’t an ideal way to raise kids and then they kind of went back to having stable families, getting married, waiting to have children until they’re in a position to do so and finding a committed partner and so on.
Whereas for the poor and the working class, they also adopted this kind of mentality of a lot of promiscuous, potentially risky sex kids out of wedlock, single parenthood and so on. And then they just never recovered and the families have been kind of unraveling and deteriorating ever since. And so it really was this belief that was… You mentioned the hippie chicks, these people from generally intact well-to-do families, overall by any standard, pretty comfortable and financially well-off. And then they broadcast these views. It became kind of integrated into pop culture, into music, into movies, into glossy magazines and elite newspapers. This became the fashionable opinion about we need to reimagine and challenge the old ways of thinking about family.
And then they were the ones who paid the lowest cost for broadcasting that belief. And my own experience with this was interesting, where I’d never had these kinds of thoughts about family until I got to Yale. And I was sitting in this class my first semester, and I was in this class. There were 20 students in this seminar, and the professor asked us… The question she’d put to us was, “Were you raised by both of your birth parents?” And she put up the anonymous results up on the PowerPoint slide when we give our answers.
I look up on the PowerPoint slide and see that 90% of the students in this class were raised by both of their birth parents. And that shocked me. Because, again, no one I grew up with was raised in an intact family like that. And then I looked at the statistics and the survey data and everything and realized, as the political scientist Robert Putnam said at a senate hearing in 2017, that rich kids and poor kids now grow up in two different Americas. Upper and upper middle class kids, they live in that leave it to beaver style family structure, a mom and a dad. Maybe there’s a divorced family or two in their neighborhood. They kind of know someone or a couple of people like this. But generally the adults around them were married and had kids in that sort of conventional family structure. Whereas kids in other circumstances, they almost never saw what a intact marriage even looks like in their personal lives.
Jim: And I don’t know if it’s still true, but say 10 years ago, and I still occasionally hung out with the Coastal Blues, even though they have stopped personally, or at least much lower rates of that particular behavior, they nonetheless hold it as a reactionary view that you should be married before you have kids. I used to really piss them off. Oh, would I do something like that? Would I troll these motherfuckers and say, “I think bastardy is a bad idea,” right? And I know I was being histrionic. And I know a one woman who had five kids by five different men, all five of the kids were remarkably successful and sane. But is that the way to bet? No.
Rob: Right.
Jim: So talk a little bit about the hypocrisy of this particular issue.
Rob: Well, you’re exactly right there that obviously there are going to be exceptions to every rule where you will see kids raised by a mother and father intact family, two-parent household, and they go astray and they end up in prison or have difficulties in their lives in one way or another. And you’ll see kids who are raised in extremely dysfunctional or deprived circumstances. I guess I could point to myself as an example here, could point to our current vice president as an example. There are kids who experience extremely dire circumstances and end up becoming successful anyway. But again, that’s not the way to bet as you said.
One statistic that I point out in my book is that only 3% of children in foster care go on to graduate from college. 3% compared with about 35% of Americans overall. So it’s just a extremely low likelihood of achieving those conventional measures of success. And the hypocrisy, this kind of duplicity that you’d mentioned, often it very much is they express one set of beliefs and values while living by another. They don’t preach what they practice. The way they practice is get married, prioritize education, work really hard, and be respectful and punctual and teach your kids about hard work and so on and so forth. Be law-abiding in their private lives, but then publicly express the opposite of, “Yeah, you can have kids out of wedlock.” Thinking that you should be married first is this outmoded, reactionary, patriarchal view. “Oh, committing crimes is wrong? Well, I’m not so sure about that. It’s more complicated actually.” And supporting the defund the police movement publicly, while privately living in a gated community or in a low crime, safe zip code with a bunch of other people who respect the law and who pick up after themselves.
And there’s always been some degree, Jim, of elite hypocrisy. All of us are hypocrites to some degree, that’s just part of being human. But what I would like to bring back actually is what I sometimes like to call the John F. Kennedy model of elite hypocrisy, which is… As we all know now, John F. Kennedy was a very flawed man. He was a philanderer, he was often an absentee father. He, in his personal life, was imperfect. But publicly, the image he presented to the American public was of a devoted father, a good husband, a family man. And so he was a hypocrite, but he still put forth a good example.
Whereas now we have almost the reverse of that model where privately the elites will be married and be faithful and devoted and work hard and prioritize family and education and live these kinds of conventional bourgeois lives, but then publicly adopt a very nonjudgmental attitude about whatever decisions you happen to make. The old model was publicly uphold these traditional principles while privately falling short of them and straying from them. And the new model is to privately adhere to those traditional values, but publicly support straying from them.
