Henderson is right on social mobility and his ideas seem to largely mirror Ian Rowe’s ideas in Agency (https://g.co/kgs/bXunw4n). Also Manchild in the Promised Land was an incredibly important book for me in college. Authors like Claude Brown, Philip Roth, Theodore Dreiser, etc. were all incredibly important for me in those turbulent-but-formative college days. The great thing about coming of age in America is that you realize that regardless of religious/ethnic/racial differences, we are all just young Americans trying to figure it out and ‘figuring it out’ is really about understanding a few key tenets which these authors help illuminate.
1951, Buckley, '50, "God and Man at Yale", written when he was approx 25.
2005, Douthat, '02, "Privilege, Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class", also approx 25 yo
2016, Vance, '13 (law) "Hillbilly Elegy", approx 31 yo
2024, Henderson, '18 Yale B.S., '22 Cambridge PhD, "Troubled". I think he's 34 now, but he's been writing about his Yale experience since he graduated when he was approx 28.
A good book I never finished, though not a memoir. Mencken - who published some of Fitzgerald's writings early in his career - really liked and reviewed it in his characteristic manner to which I cannot do justice but to quote it, "The young American novelist usually reveals himself as a naive, sentimental and somewhat disgusting ignoramus - a believer in Great Causes, a snuffler and eye-roller, a spouter of stale philosophies out of Kensington drawing rooms, the doggeries of French hack-drivers, and the lower floor of the Munich Hofbrauhaus. Nine times out of ten one finds him shocked by the discovery that women are not the complete angels they pretend to be, and full of the theory that all of the miners of West Virginia would become instantly non-luetic, intelligent and happy if Congress would only pass half a dozen simple laws. In brief, a fellow viewing human existence through a knot-hole in the floor of a Socialist local. Fitzgerald is nothing of the sort."
High praise!
By coincidence, that same issue of The Smart Set has my favorite Sam Hellman quote, "She loved an idealist, married an optimist, and buried a pessimist."
Yes as Gordon Tremeshko has observed above, the essence of the 'luxury beliefs' concept has been floating around in the conservative intellectual ether for a very long time. To take just one instance: Myron Magnet's book The Dream and the Nightmare (1993)
As one should expect when the subject concerns expression of belief in particular values, whether those expressions are congruent with internal psychological states, and why that may or may not be, related concepts repeatedly popped up in historical antiquity during the intellectual development of major religions. People fake belief both intentionally or subconsciously all the time, so many religions emphasize being on the lookout for such false believes and especially false converts and have a whole spectrum of culpability to describe the different levels of hypocrisy.
An example from Islam is the concept of munafiq, which ranges from the pure hypocrite, the features of whom are described in the Quran, all the way down to subconscious hypocrisy, which is like the difference between the legal regimes of strict liability and negligence in the matter of belief, and as I understand it, most Islamic scholars favor the strict interpretation.
I haven't read the book but reading Henderson's Substack over the past few weeks - which has (understandably) been mainly devoted to promoting it - I have found myself keep thinking ....."Yes but there are many, many different ways of having a troubled childhood."
Of course "there are many, many different ways of having a troubled childhood." Henderson simply shows that family instability nearly guarantees a troubled future, while a two-parent family offers some protection - not a guarantee - against it. Strengthening the family strengthens the child, which better prepares that child to navigate a world that is will certainly present difficulties.
On paper my parents were awful (and sometimes they were actually awful.) Constant financial issues, addiction, mental illness, verbal and physical abuse, screaming and yelling, close family members who were incarcerated - and we also ate dinner as a family every night and they prioritized our education. At nearly 50, I can look back and see they did a few things right, and it was enough.
I think you've got it right. Parents wind up being 'good enough' to raise successful children (if you don't make that bar too high). More of it winds up being genetics than most people would like to admit.
You've kind of missed my point.....there are MANY different ways of having a troubled chilhood. Henderson's (underclass ophan/foster child) is probably one of the worst; then there's your 'faimily instablity' which is a category with hundreds of millions in it; then there's unlucky genes (tens of millions more).....and so on....and so on....and so on.
I have to disagree. All the commentary I have read about this book both by the author and by reviewers has tended towards a narrative whereby there's children who have the misfortune to be brought up in (usually underclass) dysfunctional homes and there's the (relatively) fortunate everyone else. I say the reality is much more complex. To give just one for-instance: a child growing up in a wealthy, stable two-parent household but who gets mercilessly bullied by his/her peers with traumatic consequences. I have read nothing so far that puts the "Troubled" narrative into this broader, more complex and nebulous context.
From what I have seen in excerpts, Henderson does marshal a lot of data showing the very high rates of crime, etc. in people from the kind of "troubled" families he's talking about.
This thread seems to have generated a lot of 'talking at crossed puroses'.....to the point where I am inclined to give up. None of my comments have been intended to say anything at all about Henderson's political/sociological thesis....which I almost certainly would be in 100% agreement with.
MY comments have all been about my disappointment that he seems not to have sufficiently put his own personal childhood adversities into a broader context.....of other kinds of childhood adversity which he possibly has little personal understanding of.
Again, that is likely true but still not important to this conversation.
I can't speak for what the author says about dysfunctional homes but underclass is not a causation when it comes to social mobility. If anything, it makes it easier to move up as there are more possibilities in that direction.
I don't know where Russ Roberts got his data, (anyone know?) but he has noted that marital status of the parents is strongly correlated with changes in income from parent to child. More specifically, children of two parent households do better and children of single parent households do worse. I have seen data indicating children of married parents from the bottom income quintile are less than 20% likely to be there as adults. If true that's a pretty strong and compelling correlation.
To clarify that last point, if all kids had an equal shot, you'd expect 20% from each parental income quintile to end up with income putting them in the bottom quintile. With married parents it's less than that. This suggests having married parents is more important than income for avoiding the bottom quintile.
The problem with Henderson's judgmentalism is that life can be absolute shit, and it's real hard. There may be some shame in failing your marriage or your kids, but a lot of the time there isn't much and it depends on the details. I know some real losers, people who have been absent as parents and not held down jobs, and perhaps it's cliche but my heart bleeds for them. They are human beings with good souls who deserve better than what life has dealt them. I suspect the same is true of Henderson's many foster parents.
A big part of the question is whether people deserve the benefit of the doubt, and I think they do.
I frankly do not see how Henderson's background (or anybody's) lead to "Luxury beliefs" as he defines them. In none of the examples I've seen does the belief harm others or in particular lower class people. In the case of placing low priority on family stability (to the extent this IS a belief) how does that "belief" by the "elite" translate into actual family instability? Was it elite beliefs that destabilized the families he grew up in?
And the damage from defund the police is not from the "belief" but from the policy.
I think he should be talking about "luxury policy preferences."
I should add: this is not an original concept, really. "Luxury beliefs" is really just an update of Tom Wolfe's observations about "Radical Chic" 50 years ago:
Unlike dedicated activists, revolutionaries, or dissenters, those who engage in "radical chic" remain frivolous political agitators—ideologically invested in their cause of choice only so far as it advances their social standing.
The concept has been described as "an exercise in double-tracking one's public image: on the one hand, defining oneself through committed allegiance to a radical cause, but on the other, vitally, demonstrating this allegiance because it is the fashionable, au courant way to be seen in moneyed, name-conscious Society."
....
Wolfe used the term to satirize composer Leonard Bernstein and his friends for their absurdity in hosting a fundraising party for the Black Panthers—an organization whose members, activities, and goals were clearly incongruous with those of Bernstein's elite circle.[3] Wolfe's concept of radical chic was intended to lampoon individuals (particularly social elites like the jet set) who endorsed leftist radicalism merely to affect worldliness, assuage white guilt, or garner prestige, rather than to affirm genuine political convictions.
[Wolfe's] subject is how culture's patrician classes – the wealthy, fashionable intimates of high society – have sought to luxuriate in both a vicarious glamour and a monopoly on virtue through their public espousal of street politics: a politics, moreover, of minorities so removed from their sphere of experience and so absurdly, diametrically, opposed to the islands of privilege on which the cultural aristocracy maintain their isolation, that the whole basis of their relationship is wildly out of kilter from the start. ... In short, Radical Chic is described as a form of highly developed decadence; and its greatest fear is to be seen not as prejudiced or unaware, but as middle-class.
