Hmm I would strongly disagree I am eager to absolve elites of their "guilt". See what I wrote here:
> To be clear, the purpose of this essay is not to absolve elites of their role in perpetuating harmful false beliefs. Laziness is in itself a sin and at some point responsibility for one’s actions and beliefs must kick in. But I think having an accurate understanding of why things go badly in society is important. Accepting the “lazily well-intentioned” theory implies very different courses of action in terms of how we can improve the epistemic habits of elites compared to the 4D chess one.
In general, I don't think intention is all that matters, so to me being morally lazy is an issue. But having the wrong model about how these beliefs arise and devolving into conspiracy theories about people deliberately plotting things is just wrong in terms of the fact that it doesn't reflect the truth as it is.
Lastly, I'd like to add that many of these beliefs affect elites as well. The beliefs around marriage for example. Many people I know have bad relationships because of overly critical views of the other gender promoted in large part by elite fashionable beliefs. Do they divorce and cause harm in their kids to the same extent this happens in poorer families? No. But elites are not insulated from the harms of their beliefs. Affirmative action is another example of a belief that is internalised by the same elites that are in a strict sense affected by it more (white women for example are somewhat hurt by affirmative action, as a recent paper shows.)
I think a bad model of the world is a bad model of the world, though I agree luxury beliefs serves an instrumental purpose because it does seem very good at pushing back against some of these ideas.
I'd say the main way that luxury beliefs affect the upper classes is "lost potential".
Sure, they don't get divorced. But they are marrying less often, later in life, and having fewer children. There is an invisible graveyard of things not done in life to reduce divorce risk.
The same could be said about their attitudes on drugs, education, careers, and COVID.
I had a friend that drove alone in a car three hours to see me wearing and N95 mask (and he wasn't crazy before this). That's not the end of the world, but it sure was uncomfortable (and for his young kid a miserable few years).
They often don't end up in the gutter over this stuff like the poors, but they often live lives that are much worse than they could have been.
Rich people always gonna split, as far as I can tell. There have always been upper class women who tired of obligation or their husband’s ever more foolish philandering and went off to a convent, etc. Or in the 20th century, the elective stay in the sanatorium. Usually she supplied five or six children before that.
I think it’s the classes below where, I shouldn’t have to cook or care for the children and you, husband, should listen to me expatiate on the subject all the time - breaks up marriages that might have lasted.
I see an effect of the ideology against motherhood all the time because of a particular window I have into the final wishes of childless people, often Boomers, who have no one to leave their estate to. With land, this will often take the form of “I will make a foundation that will (continue x, whatever it is: introduce children to nature, camp for disabled children, nature preserve).” The latter I endorse of course - but the best course is to leave it to an existing group, rarely to create one de novo that will struggle to survive, that your similarly aged relatives are the trustees of.
You will often find that these people are proud of what their parents taught them about service or about nature, etc.
And the obvious best course of action would have been to transmit whatever that is they are trying to keep alive in the world, to kids of their own. (And pass the land onto them, with a conservation easement.)
But they didn’t have kids.
This has nothing to do with cats or stereotypes about loneliness. I do sense loneliness sometimes but often people have enjoyed thriving social lives. Or maybe they were too prickly for a relationship. That’s why early marriage and kids are important, before you settle into the course of life from which there’s no turning back.
A course that becomes easier to follow as people have fewer children and the money is settled on fewer descendants, so often down to one …
I imagine this goes on in other domains but I happen to be typing this as a guest in a beautiful place where exactly such considerations loom: for whom did I, and they before me, do this? Who will continue it, for me?
As a parent of a daughter who finally decided to have her own child after 10 years of marriage not wanting kids, I sympathize with much of what you said.
"Gonna split" might have some truth but it misses the point. Wealthier people are less likely to divorce. On top of that they are more likely to remarry. Pretty sure they are also more likely to marry in the first place. In the end they are far more likely to be married.
Ok, if that were a sizable percent of rich households, maybe it would be important but I don't think it is nor ever was. Either way, if the estranged parents are keeping up appearances, they almost have to both be involved with the kids.
