Shut up about Luxury Beliefs

Elites have a lot of bad ideas -- but the "luxury beliefs" framework is not helpful

By now, anyone who is remotely interested in cultural discourse should be familiar with the concept of “luxury beliefs”. Last week its originator, Rob Henderson, was featured in The Spectator, talking about this concept. In this piece, he defines luxury beliefs thus:

Luxury beliefs are ideas or causes a genuinely privileged person espouses, safe in the knowledge that they’re insulated from their effects… America is awash with luxury beliefs: defund the police, legalise drugs, decriminalise shop-lifting etc

In other articles and podcast appearances, he also includes social liberalism (leniency towards divorce, hook-up culture, etc) as “luxury beliefs”.

Unlike most critics of the concept, I agree with Rob on a lot of the substantive complaints he has: for example, I believe the idea of defunding the police is irresponsible, and that the elites who support it essentially engage in a form of dereliction of duty. But the concept itself has metastasized in a rather unfortunate way in general discourse. Most annoyingly, I can see how it’s quickly morphing into the social conservative’s version of the “oppressed - oppressor” dichotomy in the way it’s being used in debate. The actual merit of one's argument becomes irrelevant; the sole requirement is to demonstrate that their views benefit the elites, whether tangibly or theoretically, to invalidate their stance. Consequently, ideas are summarily dismissed as originating from the indulgent perspective of a luxury belief haver. And literally anything can be construed as such. A quick search on X for "luxury belief" reveals that a wide array of positions, from opposing anonymity to identifying as a Christian and even liberal democracy itself (?!), can be dismissed as luxury beliefs. 

Everything can be a luxury belief if you are creative enough

Some may contend that the core idea was initially sound but has been diluted by its widespread acceptance, becoming a casualty of its own popularity and straying from its original intent through oversimplification. But I think “luxury beliefs” is an intrinsically promiscuous concept and the way it can be so easily manipulated to fit whatever the interlocutor wants to prove is tied to its foundational flaws. Its empirical foundations are rather shaky: it’s simply not the case that we have witnessed a historical shift towards elites signalling with beliefs rather than material goods or that elites are somehow unique in using nonmaterial things for signalling purposes. The concept also ends up conflating a wide range of beliefs motivated by very different sentiments, ranging from radical leftist thought to libertarian ideas. This muddying of the delineation between different concepts is what ends up making the term “luxury beliefs” more confusing than useful. And, ultimately, it is guilty of underestimating the power of Ideas to capture minds and encourage those in their thrall to buy into at times ridiculous visions — even when said visions go against their own self-interest. This is possible because sometimes the most powerful form of signalling is not to others, but to oneself: “Yes, I am a good person for believing this.”

Nothing new under the sun

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To begin with, I think the empirical facts behind the luxury beliefs theory are wrong. For example, take what Rob describes in one article to be the process through which luxury beliefs took hold of today’s elite:

In the past, people displayed their membership of the upper class with their material accoutrements. But today, luxury goods are more accessible than before. This is a problem for the affluent, who still want to broadcast their high social position. But they have come up with a clever solution. The affluent have decoupled social status from goods and reattached it to beliefs.

He seems to identify a fundamental divergence between how elites perform signalling now compared to how they used to, implying a degree of coordination between members of the upper classes to enact such a change: “The affluent have decoupled social status from goods and reattached it to beliefs.” To test whether elites actually managed to cleverly orchestrate such a shift in our society, I challenge luxury beliefs truthers to imagine the following scenario: there’s a room full of normal, middle-class people. One guy starts dropping hints about having sent his kids to an exclusive private school everyone knows only super rich people have access to. Another guy starts talking about how he wants to defund the police. Who will the average people ascribe more status to? It’s not just that the answer is clearly the first guy, but the second one will probably be seen as a bit of a looney person. Now, one could argue that there is a subset of well-educated elites that cannot afford material markers of status, so in the absence of that they use “luxury beliefs.” But even then, what is going to impress people more: a guy who talks about having studied at Harvard and who has moderate views on police or someone who went to a random community college and is very passionate about police defunding? Again, the answer is clearly the first. There simply are much better ways to signal one’s status, however you decide to look at this.

So no, I don't think elites have suddenly shifted to exclusively using extreme leftist ideas to signal their status to the world at large.