I don’t really think that this inversion is healthy. Long-term, it’s detrimental because in my view part of the responsibility and the duty of being a member of the elite, a member of this fortunate segment of society if you have some kind of influence, is to basically set some kind of example for other people and to give other people guidelines and cultural guardrails. And, well, it’s not a coincidence that my classmates at Yale came from intact married families, families that prioritized education and responsibility and hard work and integrity and punctuality and law-abidingness and respect and so on. And yet those very same people would, if you would ask them directly, “Are those things important?” they would say, “Oh, you know,” very nonjudgmental. “Everyone’s different. Who are we to judge?” That hypocrisy is harmful.
Jim: I like that distinction, called the Kennedy model reminds me of… I don’t know who I’m ripping off or even if I got the words right, but I remember a quote, “Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue.”
Rob: La Rochefoucauld. Yeah, he was a French maxim writer. It’s beautiful. I mean, it’s funny, I tweeted that recently and someone said, “Now the elites are the reverse. Now they say hypocrisy is the tribute that virtue pays to vice,” because the new elites are hypocritical in the exact opposite way. I don’t remember who originally said it, but the line is, “The new upper class. They walk the ’50s and talk the ’60s.”
Jim: I like that too.
Rob: Yeah.
Jim: I like that too. Now, let’s probe into something we’ve talked about in the show a bit. We had Peter Turchin on sometime back. You know Peter Turchin, presumably?
Rob: It’s terrific, yeah.
Jim: And one of the things we talked about was the nature of elite aspirants. Because the people at Yale, they’re not all from Greenwich or even from Westchester County. Lots of them are small town doctors’ kids or small business owners in Berkeley or something. You haven’t really addressed this, I don’t recall in your writings, but maybe you could just sort of think here in real time about what are the sociological and maybe psychological, particularly sociological forces, that work on elite aspirants who aren’t really from the immune class, but nonetheless you go to Yale today and you can grab almost any kid off the street and they’re going to have these kind of goofy ideas.
Rob: That’s interesting.
Jim: Any ideas on how that happens?
Rob: Yeah, I’m a fan of Peter Turchin’s idea of intra-elite competition, elite overproduction. I mean, to me, that does go a long way to explaining what we’re seeing play out in these institutions, in American society at large, is sort of intra-elite conflict. And what I think about is there’s so much status anxiety at these institutions, the graduates of these places. I remember when I was a student at Yale, there was this group, I think they called… They probably didn’t call themselves this, honestly, but the other students would refer to it as the billionaire clique. And these were the students of billionaires. Or rather the sons and daughters of billionaires, who studied at Yale and who all hung out with each other. They seldom would hang out with the other students. They had their own little clique going, and students would talk about them in these kind of derisive ridiculing ways.
But from my perspective it made sense, because of course they don’t want to attract envy. They don’t want to potentially draw negative attention to themselves, so they would hang out with their friends who were in similar situations as themselves. And it does seem like a lot of the anger and a lot of the luxury beliefs are espoused not by the top 0.1%, but more so the top 5% or the top 10%. You know, the people who come from families in the 90th or the 95th percentile of income. And so much of this elite, intra-elite competition, I think is that top 5% angry at the top 0.1% because they’re not as privileged as the people who are above them. So much of social comparison is comparing ourselves to those who are above us who seem kind of just within grasp and we are wondering, “Well, why isn’t my life quite as good as theirs? It feels unfair to me.” And that’s kind of their reference point.
And so I think the luxury beliefs were a way attempting to maybe displace some other elites from those positions. So many people from… I mean really kind of since whatever you want to call it, the Great Awokening, 2012, 2013, but especially 2020 it was kind of further fueled by the craziness of that year. A lot of people lost their jobs in elite media, in elite universities. In the private sector as well executives would post the wrong thing on social media or express the wrong remark. And as Turchin says, there’s a limited number of seats in these elite occupations. And so elites will go to greater and greater lengths and potentially use devious or underhanded ways to jettison those people in order to get those seats for themselves. And when we have this kind of surplus of more and more people getting college degrees, more and more people who feel beleaguered that they aren’t doing as well as they believe themselves to have done and… It’s a useful lens to look through what we’ve been seeing.
Jim: That’s interesting that if you can think of it as a coalition politics plus intra-coalition competition, perhaps. That’s a coalition of the knights, not the princes or the lords of the manor, but the ones that keep the lords in the manor from getting their heads lopped off by the peasants. So they somehow have adopted this Coastal Blue vocabulary, some of which just causes your head to hurt. I read one of your things, you gave as an example, heteronormativity and cisgender. I was thinking about using those terms with my hunting buddies. I was going, “What the fuck?” That’s exactly what they would say. I know what they mean, but would I ever actually use those words with a straight face? Hell no. But certainly in Coastal Blue land, those are things that somehow a balance of power has arisen around the use of those kinds of terms to show that I’m part of this gang, right?