I think the luxury beliefs are derived from a single “luxury axiom”: that we live in a deterministic world in which no individual has agency. Our choices and destiny are pre-determined by our sexual orientation and our social environment.
Therefore, there is no sense trying to teach or judge or reward behavior. The elites are simply privileged while minorities and poor people (including criminals) are unfortunate victims of circumstance and nothing can change that. The only thing elites can do is gently help them get through their miserable lives.
One caveat to that is that elites holding these beliefs tend to think no-agency applies to others, not themselves. A possible caveat to my caveat is that this seems less common among the young but maybe that is just the ones who mistakenly get grouped with the true elites.
That does seem like a suspiciously monocausal explanation to me. Life’s rarely that simple.
That’s not to say that turning up the volume on personal responsibility ethic all over society would be a bad idea, it might be a very good one, if done at least half-intelligently.
What's missed in the "luxury beliefs" bundle is that there are important and powerful interests that often spend a lot of money to create them as part of public relations campaigns. For example, in my previous career, I worked in PR. In the course of promoting a book by a famous executive, we also went to work in touting the special qualities of her husband in ways that complemented the message of her book by placing many articles about him. This connection and purpose was never disclosed, nor did it have to be disclosed. But part of the art of influencing the population is to be indirect.
Many luxury beliefs are like this. Walmart, Home Depot, the cereal company, the cola company, the meatpacking company, the grocery company, all need low skill immigration. They cannot just say "we need to import illegal labor, ideally child labor, of any quality, from the worst places in the world, in unlimited quantities, without controls, at least for a limited period of time to bring labor costs down." No one would go out and say that in an undisguised way (except for Bryan Caplan; Tyler Cowen makes this kind of argument in a more indirect way in "Average is Over"). However, you can promote beliefs that make it possible for you to get the policy that you want by placing articles, videos, streams, and movies into the cultural river. You make a climate refugee movie, you amplify the speech lines about "kids in cages," and presto, you get your kids on the assembly line. Hell yeah!
The luxury beliefs are like this and result from this process, and so I think it's disingenuous to blame the marks for being worked effectively. If you think the problem is the luxury belief, you are picking a fight with the wrong people. One group of people are highly effective and totally cynical professionals representing the most wealthy and powerful people in the world, and the other group are just wine moms.
If every illegal Haitian immigrant in Massachusetts were deported, most every nursing home would close the next day--and just about every "home health aide" service would drastically downsize. It's not just the big, bad corporations that "need low skill immigration".
Of course, an economist would tell you that no one *needs* low skill immigration. There are no jobs that Americans won't do, even clamor to do, if the compensation is high enough. But to make it high enough would bankrupt many families, not to mention Medicaid.
Thinking about it a little more ... extend that deportation to all illegals and you hit a lot of small businesses, all the mother's little helpers, house cleaners, landscapers, restaurants ... In the short run, all that low skill immigration brings up the standard of living of a lot of natives.
Sure, and a lot of powerful interests like the financial industry advocate for policies that benefit entities like small construction and lawn care companies. These are weighty issues. This kind of problem is why the successors to the Articles of Confederation negotiated the 3/5ths compromise. The best politicians of the mid-19th century tried to develop a reasonable settlement for the type of issue that the immigration issue represents and those negotiations famously broke down.
What can you do? People just love cheap laborers with curtailed legal rights.
Even Bryan Caplan doesn’t get on CNN and argue for Gulf States style slave caste. He says this stuff on his blog where only a few sympathetic nerds will read it.
"Walmart, Home Depot, the cereal company, the cola company, the meatpacking company, the grocery company"
These companies may use and benefit from low-skill immigration but they don't need it except for maybe meatpacking. They can get more interest by increasing wages. The employers who need it are ones short of other employees willing to do the work, including lots of agricultural work, many household jobs, and probably meatpacking.
L* is not a good example. I think very few people believe L* in the sense that if the could choose the family structure of others they would be indifferent between stable two parent families and others.