To the extent that some elite groups have dropped material means as a way of signalling status (think of SF techbros and academics dressed slovenly and making a point out of not really spending much time on their appearance), they have mainly been replaced by showcasing access to other scarce resources. The SF techbro might look like a poor person, but he will surely brag about the amount of funding his company got, whether he got invited to the party of an important person in Silicon Valley and so on. Similarly, the academic hierarchy is established by how many papers one publishes and where. Again, this is possible, because there is a limited amount of articles that get published in Nature, so those will serve as good status markers within the elite. By contrast, beliefs are not scarce at all, as Bryan Caplan points out: anyone can say they believe anything!

Still, it is true that elites also signal with beliefs. But there are three key points here that contradict the luxury beliefs theory as originally formulated.

Firstly, beliefs are more of a signal of belonging to a group or to fit in, than a way to order people within a group or to display status externally. You might need to repeat certain orthodoxies to be accepted in a group, but there are diminishing returns to doing so once you have been accepted. The hierarchy within that group will then be determined by access to things that are scarce (like academic papers in Nature, big founding rounds, connection to important people.)

The other key point is that the practice signalling group loyalty through non-material means, such as shared ideologies, is not exclusive to the elite; indeed, it's a widespread behaviour seen at all levels of society. Drop a pampered, private school educated boy into a working-class neighbourhood and he will surely be bullied for what would be considered “effeminate” manners. Ironically, the anti-elitist online right frequently engages in its own form of in-group social signalling that often leads to them straying away from the truth.

Another part of the luxury beliefs theory that I take issue with is the implication that there has been an increase in the amount of nonmaterial-based allegiance signalling among elites. This is pretty clear from how the original theory was formulated: “In the past, people displayed their membership of the upper class with their material accoutrements.? (…) But they have come up with a clever solution. The affluent have decoupled social status from goods and reattached it to beliefs.”

It’s hard to quantify this with precision, but any familiarity with history would suggest elites have always used both material and nonmaterial goods to signal to each other and there hasn’t been a sudden switch recently. This is where the trope of the socially ostracized nouveau riche — someone who gets rich but has not really internalized the behavioral and cultural patterns of the elite — comes from. Almost all social novels of the 19th century (think Pride & Prejudice, Anna Karenina, Vanity Fair) include a subplot about a character that seeks to climb the social ladder, only to find that material possessions are not enough to be considered part of the elite — he or she must also change their behavior (and yes, their beliefs), to truly be “one of them.” 

What I do agree with Rob on is that the beliefs of the elite carry disproportionate weight and are frequently adopted for reasons other than their veracity. Regardless of exactly why detrimental ideas are embraced, the reality persists: if the elites adhere to misconceptions or harmful ideologies, the consequences will be disproportionate and can affect everyone — even the elites themselves. 

Luxury versus variance maximizing beliefs

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Again, with Emergent Ventures, I’m interviewing young people from ages 16, often through 25, through 30, five to eight times a week, every week of my life. They’re just awesome. They’re way better than kids were in my time. They’re smarter, they’re more productive, they’re more attentive, they’re more disciplined. I see there are problems at the median, but they’re just better in every way, and I don’t see how that fits into your account.

This is the reply Tyler Cowen gives to Jonathan Haidt in their contentious debate on the merits of phones and social media for teenagers.¹ Listening to the podcast, there is something that percolates through it, and that something goes deeper than any empirical disagreement they might have (and they do have plenty of those). It seems like Tyler is internally screaming at Jonathan Haidt: “But are you thinking of the benefits to the best kids? And the wondrous positive spillovers letting these children be free to explore their passions might have for the entire world? Maybe the bright young kids who are set free by the internet will solve ageing.” Meanwhile, Haidt seems to scream back “BUT WHAT ABOUT THE AVERAGE CHILD??”

Unsurprisingly, Rob considers support for technology use a luxury belief²:

Later, I would connect my observations to stories I read about tech tycoons, another affluent group, who encourage people to use addictive devices while simultaneously enforcing rigid rules at home about technology use. For example, Steve Jobs prohibited his children from using iPads. Parents in Silicon Valley reportedly tell their nannies to closely monitor how much their children use their smartphones.

In the realm of values, there’s a contrast between those valuing freedom and those prioritizing the protection of everyone at all costs. At times, these goals align; but often, they present a trade-off: immediate greater freedom can lead to tougher times for those least prepared to navigate it. This is the dark side of embracing variability. In the long run, however, the spillovers from variance maximization can be huge and positively impact everyone. This is particularly evident in the context of free markets, where today, even individuals at the lower end of the wealth spectrum in developed countries have access to healthcare and products vastly superior to what was available historically. But free markets also create more inequality!