Rob: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. These are kind of chibil-esque, these class signifiers. And I’m sure there are new ones now. I try not to pay too much attention to it these days. But, yeah, those kinds of terms… I mean cisgender, I mean these just crazy terms that no normal person would ever use. I’m sure you’ve seen some of these statistics, Jim, Latinx. I think it was less than 5% of Hispanic Americans said that they approved of that term, but-
Jim: 3%.
Rob: Was it 3%? Was it 3%? Right, but-
Jim: You can ask whether the sun will come up tomorrow and you would not get 97% yes, particularly if you attributed this statement to either Trump or Joe Biden. So what the hell, right?
Rob: Yeah. But that was a term that was preferred for a shockingly long period of time. I think they’re kind of rolling that one back. But Latinx was popular for, I don’t know, whatever it was, seven, eight years on these college campuses and in kind of elite firms. And, yeah, it’s just, “We’re different than you. We’re more sophisticated and culturally savvy.” And they create these strange new phrases and terms and try to impose it on the rest of us.
Jim: Yeah. Let me follow up in my notes a little further in, but let me talk to it now, which is you… in the elite firms. I mean, you could easily imagine how the metastasized thinking in Yale’s English department could infect the student body. But why in the world would Apple or Google decide that hiring people with absurd views was a good thing to do?
Rob: I’ve asked that question to some of my friends in tech and they seem to think that… So most of the people in elite firms in general, they want to be forward-thinking, not just in terms of technological advancement, but sociopolitically as well. There was a terrific interview recently with Marc Andreessen. He was interviewed by Ross Douthat in the New York Times.
Jim: I read it, a wonderful interview.
Rob: And one of the things that Marc points out… And it was so nice to just hear a high profile tech entrepreneur just say this flat out that CEOs, the number one thing on their agenda is not profit. The number one thing on their agenda is, “I’m a good person.” And he said when he goes to their dinner parties and cocktail parties, these tech elites, they’re not talking about how to maximize the bottom line. They’re talking about, “What was in the New York Times yesterday? And what am I supposed to believe now to have my membership in this club of good people extended for a longer duration?” I think that’s a lot of it too.
Most people, they just want to be thought of as good people and if… And that’s how these activists are so effective, is they convince you that if you oppose them, it’s not just a matter of opinion, it’s a matter of you are a morally toxic bad person. And, “All we’re asking for is a little bit of empathy. We’re just asking you to be kind. We’re just asking you to understand.” And a lot of these people who are so ambitious and have been so successful, I think there’s an element of guilt there too. And they think, “Okay, well, I’ve made all this money and I’m super successful and I’m otherwise happy, so I guess what’s the harm in requiring my employees to use pronouns and put them through this DEI training? And I guess I’m advancing social justice, at least that’s what these activists are telling me.”
And there’s a kind of naivete there that I think we’re now seeing them slowly recognize what’s been happening over the last 10 years or so. But for a period there, they were just going along to get along. And I think also a lot of them, Jim, even if they weren’t true believers, and even if they weren’t sympathetic, even if they may have had some questions, a lot of them were… There’s a kind of element of cowardice here where they were afraid.
So if you were a CEO and you did not implement certain policies or require employees to attend certain kinds of training, the activists would often descend upon you and ask you, “Well, why aren’t you supporting this movement? Why haven’t you released a statement about Black Lives Matter? Why haven’t you said anything about climate change? Why haven’t you said anything about this, that and the other?” And if you’re a CEO, you just don’t want to be harassed and bad-mouthed in the media and on social media and on whatever platform. And so they are doing it not because they believe it, but just because they don’t want the reputations destroyed.
Jim: Yeah, that’s this cancel culture thing. And I’ve been involved in the free speech wars on college campuses. I was the co-founder of MIT Free Speech Alliance, which we were an early part of the Alumni Free Speech Alliance. In fact, one of my successors became the president of that. So I’ve been involved in this a fair bit and I’ve talked to college professors. And it’s interesting, I think you’re exactly right, it was a… Taleb talks about this, a small aggrieved minority that basically out screams everybody else. Even on a quite liberal college campus like MIT I doubt more than 15% were true believers. But if you add in those who were afraid of the true believers, it was probably 70% at the high water mark. But as I predicted that once the wave turned, it would turn very rapidly because once people were no longer afraid of the 15%, the majority that just say, “This shit’s nuts. Should men actually be competing with women in sports of strength? What the fuck? Who came up with that idiotic idea?”
But there was a while there, the people were absolutely terrified of saying that. Even in academia, you’re seeing, as you pointed out, MIT, a Chicago-like, though not quite as strong, free speech statement. Getting rid of DEI statements for hiring, it’s turning and turning quickly. I think the glue, my hypothesis’ the same as yours, is that the glue was the attack spiders of the 15%. And now that we realize that they’re powerless, I suspect that the wave is going to turn the other way quite quickly. What do you think about that?