Yes, the essence of the 'luxury beliefs' concept has been floating around in the conservative intellectual ether for a very long time. To take another instance: Myron Magnet's book The Dream and the Nightmare (1993)
Maybe, I don't remember. But the much more important point is that the WHOLE BOOK was about how the adoption of fashionable lifestyle BELIEFS amongst the university-educated middle class (like trashing the idea of monogamy and marriage) translated much more into distastrous actual changes of BEHAVIOR lower down the social scale.
There was also the idea that people who are fairly well-off and/or have social support can do stupid things and recover from them. But people who "don't have far to fall" can do the same things and f up their lives.
I think there is a two-facedness to this, what I have elsewhere described as "keeping judgment in one's pocket". The right to judge remains embedded in the seemingly pure underdogma - expressed in small ways, but most plainly and devastatingly expressed in support for the long-open border, which is equivalent to saying, we always have a better underclass waiting in the wings ...
"I frankly do not see how Henderson's background (or anybody's) lead to "Luxury beliefs" as he defines themIn none of the examples I've seen does the belief harm others or in particular lower class people. "
Rebuttal: Henderson's Examples:
1) "Defund the Police".
A) This hurts poor people more than rich people, because poor people are several times more likely to be a victim of a crime.
B) The liberal elite's "defund the police" attitude has resulted in less respect for the police, which means there are fewer of them now, and the poor suffer more. The liberal elite's contempt for the police is another reason Trump will be reelected.
2) "Marriage/Monogamy is not that great or even outdated."
A) Henderson explains how his Yale students planned to get married and stay married, but expressed the "luxury belief" that marriage is not necessary for raising children. Those liberal luxury beliefs "get out there" in society and result in less marriage and more broken families. The poor suffer--not the rich. That's the essence of "luxury beliefs."
I'm not arguing the "luxury beliefs" are not erroneous. I just don't see how, to use your example, Yale students not thinking that marriage is a plus in rising children leads to non-marriage by non-Yale couples. Is it an Aristotelian "efficient cause?"
Luxury belief proponents speak as though elites are driving society around like a golf cart, when they're in fact subject to the same impersonal forces as the rest of us, just at different times and in different ways. I conceptualize shifts in elite belief more as harbingers than fundamental causes of social change. Demonstrating or even persuasively arguing for causation is a massive gap in the luxury belief notion.
And does little or less to persuade anyone of the error of those beliefs. It probably not Henderson's intention but "luxury beliefs" can become just another pejorative for "Conservatives" to hurl at "Progressives."
I've observed it used that way many times. Also as a term of abuse for elites generally. When Rob write he sometimes rounds "luxury beliefs" off to "elite beliefs" and, cynical or innocent, it doesn't help. The mimetic power of the term outstrips its explanatory power.
Edit: I wanted to supply a quote from Rob's work that demonstrates the rounding off I mentioned. "Luxury belief" as a synonym for "habitus"??? What an efficient way to express your distaste for everything you don't like about the upper class--"taste, values, ideas, style, and behavior"--while appearing to make a substantive critique. At best it reflects a whole stew of vague resentments seeping into in the operationalization of the concept. At worst...
"Still, Fussell notes, money and education aren’t enough to climb all the way up the ladder. That is because the highest tiers of society assign great importance to taste, values, ideas, style, and behavior — what the renowned French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu referred to as habitus. My updated term is "luxury beliefs."" (https://substack.com/inbox/post/51581810)
Ideas have consequences, whether or not the carriers of these ideas act on them personally. The Yale crowd has much more say about what role models will appear on TV than do the grads of flyover state u. TV goes on to inform the broader public about what kind of behavior is within the pale, or even to be admired. Decades ago Vice President Dan Quayle pointed this out relative to unwed motherhood and was excoriated for picking a fight with a fictional character. How's that working out for us? Shall we ask Charles Murray?
(maybe it is obvious to other readers, but) "cultural liberalization" = ?
Is it participation of women in the workplace? Declining religiosity? Civil Rights laws and desegregation? Multi-culturalism? Something else? WTO/NAFTA/low tariffs/free trade?
Before agreeing or disagreeing :)
Also, the thrust of Putnam's work was mobility! Kling's except of Henderson is to stop the focus on mobility. Raj Chetty has a celebrated (?) paper on this: https://www.nber.org/papers/w19844 but I somehow doubt that is what is meant here.
A very hypothetical possibility that probably never existed in real life at all but which we might strain our capacities for imagination to consider purely for the sake of argument would be for influential elites to conspicuously advocate for policies that impair the effectiveness of policing and radically decrease convictions and incarceration rates, causing a sudden and sustained explosion in crime rates in poor urban areas, while choosing to forgo large portions of their disposable income in order to afford to live in more elite, suburban areas, where they are insulated from the consequences of such policies, for some reason that is mysterious but which they assure us is totally unrelated.
Oh wait, we don't have to imagine, this actually happened, and it's happening again. Now here's a thought experiment - if the mayor, chief of police, district attorney, and top judge of any area had to be neighbors and reside with their families in the worst part of town and without benefit of security details, would they continue to advocate for and pursue the implementation of the same beliefs about the administration of criminal justice? If not (and it's *obviously* not) then their current ability to signal these beliefs is a *luxury* they can afford by dint of their wherewithal, a privilege unavailable to the poor residents of those areas who must suffer the fallout of those elite decisions.
Anyone who claims to not understand any of that is just being deliberately obtuse.
Two points here: whether there is merit in the idea of "defunding" the police, and whether this is an "elite" belief with no regard for safety of the "non-elite".
You may absolutely oppose any reduction in police budgets - a lot of "elites" hold that view. You may support "stop and frisk"; Michael Bloomberg is as elite as they come. This does not divide on an elite vs non-elite axis. An analysis requires looking at crime rates in various jurisdictions, its relation to the police budget, criminal rights practices, and so on. And there are tradeoffs, like in any other policy choice.
Look at Minneapolis crime rate over a 60 year period:
Please identify when "defund" went into effect and when it was reversed based on the chart :)
Segregation by income, social class, race etc. long predates any "defund" the police ideas, -- and there are non-nefarious explanations, other than the desire to live in safe communities and consign others to unsafe communities (Thomas Schelling won a Nobel for this work!)
Also, I think this is more like "I don't like this policy -- therefore proponents have nefarious motives in advocating for this". For example -- "I don't like the Iraq War -- and I bet you support it because your kids don't have to fight". Sure, your kids don't have to fight over there, but there may still be other legitimate reasons for fighting some war.
Those links you posted seem like the perfect example of a luxury belief. The Brookings Senior Fellow tells us that defunding the police will not lead to disorder. And yet your crime rates show that the post-Floyd hysteria episode in Minnesota just so happened to coincide with violent crime and homicide rates spiking back to or near historic highs that hadn't been seen since the early or mid 1990's. Any guesses as to what neighborhoods were most affected?
What on earth are you talking about with regard to Schelling? He won the Econ prize mostly for developing game theory insights into geopolitical relations and international conflict. Any connection to price discrimination's role in residential class segregation is extremely tenuous at best.
Again, some "elites" (unless you rewrite your definition once again to exclude ex-lawyer, ex-judge, ex-adjunct-professor, Gregory Abbott from the ranks of the "elite") believe the migrants are better off in the Rio Grande river.
You may think the United States should do more to stop the migrants from crossing, apprehend and return them to where they came from, withdraw from the 1951 UN Convention on Refugees, or whatever else you like, and others think the opposite. It does make either one of them elite or non-elite.
Worst luxury belief I see in practice today is the idea that discipline is harmful. The result is anarchy in schools with a greatly reduced learning environment. In the quest to appease the 5% of troublemakers and their parent / guardian everyone loses.
Of course the elite send their kids to "good schools" where the culture supports a high expectation of behavior and bad behavior is disciplined.
I don't know. This looks to me like calling everything we don't like (and I am not minimizing the problems caused by disruptive behavior) a "luxury belief" of the "elite."