I agree. But I think many, many people hold the belief, "Other things being equal, children do best in a stable two-parent household. But other things are never equal. There are so many situations where this is not true. E.g., 'children do worse when parents are always fighting than when they get divorced.' So I won't criticize. I won't judge what others do."
Which reduces the cultural support for stable two-parent families.
I suspect few if any believe we can't do anything about it. They believe we shouldn't do anything about it, largely or entirely for fear of harm it might do to families without two parents. They generally understand it used to be different and worked to end that perceived and somewhat real harm.
This could potentially be ameliorated with better data. I think the impression that people (especially on the left) have is that the costs of a couple staying together are higher than they actually are.
And conversely, the costs of splitting up are systematically underrated. Which talks directly to L*.
Some kids will be better off if their parents split up. But most (and probably many of the parents) would be better off if their parents stay together. The societal presumption should be utilitarian.
It could be mostly ameliorated if there weren't so many people, especially the most vocal and involved, who take one of the extreme views without a willingness to consider something in the middle. That said, yes, better data would definitely help too.
My slightly conspiratorial, unhinged view is that Western politics now very much contains a patron-client dynamic between certain groups of upper and lower class people. The propagation of beliefs/practices/cultural norms which actively harm the clients in this relationship are in turn beneficial to the patrons, because it cements the relationship between them by keeping the former dependent on the latter. That is the essence of a luxury belief: to be a proponent of such cultural norms and be able to deceive one's self about what's actually happening.
Re: "luxury beliefs are a subset of fashionable beliefs. Luxury beliefs require a lot of cultural capital to obtain."
However, an example you adduce — the belief that children don't need to be raised in a traditional, stable, two-parent family in order to thrive — doesn't require a lot of cultural capital to obtain. People don't have to go to university to obtain this belief. Many people who lack education have such a belief; and a substantial fraction of them duly have children out of wedlock, and disregard 'the sequence of success.' The belief is part of large subcultures that have very little overlap with "luxury" in the standard sense of the word.
True, a fraction of single, educated, career women nowadays deliberately have a child on their own (perhaps unbeknownst to the biological father) in their thirties. They do so because they don't want to "marry down," but the low ratio of educated men to educated women has left them unable to make "a good match."
I would emphasize that beliefs adapt to realities shaped by other social mechanisms, such as technology shock (e.g., new contraception), assortative mating, emulation of celebrities, tipping points, sideward glances, and so on.
PS: Compare another criticism of Rob Henderson's concept: Bryan Caplan, "What's Really Wrong with 'LuxuryBeliefs'":
I think L* is kind of a weakman description of what you're getting at-- you're missing an opportunity here to be both more charitable and insightful about where beliefs around childrearing come from.
Pedantry first: L* is obviously _true_ as stated. Plenty of children *do* thrive in family environments other than a stable, two-parent family! It's just that the odds are against it. So you might restate your luxury belief as:
L**: the belief that kids are no more likely to thrive if raised in a stable two-parent family than otherwise.
L** is indeed false and would be socially damaging if widely acted on, but you'll be hard pressed to find anyone who actually believes it-- it doesn't pass the intellectual Turing test.
A much more widely believed variation is:
L***: kids raised in a stable two-parent family do indeed have better odds of thriving. But this isn't because stable two-parent families are inherently better for kids and parents could and should make better choices to help secure such family environments for their kids. It's because of structural factors (economic inequality, discrimination etc) that correlate with family stability or lack thereof, and that parents have no control over.
This is a thing that people on the left actually widely believe, AFAICT from reading e.g. a bunch of reviews of Melissa Kearney's book. And the denial of parental agency-- the treatment, as you might put it, of parents as moral patients rather than moral agents-- is the plausible mechanism of harm here. The self-fulfilling prophecy of the external locus of control is the problem.
Now, to show that L*** actually does harm, you'd have to show that left-elite belief in L*** really causes low-income people to abandon agentic behaviors they might otherwise engage in that would give their kids better odds of stable families. This is prima facie plausible, but it is very far from obviously true, and a weakness of typical arguments about luxury beliefs is that they don't provide evidence for this connection.