Rob: Yeah, I think we’re seeing it now, this kind of decline of… Timur Karan calls it preference falsification. People are no longer misrepresenting their views. I think people have had questions about this new wave of political correctness or wokeism, identity politics for a long time. The whole transgender ideology, people have been privately concerned. And we’re seeing what some people call a respectability cascade of initially only the bad people would criticize it. And then gradually, you’re seeing more and more respectable people come out and stand up and say, “Actually, this has been nonsense. And we’ve known it’s been nonsense for a while, but we finally feel that we’re in a position to say so.”
And I think we are seeing a slow return to normalcy in a lot of… Basically everywhere except academia. Academia is as crazy as ever. I don’t think anything’s changed there. I don’t think wokeness has peaked in academia. I think they’re consolidating their gains, as a friend of mine says at Cambridge. They are just as unhinged as ever. We’re not hearing as much about it, I think in part because they basically have already canceled or fired everyone who disagrees with fashionable dogma. But in other occupational fields, public opinion at large, what public figures are willing to say, I think we have sort of shifted back to some sense of sanity.
Jim: Yeah. At least MIT, my one data point, I would say they’ve shifted in the way of sanity considerably, not just a little, but noticeably. And of course, it may be an outlier because as I said before in STEM, you got reality as your checksum. So if you get too far away from reality, you’re in a world of hurt. But certainly other places we’re seeing it rapidly… And on the other hand, to your point about CEOs, “I want to be a good person,” right? As soon as Trump gets elected, they’re all there sucking his dick. Right?
Rob: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Jim: So it’s about the Benjamins, I’m sorry. Right?
Rob: That would be an interesting point. Yeah, I would love to see someone like Marc Andreessen, what would they say to that? Why are all these CEOs suddenly sucking up to Trump? What changed there? Maybe their idea of what it means to be a good person has shifted. I think they, like everyone else, are also susceptible to fashions. I’ve seen in my own life people who I think are very smart, and I generally respect. I mean, it’s interesting, we don’t necessarily feel this internally of how we will shift with the changing fashions and trends. I’ve seen people who before wokeness were normal, and then they became woke, and now that wokeness is receding, they’re kind of returning to normalcy. And a lot of people are just kind of susceptible to the fashions of the day. But there are a few disagreeable dissenters and so on. I think people like yourself, Jim, and maybe a little bit people like me and… who always kind of step back and wonder what’s actually going on and question the social movements of the day.
Jim: Yeah, I was fortunate. I recently discovered why, as a psychology guy, about the OCEAN personality test. About three years ago, I took a professionally administered OCEAN test, and I’d never really… I’m a not very introspective person. I’m an outwardly oriented person, a man of action, a man of ranting. One of the reason, somebody actually… I was a guest on somebody’s podcast, and he talked me into doing it. And I discovered that I had a pattern of things that I think allowed me to resist. Very high in openness, very high in extroversion, 99th percentile in disagreeable-ness. And then I think the key one is 100th percentile in anti-neurotic.
Rob: Okay, yeah.
Jim: For instance, when I was in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1971 and 72, I was one of the main leaders of the pro-Vietnam war faction. Right?
Rob: Okay.
Jim: I just didn’t give a what anybody thought, sorry.
Rob: Yeah, you were definitely an anomaly. I mean, I would imagine, based on everything I’ve read about that era. Anyone who was for the Vietnam War, especially in a college campus, very much an outlier.
Jim: I remember wearing my ROTC uniform walking right through the middle of the largest riot in Cambridge the whole time I was there. And I led a little squad of other ROTC… of course, little wimps, most of the MIT students were wimps. But I just gave them suckers the look, you know? “You try to stop us, go right ahead, asshole.” My old street fighting capacities would have to come back. But unfortunately, at 99th percentile we’re obviously rare, and most people just go along because they’re afraid. Or not even really afraid, but they just go along because that’s just sort of the thing that you’re programmed to do.
Rob: Yeah, I’ve noticed that’s a common pattern in people who are unusual or who resist the flow of whatever social opinion has to be. I’m also low in agreeableness or high in disagreeableness. Our mutual friend, Richard Hanania, he’s also very disagreeable. So many people I know who are public figures who speak on issues and who are challenging whatever the fashionable views of the day are, their personality profile is unique. Yeah.
Jim: Yeah, I don’t know if you read it recently, in the last week or so, Christopher Rufo put out an essay about the attacks his family underwent for his views, and yet he did not blink. So he’s got be another one of these people that has the personal fortitude to just say, “Fuck y’all.”