I think we've be better off just taking about the policy problems, leaving aside whether they originate in a "luxury belief.
If someone believes Jews are causing the nation's problem, a policy preference to cut them down is pretty automatic. If someone believes rich people have gotten their wealth unfairly, a policy preference to take some of it away is pretty automatic. If someone believes (it's 1941) Nazis are trying to conquer your country and are may be strong enough to do it, a policy preference to go to war against them follows pretty automatically.
These are not along some elite vs non-elite axis. This is just a general statement of how self government works -- there are representatives elected and they enact policies by some combination of interest group pressure / popular pressure / external threats / etc.
There is no dark insidious belief system by the elites harming us unwashed mouth-breathing masses.
I was not talking about an "elite vs non-elite axis". I was responding to Thomas L. Hutcheson's comment that ended, "And the damage from defund the police is not from the "belief" but from the policy. I think he should be talking about "luxury policy preferences."
If you believe a major reason for black people doing badly is the police, "defund the police" follows pretty automatically.
Upward mobility is the direct effect of increased wealth - see UK, Industrial Revolution, the greatest surge in prosperity and social progress ever. Because of it children were no longer seen as an easily replaceable source of cheap labour in the family economy, and women no longer needed to be almost constantly pregnant to ensure adequate supply given high child mortality rate. The bien-pensant class believe we should all be made less wealthy (impoverished) to concentrate on more virtuous ideas and activities….hence Net Zero.
I have thoughts similar to those expressed by Graham Cunningham. I sympathize with Rob Henderson and his experience and I completely agree that a supportive family and social environment is worth all the gold in the world. At the same time, we miss the key question if we only focus on what are obviously unhealthy environments for children.
The key question is what is a healthy environment for children? What should society provide to and expect from children? My assessment is our society / culture doesn't have the courage to answer this question honestly. What we get is mumbo jumbo that results in children learning many wrongs lessons and being ill prepared for adulthood. And this sorry result happens despite institutions and parents being excessively energized about the needs of children.
What I see is a failure of adults to recognize that what children need most of all is to be taught wisdom. Modern parenting and social welfare robs children of the opportunity to learn for themselves the consequences of their choices. And it is not even clear that this parenting protects children from negative feelings and doubts! Maybe, it is necessary for children to experience negativity and denying children of this, or thinking we can deny children of bad experiences, is selfish and wrongheaded.
My childhood had three phases:
Phase 1: The first 11 years were idyllic. Wonderful parents. Wonderful neighborhood. Good elementary school. Good friends. Excellent church. Life was bliss and magical.
Phase 2: The next five years were difficult. Same wonderful parents but they were not skilled in coaching their kids through puberty and in dealing with the social complexities of life. From grades 7 through 11 I felt a lot of social awkwardness. But I still had a good home to go home to and I had a few good friends and my church was exceptional. This phase taught me the importance of optimism and perseverance. In the midst of what I felt was a lot of crumminess I had good moments.
Phase 3: A positive awakening to adulthood. I enjoyed my senior year of high school as my social awkwardness wore off. Loved college and by my second year I actually started to make serious decisions that mattered. This yielded a moment I always remember when I had the epiphany that I had made and accomplished a significant goal all of my own doing.
So my question is. Is phase 3 possible without a phase 2? Can we expect kids to succeed on their own if they do not experience awkwardness and embarrassment? What kind of attitudes do people develop if they determine they should never feel inadequate?
I have not yet read his book but plan on it soon. I have much respect for Rob and others like him who are able to prevail over childhood adversity (or their own early bad choices). They are the few, those who can beat the long odds.
It's pretty clear we DO need to focus on stable families, rather than education, as the optimal goal of policy for the reduction of poverty.
Ed stuff can help one achieve closer to their max IQ/ g potential, but everybody has a maximum. Tho focus on ed is, itself, a somewhat luxury belief.
There's only so many, few, spots at Harvard (or YPS; Ivies+), so the intense competition to get one of those spots is almost as bad as the reward of spending 2000 hrs / year playing basketball expecting to become and NBA pro. Get to Harvard? Get drafted by the NBA? For most folks ... ain't gonna happen, but second tier & even third tier colleges can help kids learn.
It's good that Rob has personal experiences which are uniquely his, yet can be seen as not so different from very tough problems many others have. Tho a statistic about 60% getting convicted of crimes, and only 3% finishing college, means being a boy in the CA foster care bureaucracy instability is a huge problem. My own family's divorces & alcoholism are a quite different set of dysfunction, but it seems my path out of that had lots of similarities to Rob's.
I hope Arnold is able to meet Rob. I met him in Budapest in the summer, and he was interesting to listen to and to talk to.
*Updated the next day, using the Edit from the right menu
The book Paying for the Party: How College Maintains Inequality (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16241465-paying-for-the-party) is written by two sociologists who understand well your point about college freshmen. They followed for a couple years an all-girls floor at a public university and show how hard it is for non-elites to succeed at a college, even with identical majors.
"upward mobility SHOULD be the side effect"? Is there any doubt that strong stable family is a strong indicator of upward social mobility?
I mostly agree on teenagers but doubt most very young children think much about the three things he lists.
The stress of moving from rural south to urban north sounded like a reasonable cause of unmooring until I thought about it 30 seconds. European immigrants before him and Hispanics immigrants after went through far more profound changes without nearly as much unmooring. Until you give a better explanation, I'm thinking it sounds like a racial generalization with very limited truth.
Swarthmore - Except they really weren't that different (besides accent). You grew up in a wealthy academic environment. I grew up on the fringe of Appalachia in the first generation to go to college. My brother went to Swarthmore and I went to Johns Hopkins. There were superficial differences between me and the metro NYC crowd. My parents were Lutheran and one of my two best friends was a NYC Jew. (Ironically, the other was from Potomac.) You sound like a black person complaining you were MADE TO feel different. It is mostly a choice.
I've not read that book ("Manchild in the Promised Land") and it sounds interesting, more so than the other book in question, much as I sympathize with Henderson's frustration. Unfortunately I'm cursed with only being interested in the past. I did read "Hillbilly Elegy" and there were passages I found worth reading aloud to my husband. But as women will, I've been reading the soapy details of other people's lives approximately since I was five years old, and I am pretty full up on that. A weird Texas murder will still draw me in once in awhile.
It's unfashionable to say so, since cities are supposed unquestionably to be the engines of prosperity, rather than parasitic and pathologizing - but to me the unmooring referenced in "Manchild" relates precisely to that rural/urban divide, and the very different patterns of life.
It's doubly unfashionable since the Great Migration to the cities is necessarily viewed in a positive light, because the American South was at one terminus of it. And one thing that will never alter as long as this country exists, is judgment of the South.
Basically "Hillbilly Elegy" drew me to the conclusion that the book in a way contains no lesson because these are people who are not going to turn out a J.D. Vance very often. They will, as he notes, turn out pretty good warriors, when required. They just are who they are, their potential is what it is.
Wherever there are hills ... And while greater paternalism would undoubtedly be for the good with regards to Vance's family, especially re drug use, it will only go so far, and the failure of a paternalistic model to penetrate or undo all subcultures was no reason to abandon it.
"Cedar Choppers: Life on the Edge of Nothing" by Ken Roberts, is a good regional book on the way people take their culture with them - there are various of these Little Appalachias strung across the country.
Throughout that book are attestations from others (who generally found them troublesome, insofar as they noticed them) that these guys (who made their living such as it was from cutting cedar and from operating stills) could work inhumanly hard, without a break, on no food. They just had no interest in doing that every day, and couldn't be made to care about "bourgeouis" respectability. Or nice things.
Where did these people go, and how does that connect up with the urban/rural business? I suspect that a lot of the people one sees in cities living on the sidewalk and so forth, near the drug markets, might be just that, some of those sorts of people depicted in the Vance book, the Roberts book. They shunned norms, to a degree, but it was in the city where their problems with modernity are magnified.
People don't have enough to do, in the city. Law school really doesn't generalize.