"Henderson's" Luxury Beliefs thesis. It is one thing to credit Einstein with The Theory of Relativity but socio-psychological insights are of a different, more widely diffused kind. I think Henderson is a case in point. He is an impressive young intellectual (I subscribe to his 'stack) but I first came across the essence of the 'luxury beliefs' thesis in a book written in the early 1990s by Myron Magnet. Equally its essence could perhaps have been a pearl of wisdom you picked up from your Granny and Grandad reflecting on their long life observing human nature.
Where Henderson may deserve special credit is for the specific rhetorical formulation of the idea, which captures in concise form the essential irresponsibility of it.
Magnet's "the Dream and the Nightmare: The Sixties' Lagacy to the Underclass" had a quote something like, "when the rich sneeze, the poor catch cold." A teenager from an affluent family, with a good deal of cultural support, could live out "if it feels good do it" for a while and not suffer lasting damage. There would be someone there to "catch him when he falls" and to provide money when necessary. A poor person might just fall and not really get up.
Except for your L*, there is not evidence that this idea started with elites, spread to the general population, and then changed the general population’s behavior. Please see here:
I understand that this is a compelling narrative, and I have few doubts that Rob Henderson and kids like him would have better childhoods were they raised by two parents who loved them. But I do not see evidence that this is something that elites “did” to regular people by adopting and then popularizing a harmful belief. And I think that about most of Rob’s original examples, which makes me think luxury belief is not useful as a category of beliefs.
The proposition L* is clearly false. I, for instance, spent most of my childhood in a single-parent family that was a big improvement over the previous two-parent, one-breadwinner dysfunctional family. I thrived, eventually earning a PhD from a prestigious chemistry department and finding great success in corporate America. I know many others who have had similar experiences.
Luxury beliefs is a useful way to identify those beliefs which privileged folk have that, when put into policy or a norm, hurt the less privileged. Rich & high IQ elite beliefs & norms which hurt poor and/or low IQ folk.
More immigration reduces the market value wages of low IQ Americans, hurting them.
Fewer marriages & more kids outside of marriage hurt those kids, on average.
Many elite opinions are less harmful, so are not luxury beliefs, and the hurts or not are a good focus for arguments about the beliefs.
>L*: the belief that children do not need to be raised in a traditional, stable, two-parent family in order to thrive.
How much evidence is there that this is actually a widespread belief? The version I have heard is that stable same-sex two-parent families are okay or at any rate better than the orphanage. I don't think single parenthood is being celebrated.
I wonder if it is a matter of framing. Suppose the real luxury belief is "You will find enduring love in marriage." Would you really castigate elites for expounding that belief?
Should elites say, "yeah, you and your spouse will probably fall out of love. You'll probably cheat on each other. But you should turn a blind eye and stay together for the sake of the children"?
No, elites should say, "Life is tough. There is no such thing as a "soul mate". You will go through bad times when it will seem best to break up. But focus on the positive, really talk to your spouse and try to work things out, because there was a reason you thought you loved the person, and you will probably be happier if you work things out and stay together."
Arnold writes: You typically have to go to a university in order to obtain the fashionable beliefs about “privilege,” “microaggression,” and “the patriarchy.”
In my experience over the past decade, even decades after leaving university plenty of mid-life folks across lower to upper classes participate in adopting these beliefs and attitudes. They act as a kind of social "litmus test" that determines the extent and kind of interaction in which certain people will engage. These people are what used to be called "snobs," now with a new attitude ...
Hmm I would strongly disagree I am eager to absolve elites of their "guilt". See what I wrote here:
> To be clear, the purpose of this essay is not to absolve elites of their role in perpetuating harmful false beliefs. Laziness is in itself a sin and at some point responsibility for one’s actions and beliefs must kick in. But I think having an accurate understanding of why things go badly in society is important. Accepting the “lazily well-intentioned” theory implies very different courses of action in terms of how we can improve the epistemic habits of elites compared to the 4D chess one.