The Western liberal tradition itself could be considered a variance maximization “luxury belief.” In his book The WEIRDest People in the World, Joseph Henrich posits that the dismantling of kin-based institutions by the Western Church fostered the rise of individualism by weakening familial ties and promoting impersonal, broad-based social norms and trust, fundamentally altering societal structures in the Western world. This focus on individualism and relying more on oneself than one’s kin is clearly variance maximizing: the least conscientious people with the poorest judgement would probably be better off having a spouse chosen by their parents, being married off at 22 and benefitting from extended kin support all their life. Some security and a minimal amount of life satisfaction is guaranteed. But climb further along the talent distribution and the catastrophic consequences of a deeply conservative society rear their ugly heads. Imagine for example if Katalin Kariko was forced to marry at 20 and give up her interests to have kids.

In some sense, variance maximizing beliefs that many classical liberals and libertarians hold fit perfectly with Rob’s definition of what a luxury belief is, since those who are expected to benefit most from freedom tend to be overrepresented among elites. But then “luxury beliefs” is also used to describe an entirely different class of ideas: radical leftist ones like “defund the police” or “decriminalize shoplifting”— which a subset of the elite does indeed hold. These are very different in nature from the variance maximization strategies I described — they do not balance extreme upside with extreme downside, mostly because there is no upside to anyone in such measures, apart from maybe career criminals.

The concept of luxury beliefs ignores the fact that the kind of sentiments that animate radical leftist and libertarians are incredibly different. There is a fundamentally Randian sentimentality for the extraordinary that is to be found in those who appreciate freedom, an acknowledgement that Genius is not only rare and precious, but also immensely fragile, that the Roarks of the world are incredibly vulnerable to the machinations of the Tooheys. This could not be more different than the sentiments animating radical leftism. The latter are the same people who want to ban math because it leads to some kids outperforming others — clearly they are not concerned with maximizing upside or helping the extraordinary reach their potential. 

Not malicious, but lazily well-intentioned

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Underlying sentiments and motives is another area where the “luxury beliefs” concept is mistaken: it suggests elites consciously adopt bad ideas because they know a priori that the implementation of these ideas won’t hurt them. This assumed nefariousness of elites is never really spelled out directly, but is heavily implied by language like: “they (elites) have come up with a clever solution” or “safe in the knowledge that they’re insulated from their effects”, which verges on conspiratorial³. This is a common issue with many critiques of elites: their tendency to attribute beliefs to intricate, strategic reasoning, or "4D chess.”

However, I'm skeptical that ideologies are adopted in such a calculated manner. Instead, they're more likely to be shaped by vibes, social dynamics, and the need to belong. Over time, ideologies evolve into forces with their own momentum, exerting influence that transcends materialistic interpretations. That’s because signalling to oneself that “Yes, I am a good person” can be an incredibly powerful behavior motivator. This concept is perfectly showcased when examining the "defund the police" movement. Indeed, as applied specifically to the defunding the police paradigm, a Manhattan Institute study finds that: “in areas with high levels of violent crime, support for defunding the police generally falls for all groups except white Democrats.” This clearly suggests that even when confronted with the consequences of their beliefs, this group persists in their ideas, because they think they are morally correct.

It is true that defunding the police leads to worse outcomes in working class neighbourhoods, as centre-left commentator Matthew Yglesias points out.⁴ It is also true that denying such a reality is easier when one is insulated from confronting it day-to-day — but while this might explain why elites continue to hold certain views, it doesn't fully account for how these beliefs initially emerge or spread. “Never attribute to malice that which can be attributed to conformism” is a good rule of thumb when it comes to explaining virtue signalling dynamics. Many frustrating beliefs held by college students stem from a sincere, albeit misguided, desire to better the situation for those less fortunate. This intent is unfortunately often accompanied by a certain laziness—both in terms of not rigorously assessing the impact of the policies they support and in exhibiting significant social conformism.

Matt Yglesias correctly describes defunding the police as a faux-generous idea, without resorting to the rather inaccurate “luxury belief” framework

While these nuances may seem trivial or unimportant, accurately identifying the motives behind why people believe what they do is important. Understanding that elites are not inherently malicious or driven entirely by selfish interests, but rather lazily well-intentioned, suggests that the focus for improvement should be on shifting cultural attitudes and allowing elites to be effortlessly imbued with the right vibes, rather than endlessly bashing them. To be clear, I am not trying to absolve elites of responsibility when they hold incorrect ideas; at the end of the day, there is a limit where intent ceases to matter and outcomes become more important. But blame elites for the right reasons: laziness, conformism and ignorance, not strategic planning.