I should add that a book AK might review, that really landed with me was "Glass House" by Brian Alexander. Think of it as a footnote on the constant drumbeat of good economic news, and a footnote to Vance. The opening chapter or two - which relate some Vance-like details of dysfunctional lives - is the least interesting, actually, but keep going. (Or maybe that was because it was on the heels of reading Sam Quinones' terrific "Dreamland" that I read it, and truthfully, drug use itself, though not the twisting means by which drugs are obtained, is, narratively, a little dull.)
"Glass House" demonstrates that the paternalism need not come from government. One of my favorite quotes was from a cranky, dying glass factory owner, childless, when his estate planner asked what he wanted to leave the town - a hospital? An auditorium?
Not really anything, was the answer. "I gave them all those jobs, didn't I?"
And then the story continues with the sort of people who indeed enjoy making big, showy philanthropic gestures. But would balk at the idea that you would ever "give jobs". That's for the global market to decide.
And the townspeople themselves, collectively - exercised a kind of community solidarity, in service to the now-discarded norm that a man is best kept busy - when one of the factories burned down in the 20s - and the town raised the dough to rebuild it, themselves, lest they lose their jobs.
I am not going to try to answer your question. I just want to note that fame is a huge stressor on a relationship. I am always impressed when I hear of someone famous who has actually been married a long time. And there is huge stress on their kids, too, of course.
Let's say I'm skeptical "fame is a huge stressor on a relationship." Do you have any evidence of this? Note, even if data showed famous people are more likely to divorce, that doesn't mean it results from fame.
I suspect whether it is a stressor on their kids depends on environment. Maybe he wasn't so famous then but were Warren Buffett's kids stressed? What about kids around Hollywood who have lots of friends with famous parents? Are kids of politicians affected in the same way as actors or pro athletes? What about kids of famous academics, news personalities, and writers? small town mayor's kids?
It seems self-evident to me, but no, I haven't looked around for studies on the subject. As for the kids, I see a lot of kids of rich/famous people who are really messed up. Not messed up in the way of Rob Henderson and his friends, more like overly entitled, snobby, etc. And if your parents are really rich, successful, whatever, and you are not... that's a lot of stress.
And what about all the rich kids who aren't messed up? How much do you see them? Do you think maybe your set is biased?
Are we talking about kids of famous people or rich people? You seem to have switched. They aren't the same. Regardless, it's kind of hard for an average kid of average parents to be snobby. Kind of have to be noticeably above average in some way.
Let's just go back to what I initially said -- that that fame causes a lot of stress in a relationship, and on the famous person's kids. That doesn't mean that every relationship and every kid is doomed, but it still seems obvious to me that it is likely to cause problems. Fame and riches, both. Maybe it's just me, but when I see a movie about a rich person or celebrity falling in love with an "ordinary" person, I think "that's nice, but how could it last?" They come from different worlds, which is additional stress beyond all the normal stresses that break up most marriages.
Actually, you said it's a huge stressor. Nobody is denying fame is one of a very long list of stressors. Is it huge? Maybe but I'm skeptical that it is. Wealth is highly correlated with marriage so that one more likely works in the OPPOSITE direction.
One obvious facet - a celebrity's attention is demanded by exponentially more people than your average person. That is attention at the expense of their children and spouse. I grew up in and around Hollywood, friends with married parents in the industry were the exception.
You are very much into the territory of correlation, not causation. We hear many stories of bad behavior of famous athletes but accounting for their background, are they more likely to misbehave or less than non-famous? Is fame the real stressor or long hours committed to their pursuit? Or could it be the correlation between creative types and psychological issues? You could indeed be right but you've put forth no compelling evidence. I remain skeptical fame is a huge component of what we see.
I could make a number of solid recommendations whose insights and advice have proven accurate and valuable in my own personal life and in the lives of a number of acquaintances. Alas most of those folks have been declared double-plus ungood unpersons, and for many of them, the quality of their output after a clear peak period really collapsed for a variety of different reasons, so not only does one have to be open-minded enough to push through some very strong psychological barriers due to social desirability bias, but then one also has to be discerning enough to tell the gold from the dross. Additionally, the focus of much of the writing is about improving one's sex life which may seem only tangentially relevant or a small factor contributing to maintaining a stable and happy married relationship, but this is getting it backwards, the sex life improvement is a consequence of creating the necessary conditions and psychological basis that are the indispensable foundation of long term intersexual relationships, and of being able to recognize the early warning signs and effectively deal with the various kinds of powerfully instinctive urges to play status-gap testing games and to create particular kinds of relationship psycho-drama. All that throat-clearing out of the way, Athol Kay in his prime is not a bad place to start.
Dalrock had tons of material on this subject in his old blog (floruit early 2010's), which he had been keeping up in read-only mode in response to readers' pleas. Unfortunately, the other day I discovered that at some point this winter he took it down and told Internet Archive to delist it, so it is no longer available.
While an understandable choice, that is nevertheless a real tragedy given the high value and quality of his writing. Someone blogging as "The Man Who Was Thursday" used to write a lot of smart things in the subject a long time ago, but was one of the first to have all his stuff flushed down the memory hole.
There was a time I was reading his blog Married Man Sex Life., and I think it helped a bit with keeping my marriage happy. Nice polite people don't talk so much about sex, and I'm not sure that's so bad -- I want a society of nice, polite, and sexually satisfied people.
Four big destabilizers are deviation from the sweet spot of an optimal status gap, lack of confidence in that gap, perceptions that one has easy, viable alternative options to one's partner, and the weight of social influences and judgments in one's scene. These are all key elements of the complicated game of survival and reproduction and the related powerful impulses for how to play that game are hard-wired into human instinct. Most of the other things people believe to be relationship stressors are "elephant in the brain" rationalizations and cover stories for trouble with these underlying factors which one are not supposed to discuss explicitly. When people genuinely believe they are effectively "shipwrecked" (as one of the Inklings put it) with each other, they experience an automatic psychological reset in perspective and suddenly find it much easier to be satisfied and happier by both turning their lemons into lemonade. This stabilizing influence is easy to observe in cute old couples who depend on each other and who know on some level they have no other place to go. If we want to encourage people to pair early and stay paired and experience this kind of long term stable contentment with each other and by consequence to produce children and create the family environment most conducive to their upbringing, then there is little alternative but to take away a lot of those destabilizing possibilities that were introduced in long course of expanding sexual liberation. More choice doesn't always make people happy: sometimes it makes it impossible for people to be happy. And anything that makes happiness impossible is a mistake at best and evil in effect.
"Biertan, a beautiful village in Romania’s famous region Transylvania, had its own remedy for divorce: a ‘marital prison’ where couples whose marriages were not working anymore were locked up for weeks to solve their issues.
BBC wrote a story about Biertan’s ‘medieval remedy for divorce’, telling readers that, although it sounds like a nightmare, the solution was quite effective as only one couple divorced in 300 years. The local bishop was the one locking the people in the tiny prison, where they would spend six weeks working to bring their marriage back to life. While in there, they were supposed to share everything, from a single pillow and table to the lone table setting."
-- but today's consumerized society believes choice & freedom always are better, despite often having worse results for many.
I thought you might go a different direction. When I read his mention of divorce, my first thought was that divorce involves two people. How much does it tell us about one of them?
Henderson is right on social mobility and his ideas seem to largely mirror Ian Rowe’s ideas in Agency (https://g.co/kgs/bXunw4n). Also Manchild in the Promised Land was an incredibly important book for me in college. Authors like Claude Brown, Philip Roth, Theodore Dreiser, etc. were all incredibly important for me in those turbulent-but-formative college days. The great thing about coming of age in America is that you realize that regardless of religious/ethnic/racial differences, we are all just young Americans trying to figure it out and ‘figuring it out’ is really about understanding a few key tenets which these authors help illuminate.
It's a genre.
1951, Buckley, '50, "God and Man at Yale", written when he was approx 25.
2005, Douthat, '02, "Privilege, Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class", also approx 25 yo
2016, Vance, '13 (law) "Hillbilly Elegy", approx 31 yo
2024, Henderson, '18 Yale B.S., '22 Cambridge PhD, "Troubled". I think he's 34 now, but he's been writing about his Yale experience since he graduated when he was approx 28.