Rob: Yeah. Very sort of mentally sturdy and strong, yeah.
Jim: Even though he’s not histrionic at all, right? He’s very calm, very calm kind of guy. Yet the abuse… If anyone hadn’t read that, I would strongly suggest you check that out on Christopher’s Substack. I think it’s a free to read article. It’s like, “what the hell?” Anybody try that to me, they better be having their Kevlar vest on is all I can say.
But now we’ve talked a fair bit about some dynamics, some theories, some aspirant elites. How is it that companies are actually a pull towards this thing? At least were, though that may change very rapidly here in the era of Trump dick-suckery from our big corporations, we shall see. Let’s get down to some of the tangibles. Some of your pretty nice list of examples of the things that meet your criterion as luxury beliefs that are virtue signaling at the top, not too harmful if you’re affluent and very detrimental if you’re not, or if your community is not.
Rob: Yeah. Well, we’ve talked about family. I mean, that’s a big one. That’s one… I cite statistics in the book and in my essays about how there was this divergence over time. And again, it’s not economics alone. A lead opinion counts for a great deal, whatever the… in terms of policy, in terms of fashion, in terms of trends, it trickles down from the top. And so we saw this, for example, with the defund the police movement, where there were multiple surveys that were conducted in 2020 and 2021, which found that the highest income Americans were consistently the most in support of defund the police. The most educated Americans were the most in support of defund the police. White progressives were far more in support of defunding the police than Black and Hispanic Americans.
And despite the fact that most Americans were not in support of this, most Americans like the police, this wasn’t a policy that was implemented in many cities in the US. Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, most of the major cities, metropolitan areas, they implemented some version of this diverting resources away from law enforcement and towards other organizations or other avenues. And as a result, violent crime soared from 2020 to 2022. There’s some evidence that it is declining. But for about two years, the violent crime rate spiked. Most of the victims of these violent crimes, including homicide, were poor and marginalized people. And yet there has been no accountability for the defund the police movement.
No one has accepted responsibility for this, and we’re all just going to move on. Most of the people who supported the defund the police movement, again, were affluent people in gated and safe communities who themselves never had to suffer the consequences of their own beliefs. And there are other luxury beliefs as well. There’s one that’s kind of less, I guess, politically contentious which is, “What do you attribute success to?”
Jim: I like this one. This is a good one.
Rob: Yeah. Which is, “Is it intrinsic factors or extrinsic factors?” And there was a study that was released in 2019, which found that the higher up the socioeconomic ladder you go, the more likely you are to find people who say that success is attributed to luck and good fortune and forces that are outside of your control. Whereas less fortunate people, people who are lower on the socioeconomic ladder, are more likely to attribute success to hard work. And you’ll see this a lot, successful people will say, “Oh, it comes down to luck.” You talk to college graduates and ask them, especially League college graduates, what accounts for success in life? They will say, “It’s who you know. It’s these invisible forces, systemic forces.” What accounts for poverty? “Oh, it’s these systemic forces. It’s these structural impediments.” Very few of them will say that some people are more responsible for their misfortune than others, and behaviors do have consequences.
And I think that there’s value in elites saying that. What actually fueled their own rise? The brown economist and podcaster Glenn Lowry, one of his quotes is, “The cruelest thing the elites do is lie about how they became successful.” And what he means by that is a lot of elites will say, “Oh, I became successful because of luck, because of who my family knew, because of these…” And all of those things may be true to some degree. But regardless, becoming or even remaining a member of the upper middle class, even if your parents were in that category, it still takes work, it still takes concentration, it still takes effort, and very few elites are willing to acknowledge this. And so if you cultivate this attitude of it all comes down to luck, you are demoralizing people. You’re getting them to potentially give up on their own aspirations.
I tell this story in my book about how when I was 15, I worked at this restaurant. I was a dishwasher, and I got this job to bag groceries. So I had to put in my two weeks notice at my dish washing job to go work at this supermarket. And I told my manager at the restaurant that, “I’m leaving this job, I’m going to bag groceries.” And he told me he was proud of me, and he said, “Good for you. You were washing dishes, now you’re going to go back groceries. And each job you get, you want it to be better than the one you had before.” And that was the lesson that I took from that interaction, was to keep working hard, to keep striving upward, to take a step forward each time you move along the job ladder. And you could easily imagine some professor or some member of the luxury belief class witnessing this and saying, “Oh, you have this foster kid who’s washing dishes and now he’s going to go bag groceries, he’s actually just trapped in these structural forces that are beyond his control, and he’s just blinded. He’s a victim of false consciousness,” or something along those lines.
And I’m glad I was never exposed to that kind of messaging. And instead, I just listened to the manager at my job and he just told me, “Keep working hard. Keep your head down and do your job,” and that helped me. It obviously lingered with me because I remember it now nearly 20 years later. So that’s another one. And we can get into some other luxury beliefs as well. I think it’s kind of tied in with the family piece, but sexual promiscuity is another one.