In general, I don't think intention is all that matters, so to me being morally lazy is an issue. But having the wrong model about how these beliefs arise and devolving into conspiracy theories about people deliberately plotting things is just wrong in terms of the fact that it doesn't reflect the truth as it is.
Lastly, I'd like to add that many of these beliefs affect elites as well. The beliefs around marriage for example. Many people I know have bad relationships because of overly critical views of the other gender promoted in large part by elite fashionable beliefs. Do they divorce and cause harm in their kids to the same extent this happens in poorer families? No. But elites are not insulated from the harms of their beliefs. Affirmative action is another example of a belief that is internalised by the same elites that are in a strict sense affected by it more (white women for example are somewhat hurt by affirmative action, as a recent paper shows.)
I think a bad model of the world is a bad model of the world, though I agree luxury beliefs serves an instrumental purpose because it does seem very good at pushing back against some of these ideas.
I'd say the main way that luxury beliefs affect the upper classes is "lost potential".
Sure, they don't get divorced. But they are marrying less often, later in life, and having fewer children. There is an invisible graveyard of things not done in life to reduce divorce risk.
The same could be said about their attitudes on drugs, education, careers, and COVID.
I had a friend that drove alone in a car three hours to see me wearing and N95 mask (and he wasn't crazy before this). That's not the end of the world, but it sure was uncomfortable (and for his young kid a miserable few years).
They often don't end up in the gutter over this stuff like the poors, but they often live lives that are much worse than they could have been.
Rich people always gonna split, as far as I can tell. There have always been upper class women who tired of obligation or their husband’s ever more foolish philandering and went off to a convent, etc. Or in the 20th century, the elective stay in the sanatorium. Usually she supplied five or six children before that.
I think it’s the classes below where, I shouldn’t have to cook or care for the children and you, husband, should listen to me expatiate on the subject all the time - breaks up marriages that might have lasted.
I see an effect of the ideology against motherhood all the time because of a particular window I have into the final wishes of childless people, often Boomers, who have no one to leave their estate to. With land, this will often take the form of “I will make a foundation that will (continue x, whatever it is: introduce children to nature, camp for disabled children, nature preserve).” The latter I endorse of course - but the best course is to leave it to an existing group, rarely to create one de novo that will struggle to survive, that your similarly aged relatives are the trustees of.
You will often find that these people are proud of what their parents taught them about service or about nature, etc.
And the obvious best course of action would have been to transmit whatever that is they are trying to keep alive in the world, to kids of their own. (And pass the land onto them, with a conservation easement.)
But they didn’t have kids.
This has nothing to do with cats or stereotypes about loneliness. I do sense loneliness sometimes but often people have enjoyed thriving social lives. Or maybe they were too prickly for a relationship. That’s why early marriage and kids are important, before you settle into the course of life from which there’s no turning back.
A course that becomes easier to follow as people have fewer children and the money is settled on fewer descendants, so often down to one …
I imagine this goes on in other domains but I happen to be typing this as a guest in a beautiful place where exactly such considerations loom: for whom did I, and they before me, do this? Who will continue it, for me?
As a parent of a daughter who finally decided to have her own child after 10 years of marriage not wanting kids, I sympathize with much of what you said.
"Gonna split" might have some truth but it misses the point. Wealthier people are less likely to divorce. On top of that they are more likely to remarry. Pretty sure they are also more likely to marry in the first place. In the end they are far more likely to be married.
There is an art to being separated and not divorced, particularly in the past.
Ok, if that were a sizable percent of rich households, maybe it would be important but I don't think it is nor ever was. Either way, if the estranged parents are keeping up appearances, they almost have to both be involved with the kids.
I think the luxury beliefs are derived from a single “luxury axiom”: that we live in a deterministic world in which no individual has agency. Our choices and destiny are pre-determined by our sexual orientation and our social environment.