"It's a genre."
Fitzgerald's "This Side of Paradise" might be the most famous in that genre.
A good book I never finished, though not a memoir. Mencken - who published some of Fitzgerald's writings early in his career - really liked and reviewed it in his characteristic manner to which I cannot do justice but to quote it, "The young American novelist usually reveals himself as a naive, sentimental and somewhat disgusting ignoramus - a believer in Great Causes, a snuffler and eye-roller, a spouter of stale philosophies out of Kensington drawing rooms, the doggeries of French hack-drivers, and the lower floor of the Munich Hofbrauhaus. Nine times out of ten one finds him shocked by the discovery that women are not the complete angels they pretend to be, and full of the theory that all of the miners of West Virginia would become instantly non-luetic, intelligent and happy if Congress would only pass half a dozen simple laws. In brief, a fellow viewing human existence through a knot-hole in the floor of a Socialist local. Fitzgerald is nothing of the sort."
High praise!
By coincidence, that same issue of The Smart Set has my favorite Sam Hellman quote, "She loved an idealist, married an optimist, and buried a pessimist."
Yes as Gordon Tremeshko has observed above, the essence of the 'luxury beliefs' concept has been floating around in the conservative intellectual ether for a very long time. To take just one instance: Myron Magnet's book The Dream and the Nightmare (1993)
As one should expect when the subject concerns expression of belief in particular values, whether those expressions are congruent with internal psychological states, and why that may or may not be, related concepts repeatedly popped up in historical antiquity during the intellectual development of major religions. People fake belief both intentionally or subconsciously all the time, so many religions emphasize being on the lookout for such false believes and especially false converts and have a whole spectrum of culpability to describe the different levels of hypocrisy.
An example from Islam is the concept of munafiq, which ranges from the pure hypocrite, the features of whom are described in the Quran, all the way down to subconscious hypocrisy, which is like the difference between the legal regimes of strict liability and negligence in the matter of belief, and as I understand it, most Islamic scholars favor the strict interpretation.
I haven't read the book but reading Henderson's Substack over the past few weeks - which has (understandably) been mainly devoted to promoting it - I have found myself keep thinking ....."Yes but there are many, many different ways of having a troubled childhood."
Of course "there are many, many different ways of having a troubled childhood." Henderson simply shows that family instability nearly guarantees a troubled future, while a two-parent family offers some protection - not a guarantee - against it. Strengthening the family strengthens the child, which better prepares that child to navigate a world that is will certainly present difficulties.
On paper my parents were awful (and sometimes they were actually awful.) Constant financial issues, addiction, mental illness, verbal and physical abuse, screaming and yelling, close family members who were incarcerated - and we also ate dinner as a family every night and they prioritized our education. At nearly 50, I can look back and see they did a few things right, and it was enough.
I think you've got it right. Parents wind up being 'good enough' to raise successful children (if you don't make that bar too high). More of it winds up being genetics than most people would like to admit.
You've kind of missed my point.....there are MANY different ways of having a troubled chilhood. Henderson's (underclass ophan/foster child) is probably one of the worst; then there's your 'faimily instablity' which is a category with hundreds of millions in it; then there's unlucky genes (tens of millions more).....and so on....and so on....and so on.
I don't think anyone missed your point. You aren't wrong. It just isn't important to this conversation.
I have to disagree. All the commentary I have read about this book both by the author and by reviewers has tended towards a narrative whereby there's children who have the misfortune to be brought up in (usually underclass) dysfunctional homes and there's the (relatively) fortunate everyone else. I say the reality is much more complex. To give just one for-instance: a child growing up in a wealthy, stable two-parent household but who gets mercilessly bullied by his/her peers with traumatic consequences. I have read nothing so far that puts the "Troubled" narrative into this broader, more complex and nebulous context.
From what I have seen in excerpts, Henderson does marshal a lot of data showing the very high rates of crime, etc. in people from the kind of "troubled" families he's talking about.
This thread seems to have generated a lot of 'talking at crossed puroses'.....to the point where I am inclined to give up. None of my comments have been intended to say anything at all about Henderson's political/sociological thesis....which I almost certainly would be in 100% agreement with.
MY comments have all been about my disappointment that he seems not to have sufficiently put his own personal childhood adversities into a broader context.....of other kinds of childhood adversity which he possibly has little personal understanding of.
"I have read nothing so far that puts the "Troubled" narrative into this broader, more complex and nebulous context."
Then why don't you write that book!
Again, that is likely true but still not important to this conversation.
I can't speak for what the author says about dysfunctional homes but underclass is not a causation when it comes to social mobility. If anything, it makes it easier to move up as there are more possibilities in that direction.
I don't know where Russ Roberts got his data, (anyone know?) but he has noted that marital status of the parents is strongly correlated with changes in income from parent to child. More specifically, children of two parent households do better and children of single parent households do worse. I have seen data indicating children of married parents from the bottom income quintile are less than 20% likely to be there as adults. If true that's a pretty strong and compelling correlation.
To clarify that last point, if all kids had an equal shot, you'd expect 20% from each parental income quintile to end up with income putting them in the bottom quintile. With married parents it's less than that. This suggests having married parents is more important than income for avoiding the bottom quintile.
"All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."
Exactly so.
The problem with Henderson's judgmentalism is that life can be absolute shit, and it's real hard. There may be some shame in failing your marriage or your kids, but a lot of the time there isn't much and it depends on the details. I know some real losers, people who have been absent as parents and not held down jobs, and perhaps it's cliche but my heart bleeds for them. They are human beings with good souls who deserve better than what life has dealt them. I suspect the same is true of Henderson's many foster parents.
A big part of the question is whether people deserve the benefit of the doubt, and I think they do.
I frankly do not see how Henderson's background (or anybody's) lead to "Luxury beliefs" as he defines them. In none of the examples I've seen does the belief harm others or in particular lower class people. In the case of placing low priority on family stability (to the extent this IS a belief) how does that "belief" by the "elite" translate into actual family instability? Was it elite beliefs that destabilized the families he grew up in?
And the damage from defund the police is not from the "belief" but from the policy.
I think he should be talking about "luxury policy preferences."
I suggest that policy preferences are downstream from beliefs.
Henderson is suggesting a change in culture. Politics (and policy) are downstream from culture. (attributed to Andrew Breitbart)
COVID
I should add: this is not an original concept, really. "Luxury beliefs" is really just an update of Tom Wolfe's observations about "Radical Chic" 50 years ago:
Unlike dedicated activists, revolutionaries, or dissenters, those who engage in "radical chic" remain frivolous political agitators—ideologically invested in their cause of choice only so far as it advances their social standing.
The concept has been described as "an exercise in double-tracking one's public image: on the one hand, defining oneself through committed allegiance to a radical cause, but on the other, vitally, demonstrating this allegiance because it is the fashionable, au courant way to be seen in moneyed, name-conscious Society."
....
Wolfe used the term to satirize composer Leonard Bernstein and his friends for their absurdity in hosting a fundraising party for the Black Panthers—an organization whose members, activities, and goals were clearly incongruous with those of Bernstein's elite circle.[3] Wolfe's concept of radical chic was intended to lampoon individuals (particularly social elites like the jet set) who endorsed leftist radicalism merely to affect worldliness, assuage white guilt, or garner prestige, rather than to affirm genuine political convictions.
[Wolfe's] subject is how culture's patrician classes – the wealthy, fashionable intimates of high society – have sought to luxuriate in both a vicarious glamour and a monopoly on virtue through their public espousal of street politics: a politics, moreover, of minorities so removed from their sphere of experience and so absurdly, diametrically, opposed to the islands of privilege on which the cultural aristocracy maintain their isolation, that the whole basis of their relationship is wildly out of kilter from the start. ... In short, Radical Chic is described as a form of highly developed decadence; and its greatest fear is to be seen not as prejudiced or unaware, but as middle-class.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_chic
Yes, the essence of the 'luxury beliefs' concept has been floating around in the conservative intellectual ether for a very long time. To take another instance: Myron Magnet's book The Dream and the Nightmare (1993)
Which as I recall had a line something like, "When rich people sneeze, poor people get sick."