Jim: Well, I can tell you one for sure that I’ve seen, it’s drugs. Yeah, I’ve known plenty of upper middle class people who do some drugs, but, hey, they’re making 200 grand a year. You can deal with the fallout. And frankly, you’re not out there trying to pound nails all day. And so you sit at your trading terminal and you got a little bit of a… The world does not come to an end.
But I live in Appalachia, deep in Appalachia and, well, our particular area, thank God, knock on wood, has not had much of the opioid crisis. Much of the rest of Appalachia has been utterly decimated by it, where people thought, “Oh, we’ll go out to the club and sniff a little heroin or something.” And the fancy crowd was into all that stuff. It’s been utterly devastating to much of the country. And even just the everyday drugs, the cocaine and marijuana. Smoking marijuana for you every day makes you stupid people, sorry. Okay, if you’ve got an IQ of 135, you can afford to lose 10 points, particularly if you’ve got a drone job in a cubicle someplace but you’re making good money. But if you got 90 to start with, losing 10 is not a good thing.
Rob: Yeah. I’ll tell you a story, Jim. So I mentioned I was a dishwasher at this restaurant, and I had an older co-worker. So I was 15, he was like 22. And I asked him if he would sell me and my friend some weed, and he said, “Rob, you shouldn’t be smoking weed.” And just to preface this, I was a fifteen-year-old kid. I was always a curious kind of smart kid, but I was barely passing my classes. I was very academically unfocused and no one could really tell that I was that smart.
And so I asked this guy, “Come on, sell me and my friends some weed,” and he was like, “Rob, you shouldn’t be smoking weed.” And I said, “You’re a hypocrite. You smoke weed every day, I see you.” And he said, “Look, Rob, I’m smart. So when I smoke weed, I go from smart to normal.” He’s like, “Rob, you’re normal. If you smoke weed, you’re going to go from normal to retarded.” And I said…
There was a certain logic that made sense there. And I think that’s exactly to your point that if you’re a highly intelligent person and you can afford to take a bit of damage mentally, cognitively…. There was that book, it was something like In Defense of Drug Use or something, written by this professor at Columbia who was saying he likes to use heroin recreationally, so why shouldn’t everyone else? And, yeah, if you’re an Ivy League professor and you have this kind of job and maybe you’re endowed with all these characteristics that allow you to experiment recreationally with hard drugs, that’s good for you, but why are you trying to get the rest of society who are not in that same position to do those drugs as well?
So we see the aftermath of the drug decriminalization policies. Oregon famously decriminalized drugs in 2020, and then they recriminalized them, I think, last year. So they had a three-year experiment where they decriminalized all drugs, and it just turned Portland and other parts of Oregon into an open air drug den where you’d see families walking their kids along a park and you would just see people strung out and overdosing in public places.
And so even if you yourself are personally unaffected, having children exposed to that kind of drug abuse and substance misuse, that affects people and it affects kids and it just creates… It has all these negative, harmful consequences on the social fabric of any community. So I guess the libertarian in me is like, “If you’re an adult and you’re in a private place and no one is relying on you and you want to do whatever you want to yourself, go ahead.” But the thing is, once you open that doorway, you’re going to allow kids and families and so there are going to be all of these second-order consequences. So if you’re a smart and affluent person, you can probably get whatever drug you want anyway. It’s going to be a little hard for you, but you could probably find what you want. But just because you want to make it easier on yourself to do drugs, I don’t think it’s good for the rest of society to also have easy access to them.
Jim: Yeah. We talked earlier about then and now. I graduated from high school in 1971, and it was a quite conservative, socially conservative area, and I had never actually seen marijuana or smelled it even graduating from high school. The drug wave came through about two years after I graduated. And a few years later it was heroin and everything else, PCP, you name it, speed. But I was at the very, very end. And I suspect that part of what preserved our social capital was the kids didn’t do drugs. But more to the point, the young adults didn’t do drugs and their family formative years.
I ain’t going to lie, man, I was a college student in Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1971 and ’75. I did every drug you could imagine that didn’t involve the use of a needle pretty much, and I enjoyed most of them. And I will say, fortunately, I had that kind of personality. I’m not particularly addictive, pretty strong personality. “Ain’t going to let nobody tell me what to do, certainly not some stupid-ass drug,” and so it didn’t hurt me in the slightest. But people in my old hometown, man, it derailed a whole bunch of them of about my age, and particularly the ones just a couple of years younger.