Therefore, there is no sense trying to teach or judge or reward behavior. The elites are simply privileged while minorities and poor people (including criminals) are unfortunate victims of circumstance and nothing can change that. The only thing elites can do is gently help them get through their miserable lives.
Blank slate-ism + luxury axiom is the default combo of beliefs. On average, people have both more and less agency than we'd like to believe, I guess.
One caveat to that is that elites holding these beliefs tend to think no-agency applies to others, not themselves. A possible caveat to my caveat is that this seems less common among the young but maybe that is just the ones who mistakenly get grouped with the true elites.
That does seem like a suspiciously monocausal explanation to me. Life’s rarely that simple.
That’s not to say that turning up the volume on personal responsibility ethic all over society would be a bad idea, it might be a very good one, if done at least half-intelligently.
I agree saying a single cause oversimplifies. Maybe it isn't even primary but it still seems insightful and noteworthy.
What's missed in the "luxury beliefs" bundle is that there are important and powerful interests that often spend a lot of money to create them as part of public relations campaigns. For example, in my previous career, I worked in PR. In the course of promoting a book by a famous executive, we also went to work in touting the special qualities of her husband in ways that complemented the message of her book by placing many articles about him. This connection and purpose was never disclosed, nor did it have to be disclosed. But part of the art of influencing the population is to be indirect.
Many luxury beliefs are like this. Walmart, Home Depot, the cereal company, the cola company, the meatpacking company, the grocery company, all need low skill immigration. They cannot just say "we need to import illegal labor, ideally child labor, of any quality, from the worst places in the world, in unlimited quantities, without controls, at least for a limited period of time to bring labor costs down." No one would go out and say that in an undisguised way (except for Bryan Caplan; Tyler Cowen makes this kind of argument in a more indirect way in "Average is Over"). However, you can promote beliefs that make it possible for you to get the policy that you want by placing articles, videos, streams, and movies into the cultural river. You make a climate refugee movie, you amplify the speech lines about "kids in cages," and presto, you get your kids on the assembly line. Hell yeah!
The luxury beliefs are like this and result from this process, and so I think it's disingenuous to blame the marks for being worked effectively. If you think the problem is the luxury belief, you are picking a fight with the wrong people. One group of people are highly effective and totally cynical professionals representing the most wealthy and powerful people in the world, and the other group are just wine moms.
If every illegal Haitian immigrant in Massachusetts were deported, most every nursing home would close the next day--and just about every "home health aide" service would drastically downsize. It's not just the big, bad corporations that "need low skill immigration".
Of course, an economist would tell you that no one *needs* low skill immigration. There are no jobs that Americans won't do, even clamor to do, if the compensation is high enough. But to make it high enough would bankrupt many families, not to mention Medicaid.
Thinking about it a little more ... extend that deportation to all illegals and you hit a lot of small businesses, all the mother's little helpers, house cleaners, landscapers, restaurants ... In the short run, all that low skill immigration brings up the standard of living of a lot of natives.
Sure, and a lot of powerful interests like the financial industry advocate for policies that benefit entities like small construction and lawn care companies. These are weighty issues. This kind of problem is why the successors to the Articles of Confederation negotiated the 3/5ths compromise. The best politicians of the mid-19th century tried to develop a reasonable settlement for the type of issue that the immigration issue represents and those negotiations famously broke down.
What can you do? People just love cheap laborers with curtailed legal rights.
Even Bryan Caplan doesn’t get on CNN and argue for Gulf States style slave caste. He says this stuff on his blog where only a few sympathetic nerds will read it.
A lot of PR is audience targeting.
"Walmart, Home Depot, the cereal company, the cola company, the meatpacking company, the grocery company"
These companies may use and benefit from low-skill immigration but they don't need it except for maybe meatpacking. They can get more interest by increasing wages. The employers who need it are ones short of other employees willing to do the work, including lots of agricultural work, many household jobs, and probably meatpacking.
L* is not a good example. I think very few people believe L* in the sense that if the could choose the family structure of others they would be indifferent between stable two parent families and others.