Maybe, I don't remember. But the much more important point is that the WHOLE BOOK was about how the adoption of fashionable lifestyle BELIEFS amongst the university-educated middle class (like trashing the idea of monogamy and marriage) translated much more into distastrous actual changes of BEHAVIOR lower down the social scale.
There was also the idea that people who are fairly well-off and/or have social support can do stupid things and recover from them. But people who "don't have far to fall" can do the same things and f up their lives.
Yes, that's how I remember it too.
I think there is a two-facedness to this, what I have elsewhere described as "keeping judgment in one's pocket". The right to judge remains embedded in the seemingly pure underdogma - expressed in small ways, but most plainly and devastatingly expressed in support for the long-open border, which is equivalent to saying, we always have a better underclass waiting in the wings ...
"I frankly do not see how Henderson's background (or anybody's) lead to "Luxury beliefs" as he defines themIn none of the examples I've seen does the belief harm others or in particular lower class people. "
Rebuttal: Henderson's Examples:
1) "Defund the Police".
A) This hurts poor people more than rich people, because poor people are several times more likely to be a victim of a crime.
B) The liberal elite's "defund the police" attitude has resulted in less respect for the police, which means there are fewer of them now, and the poor suffer more. The liberal elite's contempt for the police is another reason Trump will be reelected.
2) "Marriage/Monogamy is not that great or even outdated."
A) Henderson explains how his Yale students planned to get married and stay married, but expressed the "luxury belief" that marriage is not necessary for raising children. Those liberal luxury beliefs "get out there" in society and result in less marriage and more broken families. The poor suffer--not the rich. That's the essence of "luxury beliefs."
I'm not arguing the "luxury beliefs" are not erroneous. I just don't see how, to use your example, Yale students not thinking that marriage is a plus in rising children leads to non-marriage by non-Yale couples. Is it an Aristotelian "efficient cause?"
Luxury belief proponents speak as though elites are driving society around like a golf cart, when they're in fact subject to the same impersonal forces as the rest of us, just at different times and in different ways. I conceptualize shifts in elite belief more as harbingers than fundamental causes of social change. Demonstrating or even persuasively arguing for causation is a massive gap in the luxury belief notion.
And does little or less to persuade anyone of the error of those beliefs. It probably not Henderson's intention but "luxury beliefs" can become just another pejorative for "Conservatives" to hurl at "Progressives."
I've observed it used that way many times. Also as a term of abuse for elites generally. When Rob write he sometimes rounds "luxury beliefs" off to "elite beliefs" and, cynical or innocent, it doesn't help. The mimetic power of the term outstrips its explanatory power.
Edit: I wanted to supply a quote from Rob's work that demonstrates the rounding off I mentioned. "Luxury belief" as a synonym for "habitus"??? What an efficient way to express your distaste for everything you don't like about the upper class--"taste, values, ideas, style, and behavior"--while appearing to make a substantive critique. At best it reflects a whole stew of vague resentments seeping into in the operationalization of the concept. At worst...
"Still, Fussell notes, money and education aren’t enough to climb all the way up the ladder. That is because the highest tiers of society assign great importance to taste, values, ideas, style, and behavior — what the renowned French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu referred to as habitus. My updated term is "luxury beliefs."" (https://substack.com/inbox/post/51581810)
Ideas have consequences, whether or not the carriers of these ideas act on them personally. The Yale crowd has much more say about what role models will appear on TV than do the grads of flyover state u. TV goes on to inform the broader public about what kind of behavior is within the pale, or even to be admired. Decades ago Vice President Dan Quayle pointed this out relative to unwed motherhood and was excoriated for picking a fight with a fictional character. How's that working out for us? Shall we ask Charles Murray?
Ken
Did you SEE that show? I did and it did not glorify single motherhood. The derision directed at Quail was well deserved.
And you do know don't you that single motherhood is way down whatever they think about it at Yale.
I just do not think that the causation runs from "single motherhood is OK" if that's what Yalies think and single motherhood.
+100 to this!
The causality is never explained.
1. Elites hold these views that I don't like
2. ???
3. The non elites suffer
(maybe it is obvious to other readers, but) "cultural liberalization" = ?
Is it participation of women in the workplace? Declining religiosity? Civil Rights laws and desegregation? Multi-culturalism? Something else? WTO/NAFTA/low tariffs/free trade?
Before agreeing or disagreeing :)
Also, the thrust of Putnam's work was mobility! Kling's except of Henderson is to stop the focus on mobility. Raj Chetty has a celebrated (?) paper on this: https://www.nber.org/papers/w19844 but I somehow doubt that is what is meant here.
A very hypothetical possibility that probably never existed in real life at all but which we might strain our capacities for imagination to consider purely for the sake of argument would be for influential elites to conspicuously advocate for policies that impair the effectiveness of policing and radically decrease convictions and incarceration rates, causing a sudden and sustained explosion in crime rates in poor urban areas, while choosing to forgo large portions of their disposable income in order to afford to live in more elite, suburban areas, where they are insulated from the consequences of such policies, for some reason that is mysterious but which they assure us is totally unrelated.
Oh wait, we don't have to imagine, this actually happened, and it's happening again. Now here's a thought experiment - if the mayor, chief of police, district attorney, and top judge of any area had to be neighbors and reside with their families in the worst part of town and without benefit of security details, would they continue to advocate for and pursue the implementation of the same beliefs about the administration of criminal justice? If not (and it's *obviously* not) then their current ability to signal these beliefs is a *luxury* they can afford by dint of their wherewithal, a privilege unavailable to the poor residents of those areas who must suffer the fallout of those elite decisions.
Anyone who claims to not understand any of that is just being deliberately obtuse.
Two points here: whether there is merit in the idea of "defunding" the police, and whether this is an "elite" belief with no regard for safety of the "non-elite".
One of literally thousands of examples:
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/7-myths-about-defunding-the-police-debunked/ (from the famously elite Tennessee State University and Texas Southern University -- or does their affiliation with Brookings infect them with the "elite" virus?)
You may absolutely oppose any reduction in police budgets - a lot of "elites" hold that view. You may support "stop and frisk"; Michael Bloomberg is as elite as they come. This does not divide on an elite vs non-elite axis. An analysis requires looking at crime rates in various jurisdictions, its relation to the police budget, criminal rights practices, and so on. And there are tradeoffs, like in any other policy choice.
Look at Minneapolis crime rate over a 60 year period:
https://minnesotareformer.com/2024/01/18/crime-fell-in-every-major-category-in-2023-according-to-early-data/
Please identify when "defund" went into effect and when it was reversed based on the chart :)
Segregation by income, social class, race etc. long predates any "defund" the police ideas, -- and there are non-nefarious explanations, other than the desire to live in safe communities and consign others to unsafe communities (Thomas Schelling won a Nobel for this work!)
Also, I think this is more like "I don't like this policy -- therefore proponents have nefarious motives in advocating for this". For example -- "I don't like the Iraq War -- and I bet you support it because your kids don't have to fight". Sure, your kids don't have to fight over there, but there may still be other legitimate reasons for fighting some war.
Those links you posted seem like the perfect example of a luxury belief. The Brookings Senior Fellow tells us that defunding the police will not lead to disorder. And yet your crime rates show that the post-Floyd hysteria episode in Minnesota just so happened to coincide with violent crime and homicide rates spiking back to or near historic highs that hadn't been seen since the early or mid 1990's. Any guesses as to what neighborhoods were most affected?
What on earth are you talking about with regard to Schelling? He won the Econ prize mostly for developing game theory insights into geopolitical relations and international conflict. Any connection to price discrimination's role in residential class segregation is extremely tenuous at best.
Again, some "elites" (unless you rewrite your definition once again to exclude ex-lawyer, ex-judge, ex-adjunct-professor, Gregory Abbott from the ranks of the "elite") believe the migrants are better off in the Rio Grande river.
You may think the United States should do more to stop the migrants from crossing, apprehend and return them to where they came from, withdraw from the 1951 UN Convention on Refugees, or whatever else you like, and others think the opposite. It does make either one of them elite or non-elite.