Rob: Yeah. Legalizing anything that is potentially harmful, it’ll have different effects on different people. And, I mean, it’s funny, there’s this interesting response that I’ll hear sometimes where, “Well, marijuana isn’t as harmful as alcohol and alcohol is legal, so we should make marijuana legal.” And, I think, I guess there’s a certain logic to that, but you could say like, “Oh, well this harmful thing is legal, so therefore we should make everything that’s also harmful but isn’t as harmful as that legal as well.” I don’t necessarily follow that logic all the way to the conclusion there that, yes, this thing is harmful and it’s still going to create more harm regardless of whatever other harmful thing is already legal. So why would we want more of that? And we’re starting to see all of these experiments in place right now of a lot of young people are having addiction issues.
I just had coffee a few hours ago with a friend of mine today who’s a physician, and he’s seeing more and more young people who are addicted to marijuana. Because when you were in college and in the ’60s and ’70s, and even 20 years ago when I was in high school, weed, it was not nearly as it is now. I live in New York City. If I go into one of these pot shops, I can get super potent, super powerful weed, get a dab pen, get one of these edibles, and that could put you out for the whole day if you take a little too much of it. And it’s just so different from what we used to have. So in a way, maybe it isn’t quite as harmful as alcohol in terms of how much damage you can do to other people or domestic violence or what have you, but it will still have potentially detrimental effects on you and yourself and your own ambitions in your life. And like you said, it does make you stupid.
Jim: Yeah. And also I think very importantly, people when they’re young parents, right? Being a parent… Do you have kids?
Rob: I don’t have kids, no.
Jim: Let me tell you, it’s all in right and should be all in. But if you’re substantially diminished, you’re going to do a less good job of raising your kids. I got another one for you. I don’t think it was in your essays, looking at the section in your book on luxury goods. And it’s interesting, libertarians, because I also have long considered myself a sort of libertarian, kind of a Goldwater Republican back in the day. Frankly, I will say I have distanced myself from the Republicans because they’ve gone nuts also. But that’s another story for another day, and that’s gambling. When I was a growing up, only two places in the United States allowed gambling legally, Las Vegas, or Nevada, and four rural counties in Maryland had slot machines. Those were abolished in 1960.
Rob: No, Atlantic City, huh?
Jim: No Atlantic City yet, and no state lotteries until 1964. First one was in New Hampshire. And now on the other hand, as I said, my dad was a D.C. cop. And being a data nerd, I’d always go through all of the crime report books that got published at the end of the year and all this stuff. The number one crime in D.C. that were people led to arrests, well, drunkenness was number one and number two was gambling offenses. There was all these guys running the numbers, they were doing the sports betting and all that sort of stuff.
But it was kept under control. You had to go look for it. It was hard. And so there was a fluid dynamics pressure on it that if you really, really want to go gamble, you could find a bookie, right? They were there. But it wasn’t being advertised on TV. My wife and I try hard not to expose ourselves to broadcast advertising, pay the extra two bucks on the streaming service, no ads. But we were watching football, the two playoff games, oh my God, that’s just like wall-to-wall ads for the dopamine drip of gambling.
And I go… and again to your luxury goods idea, if I’m a guy with a professional job making 200,000 a year and I spend $50 a week… lose $50 a week gambling, whatever. If I’m a family guy just getting by $50 a week is $2,500 a year, which is a major hit on a family. And so even though on the one side of me says people want to be stupid, oh, well. If we look at this from this luxury goods angle goal, I just don’t think this is a great idea.
Rob: Yeah. I mean, I think that complete individual personal freedom, that libertarian ideal, it works if everyone is an adult over the age of 18 and at the 90th percentile or above in IQ and conscientiousness and impulse control and time preference and all those kinds of things. But we don’t live in that reality. We live in a reality with children and family and kids and parents and people who are not equipped to handle… You called it the dopamine drip, this extremely appealing in the short term, but potentially destructive in the long term, whether it’s drugs or gambling or pornography or any other kind of appealing substance.
That’s fascinating. I had no idea that gambling was not widespread until later than I thought. And now there’s this argument around sports gambling online. And I’m hearing these horror stories of young guys in particular, especially young fathers, who they think that they can double their paycheck, and so they misspend it on sports gambling instead of directing the money to their own families. I remember reading this article in the Wall Street Journal some years ago, and it’s like the gambling industry earns… It’s a power law where they earn something like 80% of their profits from 5% of the population, the most addiction prone, gambling prone segment of society. And there just seem to be just ethically something wrong there where you’re taking these 5% of the most vulnerable people and basically that’s is supporting the entire industry it seems.
Jim: That is truly sick, actually. And the fact that we can’t say that it… Or not that we can’t say it, I’m saying it right here, it’s sick. But that the leaders, the so-called leaders of our society who don’t really lead anymore, they just step in front of the crowd, won’t come out and say, “It’s wrong. Let’s not do that. It’s not good for particularly the less fortunate.” And there’s something that’s gone awry in our social operating system that has allowed us to become so decadent and to not care about it, and to actually then condemn people, “Oh, reactionary old fart,” when you say that this is bad for society.