I agree. But I think many, many people hold the belief, "Other things being equal, children do best in a stable two-parent household. But other things are never equal. There are so many situations where this is not true. E.g., 'children do worse when parents are always fighting than when they get divorced.' So I won't criticize. I won't judge what others do."
Which reduces the cultural support for stable two-parent families.
"They only appear to believe L* because they literally can't do anything about it" isn't much of an argument.
I suspect few if any believe we can't do anything about it. They believe we shouldn't do anything about it, largely or entirely for fear of harm it might do to families without two parents. They generally understand it used to be different and worked to end that perceived and somewhat real harm.
This could potentially be ameliorated with better data. I think the impression that people (especially on the left) have is that the costs of a couple staying together are higher than they actually are.
And conversely, the costs of splitting up are systematically underrated. Which talks directly to L*.
Some kids will be better off if their parents split up. But most (and probably many of the parents) would be better off if their parents stay together. The societal presumption should be utilitarian.
It could be mostly ameliorated if there weren't so many people, especially the most vocal and involved, who take one of the extreme views without a willingness to consider something in the middle. That said, yes, better data would definitely help too.
My slightly conspiratorial, unhinged view is that Western politics now very much contains a patron-client dynamic between certain groups of upper and lower class people. The propagation of beliefs/practices/cultural norms which actively harm the clients in this relationship are in turn beneficial to the patrons, because it cements the relationship between them by keeping the former dependent on the latter. That is the essence of a luxury belief: to be a proponent of such cultural norms and be able to deceive one's self about what's actually happening.
Only very slightly!
Re: "luxury beliefs are a subset of fashionable beliefs. Luxury beliefs require a lot of cultural capital to obtain."
However, an example you adduce — the belief that children don't need to be raised in a traditional, stable, two-parent family in order to thrive — doesn't require a lot of cultural capital to obtain. People don't have to go to university to obtain this belief. Many people who lack education have such a belief; and a substantial fraction of them duly have children out of wedlock, and disregard 'the sequence of success.' The belief is part of large subcultures that have very little overlap with "luxury" in the standard sense of the word.
True, a fraction of single, educated, career women nowadays deliberately have a child on their own (perhaps unbeknownst to the biological father) in their thirties. They do so because they don't want to "marry down," but the low ratio of educated men to educated women has left them unable to make "a good match."
I would emphasize that beliefs adapt to realities shaped by other social mechanisms, such as technology shock (e.g., new contraception), assortative mating, emulation of celebrities, tipping points, sideward glances, and so on.
PS: Compare another criticism of Rob Henderson's concept: Bryan Caplan, "What's Really Wrong with 'LuxuryBeliefs'":
https://www.betonit.ai/p/whats-really-wrong-with-luxury-beliefs
I think L* is kind of a weakman description of what you're getting at-- you're missing an opportunity here to be both more charitable and insightful about where beliefs around childrearing come from.
Pedantry first: L* is obviously _true_ as stated. Plenty of children *do* thrive in family environments other than a stable, two-parent family! It's just that the odds are against it. So you might restate your luxury belief as:
L**: the belief that kids are no more likely to thrive if raised in a stable two-parent family than otherwise.
L** is indeed false and would be socially damaging if widely acted on, but you'll be hard pressed to find anyone who actually believes it-- it doesn't pass the intellectual Turing test.
A much more widely believed variation is:
L***: kids raised in a stable two-parent family do indeed have better odds of thriving. But this isn't because stable two-parent families are inherently better for kids and parents could and should make better choices to help secure such family environments for their kids. It's because of structural factors (economic inequality, discrimination etc) that correlate with family stability or lack thereof, and that parents have no control over.
This is a thing that people on the left actually widely believe, AFAICT from reading e.g. a bunch of reviews of Melissa Kearney's book. And the denial of parental agency-- the treatment, as you might put it, of parents as moral patients rather than moral agents-- is the plausible mechanism of harm here. The self-fulfilling prophecy of the external locus of control is the problem.