Unless "people I don't like" is the elite :)
Worst luxury belief I see in practice today is the idea that discipline is harmful. The result is anarchy in schools with a greatly reduced learning environment. In the quest to appease the 5% of troublemakers and their parent / guardian everyone loses.
Of course the elite send their kids to "good schools" where the culture supports a high expectation of behavior and bad behavior is disciplined.
I don't know. This looks to me like calling everything we don't like (and I am not minimizing the problems caused by disruptive behavior) a "luxury belief" of the "elite."
I think we've be better off just taking about the policy problems, leaving aside whether they originate in a "luxury belief.
That's the other key to a 'luxury belief'. As Charles Murray documented in Coming Apart, the UMC don't actually act on the beliefs they champion.
Do you not get how norms work?
If someone believes Jews are causing the nation's problem, a policy preference to cut them down is pretty automatic. If someone believes rich people have gotten their wealth unfairly, a policy preference to take some of it away is pretty automatic. If someone believes (it's 1941) Nazis are trying to conquer your country and are may be strong enough to do it, a policy preference to go to war against them follows pretty automatically.
These are not along some elite vs non-elite axis. This is just a general statement of how self government works -- there are representatives elected and they enact policies by some combination of interest group pressure / popular pressure / external threats / etc.
There is no dark insidious belief system by the elites harming us unwashed mouth-breathing masses.
I was not talking about an "elite vs non-elite axis". I was responding to Thomas L. Hutcheson's comment that ended, "And the damage from defund the police is not from the "belief" but from the policy. I think he should be talking about "luxury policy preferences."
If you believe a major reason for black people doing badly is the police, "defund the police" follows pretty automatically.
Ah, I misunderstood!
Upward mobility is the direct effect of increased wealth - see UK, Industrial Revolution, the greatest surge in prosperity and social progress ever. Because of it children were no longer seen as an easily replaceable source of cheap labour in the family economy, and women no longer needed to be almost constantly pregnant to ensure adequate supply given high child mortality rate. The bien-pensant class believe we should all be made less wealthy (impoverished) to concentrate on more virtuous ideas and activities….hence Net Zero.
I have thoughts similar to those expressed by Graham Cunningham. I sympathize with Rob Henderson and his experience and I completely agree that a supportive family and social environment is worth all the gold in the world. At the same time, we miss the key question if we only focus on what are obviously unhealthy environments for children.
The key question is what is a healthy environment for children? What should society provide to and expect from children? My assessment is our society / culture doesn't have the courage to answer this question honestly. What we get is mumbo jumbo that results in children learning many wrongs lessons and being ill prepared for adulthood. And this sorry result happens despite institutions and parents being excessively energized about the needs of children.
What I see is a failure of adults to recognize that what children need most of all is to be taught wisdom. Modern parenting and social welfare robs children of the opportunity to learn for themselves the consequences of their choices. And it is not even clear that this parenting protects children from negative feelings and doubts! Maybe, it is necessary for children to experience negativity and denying children of this, or thinking we can deny children of bad experiences, is selfish and wrongheaded.
My childhood had three phases:
Phase 1: The first 11 years were idyllic. Wonderful parents. Wonderful neighborhood. Good elementary school. Good friends. Excellent church. Life was bliss and magical.
Phase 2: The next five years were difficult. Same wonderful parents but they were not skilled in coaching their kids through puberty and in dealing with the social complexities of life. From grades 7 through 11 I felt a lot of social awkwardness. But I still had a good home to go home to and I had a few good friends and my church was exceptional. This phase taught me the importance of optimism and perseverance. In the midst of what I felt was a lot of crumminess I had good moments.
Phase 3: A positive awakening to adulthood. I enjoyed my senior year of high school as my social awkwardness wore off. Loved college and by my second year I actually started to make serious decisions that mattered. This yielded a moment I always remember when I had the epiphany that I had made and accomplished a significant goal all of my own doing.
So my question is. Is phase 3 possible without a phase 2? Can we expect kids to succeed on their own if they do not experience awkwardness and embarrassment? What kind of attitudes do people develop if they determine they should never feel inadequate?
I have not yet read his book but plan on it soon. I have much respect for Rob and others like him who are able to prevail over childhood adversity (or their own early bad choices). They are the few, those who can beat the long odds.
*My Goodreads review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6284569198?type=review#rating_699515137
It's pretty clear we DO need to focus on stable families, rather than education, as the optimal goal of policy for the reduction of poverty.
Ed stuff can help one achieve closer to their max IQ/ g potential, but everybody has a maximum. Tho focus on ed is, itself, a somewhat luxury belief.
There's only so many, few, spots at Harvard (or YPS; Ivies+), so the intense competition to get one of those spots is almost as bad as the reward of spending 2000 hrs / year playing basketball expecting to become and NBA pro. Get to Harvard? Get drafted by the NBA? For most folks ... ain't gonna happen, but second tier & even third tier colleges can help kids learn.
It's good that Rob has personal experiences which are uniquely his, yet can be seen as not so different from very tough problems many others have. Tho a statistic about 60% getting convicted of crimes, and only 3% finishing college, means being a boy in the CA foster care bureaucracy instability is a huge problem. My own family's divorces & alcoholism are a quite different set of dysfunction, but it seems my path out of that had lots of similarities to Rob's.
I hope Arnold is able to meet Rob. I met him in Budapest in the summer, and he was interesting to listen to and to talk to.
*Updated the next day, using the Edit from the right menu
The book Paying for the Party: How College Maintains Inequality (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16241465-paying-for-the-party) is written by two sociologists who understand well your point about college freshmen. They followed for a couple years an all-girls floor at a public university and show how hard it is for non-elites to succeed at a college, even with identical majors.
"upward mobility SHOULD be the side effect"? Is there any doubt that strong stable family is a strong indicator of upward social mobility?
I mostly agree on teenagers but doubt most very young children think much about the three things he lists.
The stress of moving from rural south to urban north sounded like a reasonable cause of unmooring until I thought about it 30 seconds. European immigrants before him and Hispanics immigrants after went through far more profound changes without nearly as much unmooring. Until you give a better explanation, I'm thinking it sounds like a racial generalization with very limited truth.
Swarthmore - Except they really weren't that different (besides accent). You grew up in a wealthy academic environment. I grew up on the fringe of Appalachia in the first generation to go to college. My brother went to Swarthmore and I went to Johns Hopkins. There were superficial differences between me and the metro NYC crowd. My parents were Lutheran and one of my two best friends was a NYC Jew. (Ironically, the other was from Potomac.) You sound like a black person complaining you were MADE TO feel different. It is mostly a choice.
I've not read that book ("Manchild in the Promised Land") and it sounds interesting, more so than the other book in question, much as I sympathize with Henderson's frustration. Unfortunately I'm cursed with only being interested in the past. I did read "Hillbilly Elegy" and there were passages I found worth reading aloud to my husband. But as women will, I've been reading the soapy details of other people's lives approximately since I was five years old, and I am pretty full up on that. A weird Texas murder will still draw me in once in awhile.
It's unfashionable to say so, since cities are supposed unquestionably to be the engines of prosperity, rather than parasitic and pathologizing - but to me the unmooring referenced in "Manchild" relates precisely to that rural/urban divide, and the very different patterns of life.
It's doubly unfashionable since the Great Migration to the cities is necessarily viewed in a positive light, because the American South was at one terminus of it. And one thing that will never alter as long as this country exists, is judgment of the South.
Basically "Hillbilly Elegy" drew me to the conclusion that the book in a way contains no lesson because these are people who are not going to turn out a J.D. Vance very often. They will, as he notes, turn out pretty good warriors, when required. They just are who they are, their potential is what it is.
Wherever there are hills ... And while greater paternalism would undoubtedly be for the good with regards to Vance's family, especially re drug use, it will only go so far, and the failure of a paternalistic model to penetrate or undo all subcultures was no reason to abandon it.
"Cedar Choppers: Life on the Edge of Nothing" by Ken Roberts, is a good regional book on the way people take their culture with them - there are various of these Little Appalachias strung across the country.