Rob: Yeah, I think he’s a sociologist, Joseph Heath, he calls these people… I’ll call them the luxury belief class. He’ll call them the self-control aristocracy. These people who are at the 90th percentile and above in self-control, and these people who don’t understand. They have no theory of mind or no empathy for the people who aren’t that able to exert control over their own appetites and their own desires. And so they say, “Oh yeah, of course we should have drugs freely available, gambling online, every kind of indulgence, and people can just leave it up to themselves whether they want to do it or not do it, and who are we to say?” It’s kind of a reverse form of noblesse oblige of just abandoning these people to appetites.
Jim: Yeah, and I will, because as I say as a former libertarian, I was that way… But I will say in my old age, one of the things I realized that most reformers don’t think about the fact that humans exist on a continuum and they write their reforms for people like themselves, generally speaking. I recently read four books on the French Revolution, and it was hilarious. Talk about a clueless bunch, most of the French revolutionaries, that clearly just had themselves in mind and their ideas just were just not so otherwise. And of course, the results led where you’d expect it to, to a dictatorship. You call out this one as a luxury belief, and I think it sort of is, but maybe you can tie it back into the rest of the story and that’s the western environmentalists campaigning against GMO foods.
Rob: Hmm. I’m not as familiar with the science of GMO. I’ve seen people I respect who are for it versus against it. Assuming that they’re completely safe, it would be a luxury belief because if you can afford to eat non-GMO, organic, you can pay the extra out of pocket costs to get whatever farm to table or… that for you, you can afford whatever the grocery bill happens to be. Whereas for genetically modified foods, I mean, even if there is a potential health risk, if it brings the cost of food down and feeds more people, you have to balance those potential downsides of whatever the second order consequences of GMO is versus literally starving or going without food, it’s not as if all food is suddenly going to become GMO. So when you campaign against it, you’re potentially withholding food from less fortunate people. That’s sort of my intuition around people who rail against GMO.
Jim: Yeah, I will say so far there is no scientific evidence for any negativity of the food GMOs, which are pretty carefully curated per se. But that’s not to say there might not be a little risk, but here’s where it can become a luxury belief, literally belief, where is the line held most strongly against GMOs? Sub-Saharan Africa.
Rob: Oh, interesting. So in Sub-Saharan Africa, they’re the most against GMO foods?
Jim: Yep.
Rob: Why is that?
Jim: My guess is it’s the NGOs, right? The NGOs are stuffed with the Yale liberal arts majors or humanities majors who couldn’t get a job even at Starbucks because of all the tattoos and those rings and what have you. They got a work job, an NGO in Congo or something. “Oh, GMO bad.” Well, people, all starving to death kids, stunted malnutrition as an example of a luxury belief inappropriately broadcast to a group of people where it’s doing real harm.
Rob: Interesting. Yeah, I mean, I think in that case, especially if you are a member of one of those societies, even if you do say, “Well, there’s potential unforeseen… we’re not entirely…” I think they would still say, “Give me the food anyway.”
Jim: But they don’t, as it turns out. It’s interesting that the elite view has prevailed against something as fundamental as food to feed your starving children.
Rob: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it is shocking. I guess that’s one of the takeaways that I’ve learned from sort of reading about the history of social class and the influence of elites is that elite opinion matters a great deal in terms of policy, in terms of culture, in terms of trends. It matters for cultural memory of what we remember about a specific time. I mean, one thing, there was a poll that shocked me, I read it… You mentioned the Vietnam War earlier. Something like 60% or 65% of Americans supported the Vietnam War even as it was coming to an end. It wasn’t the fact that public opinion turned against the Vietnam War, it was elite opinion turned against the Vietnam War and that’s what… and college students and kind of the cool people in society didn’t like the Vietnam War, and that’s why it had to end, not because public opinion had shifted. But in our cultural memory, we think that it was public opinion because that’s how elites write history.
Jim: By the way, the Vietnam War was stupid. Probably was not a good thing, certainly not the way we fought it, but you’re absolutely right. And people forget Nixon won in an unprecedented landslide in 1972 against peacenik George McGovern carried every state except Massachusetts, and the District of Columbia. McGovern didn’t even carry his home state. And that’s what American opinion was like in 1972, with the war still going on. Well, I’d like to really thank Rob Henderson for a fun, deep, wide conversation about the idea of luxury beliefs. And remember, when his book comes out in paperback here in a few days, or the hardcover or Kindle if you’re like me, I don’t like to sacrifice poor trees, Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class.
Rob: Thank you, Jim.
Jim: Yeah, this was a great conversation.