Now, to show that L*** actually does harm, you'd have to show that left-elite belief in L*** really causes low-income people to abandon agentic behaviors they might otherwise engage in that would give their kids better odds of stable families. This is prima facie plausible, but it is very far from obviously true, and a weakness of typical arguments about luxury beliefs is that they don't provide evidence for this connection.
"Henderson's" Luxury Beliefs thesis. It is one thing to credit Einstein with The Theory of Relativity but socio-psychological insights are of a different, more widely diffused kind. I think Henderson is a case in point. He is an impressive young intellectual (I subscribe to his 'stack) but I first came across the essence of the 'luxury beliefs' thesis in a book written in the early 1990s by Myron Magnet. Equally its essence could perhaps have been a pearl of wisdom you picked up from your Granny and Grandad reflecting on their long life observing human nature.
Where Henderson may deserve special credit is for the specific rhetorical formulation of the idea, which captures in concise form the essential irresponsibility of it.
Magnet's "the Dream and the Nightmare: The Sixties' Lagacy to the Underclass" had a quote something like, "when the rich sneeze, the poor catch cold." A teenager from an affluent family, with a good deal of cultural support, could live out "if it feels good do it" for a while and not suffer lasting damage. There would be someone there to "catch him when he falls" and to provide money when necessary. A poor person might just fall and not really get up.
Henderson.
He's all your.
A worthwhile read on "virtuous lies" and the overlap with "luxury beliefs"
https://unsafescience.substack.com/p/living-by-virtuous-lies-on-the-racism
Except for your L*, there is not evidence that this idea started with elites, spread to the general population, and then changed the general population’s behavior. Please see here:
https://jaredpbarton.substack.com/p/luxury-beliefs-isnt-a-necessary-idea
I understand that this is a compelling narrative, and I have few doubts that Rob Henderson and kids like him would have better childhoods were they raised by two parents who loved them. But I do not see evidence that this is something that elites “did” to regular people by adopting and then popularizing a harmful belief. And I think that about most of Rob’s original examples, which makes me think luxury belief is not useful as a category of beliefs.
The proposition L* is clearly false. I, for instance, spent most of my childhood in a single-parent family that was a big improvement over the previous two-parent, one-breadwinner dysfunctional family. I thrived, eventually earning a PhD from a prestigious chemistry department and finding great success in corporate America. I know many others who have had similar experiences.
Luxury beliefs is a useful way to identify those beliefs which privileged folk have that, when put into policy or a norm, hurt the less privileged. Rich & high IQ elite beliefs & norms which hurt poor and/or low IQ folk.
More immigration reduces the market value wages of low IQ Americans, hurting them.
Fewer marriages & more kids outside of marriage hurt those kids, on average.
Many elite opinions are less harmful, so are not luxury beliefs, and the hurts or not are a good focus for arguments about the beliefs.
>L*: the belief that children do not need to be raised in a traditional, stable, two-parent family in order to thrive.
How much evidence is there that this is actually a widespread belief? The version I have heard is that stable same-sex two-parent families are okay or at any rate better than the orphanage. I don't think single parenthood is being celebrated.
I wonder if it is a matter of framing. Suppose the real luxury belief is "You will find enduring love in marriage." Would you really castigate elites for expounding that belief?
Should elites say, "yeah, you and your spouse will probably fall out of love. You'll probably cheat on each other. But you should turn a blind eye and stay together for the sake of the children"?
No, elites should say, "Life is tough. There is no such thing as a "soul mate". You will go through bad times when it will seem best to break up. But focus on the positive, really talk to your spouse and try to work things out, because there was a reason you thought you loved the person, and you will probably be happier if you work things out and stay together."
Arnold writes: You typically have to go to a university in order to obtain the fashionable beliefs about “privilege,” “microaggression,” and “the patriarchy.”
In my experience over the past decade, even decades after leaving university plenty of mid-life folks across lower to upper classes participate in adopting these beliefs and attitudes. They act as a kind of social "litmus test" that determines the extent and kind of interaction in which certain people will engage. These people are what used to be called "snobs," now with a new attitude ...