Throughout that book are attestations from others (who generally found them troublesome, insofar as they noticed them) that these guys (who made their living such as it was from cutting cedar and from operating stills) could work inhumanly hard, without a break, on no food. They just had no interest in doing that every day, and couldn't be made to care about "bourgeouis" respectability. Or nice things.
Where did these people go, and how does that connect up with the urban/rural business? I suspect that a lot of the people one sees in cities living on the sidewalk and so forth, near the drug markets, might be just that, some of those sorts of people depicted in the Vance book, the Roberts book. They shunned norms, to a degree, but it was in the city where their problems with modernity are magnified.
People don't have enough to do, in the city. Law school really doesn't generalize.
I should add that a book AK might review, that really landed with me was "Glass House" by Brian Alexander. Think of it as a footnote on the constant drumbeat of good economic news, and a footnote to Vance. The opening chapter or two - which relate some Vance-like details of dysfunctional lives - is the least interesting, actually, but keep going. (Or maybe that was because it was on the heels of reading Sam Quinones' terrific "Dreamland" that I read it, and truthfully, drug use itself, though not the twisting means by which drugs are obtained, is, narratively, a little dull.)
"Glass House" demonstrates that the paternalism need not come from government. One of my favorite quotes was from a cranky, dying glass factory owner, childless, when his estate planner asked what he wanted to leave the town - a hospital? An auditorium?
Not really anything, was the answer. "I gave them all those jobs, didn't I?"
And then the story continues with the sort of people who indeed enjoy making big, showy philanthropic gestures. But would balk at the idea that you would ever "give jobs". That's for the global market to decide.
And the townspeople themselves, collectively - exercised a kind of community solidarity, in service to the now-discarded norm that a man is best kept busy - when one of the factories burned down in the 20s - and the town raised the dough to rebuild it, themselves, lest they lose their jobs.
I am not going to try to answer your question. I just want to note that fame is a huge stressor on a relationship. I am always impressed when I hear of someone famous who has actually been married a long time. And there is huge stress on their kids, too, of course.
Let's say I'm skeptical "fame is a huge stressor on a relationship." Do you have any evidence of this? Note, even if data showed famous people are more likely to divorce, that doesn't mean it results from fame.
I suspect whether it is a stressor on their kids depends on environment. Maybe he wasn't so famous then but were Warren Buffett's kids stressed? What about kids around Hollywood who have lots of friends with famous parents? Are kids of politicians affected in the same way as actors or pro athletes? What about kids of famous academics, news personalities, and writers? small town mayor's kids?
It seems self-evident to me, but no, I haven't looked around for studies on the subject. As for the kids, I see a lot of kids of rich/famous people who are really messed up. Not messed up in the way of Rob Henderson and his friends, more like overly entitled, snobby, etc. And if your parents are really rich, successful, whatever, and you are not... that's a lot of stress.
And what about all the rich kids who aren't messed up? How much do you see them? Do you think maybe your set is biased?
Are we talking about kids of famous people or rich people? You seem to have switched. They aren't the same. Regardless, it's kind of hard for an average kid of average parents to be snobby. Kind of have to be noticeably above average in some way.
Let's just go back to what I initially said -- that that fame causes a lot of stress in a relationship, and on the famous person's kids. That doesn't mean that every relationship and every kid is doomed, but it still seems obvious to me that it is likely to cause problems. Fame and riches, both. Maybe it's just me, but when I see a movie about a rich person or celebrity falling in love with an "ordinary" person, I think "that's nice, but how could it last?" They come from different worlds, which is additional stress beyond all the normal stresses that break up most marriages.
Actually, you said it's a huge stressor. Nobody is denying fame is one of a very long list of stressors. Is it huge? Maybe but I'm skeptical that it is. Wealth is highly correlated with marriage so that one more likely works in the OPPOSITE direction.
One obvious facet - a celebrity's attention is demanded by exponentially more people than your average person. That is attention at the expense of their children and spouse. I grew up in and around Hollywood, friends with married parents in the industry were the exception.
You are very much into the territory of correlation, not causation. We hear many stories of bad behavior of famous athletes but accounting for their background, are they more likely to misbehave or less than non-famous? Is fame the real stressor or long hours committed to their pursuit? Or could it be the correlation between creative types and psychological issues? You could indeed be right but you've put forth no compelling evidence. I remain skeptical fame is a huge component of what we see.
I could make a number of solid recommendations whose insights and advice have proven accurate and valuable in my own personal life and in the lives of a number of acquaintances. Alas most of those folks have been declared double-plus ungood unpersons, and for many of them, the quality of their output after a clear peak period really collapsed for a variety of different reasons, so not only does one have to be open-minded enough to push through some very strong psychological barriers due to social desirability bias, but then one also has to be discerning enough to tell the gold from the dross. Additionally, the focus of much of the writing is about improving one's sex life which may seem only tangentially relevant or a small factor contributing to maintaining a stable and happy married relationship, but this is getting it backwards, the sex life improvement is a consequence of creating the necessary conditions and psychological basis that are the indispensable foundation of long term intersexual relationships, and of being able to recognize the early warning signs and effectively deal with the various kinds of powerfully instinctive urges to play status-gap testing games and to create particular kinds of relationship psycho-drama. All that throat-clearing out of the way, Athol Kay in his prime is not a bad place to start.
Dalrock had tons of material on this subject in his old blog (floruit early 2010's), which he had been keeping up in read-only mode in response to readers' pleas. Unfortunately, the other day I discovered that at some point this winter he took it down and told Internet Archive to delist it, so it is no longer available.
While an understandable choice, that is nevertheless a real tragedy given the high value and quality of his writing. Someone blogging as "The Man Who Was Thursday" used to write a lot of smart things in the subject a long time ago, but was one of the first to have all his stuff flushed down the memory hole.
https://www.amazon.com/Married-Man-Life-Primer-2011/dp/1460981731
There was a time I was reading his blog Married Man Sex Life., and I think it helped a bit with keeping my marriage happy. Nice polite people don't talk so much about sex, and I'm not sure that's so bad -- I want a society of nice, polite, and sexually satisfied people.
Not sure of his status now, his blog is gone: http://marriedmansexlife.com/
Four big destabilizers are deviation from the sweet spot of an optimal status gap, lack of confidence in that gap, perceptions that one has easy, viable alternative options to one's partner, and the weight of social influences and judgments in one's scene. These are all key elements of the complicated game of survival and reproduction and the related powerful impulses for how to play that game are hard-wired into human instinct. Most of the other things people believe to be relationship stressors are "elephant in the brain" rationalizations and cover stories for trouble with these underlying factors which one are not supposed to discuss explicitly. When people genuinely believe they are effectively "shipwrecked" (as one of the Inklings put it) with each other, they experience an automatic psychological reset in perspective and suddenly find it much easier to be satisfied and happier by both turning their lemons into lemonade. This stabilizing influence is easy to observe in cute old couples who depend on each other and who know on some level they have no other place to go. If we want to encourage people to pair early and stay paired and experience this kind of long term stable contentment with each other and by consequence to produce children and create the family environment most conducive to their upbringing, then there is little alternative but to take away a lot of those destabilizing possibilities that were introduced in long course of expanding sexual liberation. More choice doesn't always make people happy: sometimes it makes it impossible for people to be happy. And anything that makes happiness impossible is a mistake at best and evil in effect.
"take away choices" works, when practiced.
https://www.romania-insider.com/bbc-biertan-marital-prison-romania
"Biertan, a beautiful village in Romania’s famous region Transylvania, had its own remedy for divorce: a ‘marital prison’ where couples whose marriages were not working anymore were locked up for weeks to solve their issues.
BBC wrote a story about Biertan’s ‘medieval remedy for divorce’, telling readers that, although it sounds like a nightmare, the solution was quite effective as only one couple divorced in 300 years. The local bishop was the one locking the people in the tiny prison, where they would spend six weeks working to bring their marriage back to life. While in there, they were supposed to share everything, from a single pillow and table to the lone table setting."
-- but today's consumerized society believes choice & freedom always are better, despite often having worse results for many.
I thought you might go a different direction. When I read his mention of divorce, my first thought was that divorce involves two people. How much does it tell us about one of them?