Not everything is a “class struggle”

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Social conservatives often criticize liberals for fitting all issues within a binary of oppressor and oppressed, or privileged and underprivileged — a repurposing of the old “class struggle” doctrine. This approach, they argue, sidesteps the core merits of different arguments, turning debates into contests of victimhood. One of the most annoying things about the “luxury beliefs” concept is that it has now become another transmutation of the old class struggle idea, rebranded to appeal to conservatives! This is bad. Not everything must be understood as a binary conflict between the elite and the nonelite (indeed, most things are not), and being on the side of the nonelite is not an automatic proof of righteousness. What’s more, almost any belief that does not explicitly seek to improve the lives of the working class will be instantiated in a more glamorous way among the elites. Conversely, they will be insulated from its worst consequences — this reality is a non-trivial reason why people want to become elites. So the concept is very amenable to being weaponized in whatever way people find convenient and has become a sort of ad hominem of online discourse based on the fact that no one wants to be seen as “hurting the weak.” Again, very similar to the oppressor/oppressed binary. 

Wanting people to stand up for their ideas with their real name is apparently a “luxury belief” now

Let’s consider the decrease in social and legal barriers to divorce that has been taking place for the last decades, often considered to be a “luxury belief” by social conservatives, because it affects children of low socio-economic status more. But just as easily, one can look at the rates of domestic violence among working-class versus upper middle-class women and conclude that raising the barriers to divorce is a luxury belief, since elite women are more insulated from the consequences of catastrophic marriages and domestic violence.⁵ Sometimes social conservatives argue that we should not really care that much about adults and focus entirely on the welfare of children. When they do this, they like to cite studies that show that even when controlling for family income, children raised in one parent households fare worse. I do not really find this convincing because it does not get rid of confounders: the kind of families that end up divorcing differ in important ways from those who do not, beyond income. For example, one of the parents might be physically violent or emotionally abusive. So what you would want is some sort of “natural experiment,” wherein otherwise identical families were either forced to separate or stay together due to a completely exogenous shock. Suffice to say, that’s hard to find. To the extent that such natural experiments have been carried out, they mostly conclude that the long-term adverse effects of separation are not causal, but rather due to other factors that correlate with divorce.

I think this is an important, substantive debate to have. It might be that the “optimal rate” of divorce is lower than what we have now, although I also believe that ideal rate is not zero. My personal view is that we are glamourizing marital dysfunction to an unhealthy level and not extolling the benefits of relationships enough, something I have written about before. But these things are bad in and of themselves — regardless of one’s social class. Having good relationships is an important part of life satisfaction and while elites might be able to better navigate harsh circumstances in the absence of support, that does not make their lives any less empty if they cannot forge meaningful connections. So my preference would be that popular culture was more explicitly pro healthy relationships. But this game of “you’re the luxury belief haver! No, you are!” does little to get at the actual core questions about where our culture is heading.

Towards better elites

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I’ve spent a lot of time criticizing the concept of “luxury beliefs”, but the truth is, a phrase does not become this popular without reason. In the last 12 years or so, liberal elites have become prone to hysterically moralizing in ways that do not seem to be reflected in better outcomes for the people they claim to be interested in helping. I imagine someone like Rob must have felt incredibly annoyed to go to Yale and get screamed at by entitled students about the struggles of people from low-income communities — communities that he belonged to. So there is a pent-up frustration with this pointless moralizing that elites often engage in that makes a lot of people angry. It is this visceral annoyance that has been powerfully captured by the luxury beliefs concept. And even though I strongly disagree with him on the accuracy of the term, Rob is also fundamentally right to identify some of these views as harmful. 

However, echoing Jeff Giesea's perspective in his essay, the solution isn't to descend into chaos, but to cultivate better elites. Recognizing elites as imperfect, fallible individuals rather than malevolent, entirely self-serving creatures, and placing them within an accurate historical narrative is important. What we need is a shift towards a discourse that is more rational and centered on the factual essence of issues. Adopting yet a new instantiation of the old class struggle framework to interpret the world is unlikely to contribute positively towards that objective.

1. TLDR: Haidt thinks they are disastrous and suggests ways in which phone access should be regulated, Tyler is more skeptical.

2. In the case of those who own technology companies, support for tech cannot even be considered a “belief”, but rather a direct money-making strategy. Again, the issue with the term “luxury beliefs” is that it seems to conflate very different things.

3. “The affluent have decoupled social status from goods and reattached it to beliefs.” -is another sentence that assumes elites have much more centralised power than they actually do.

4. Again, I would like to remind everyone that elites at large do NOT support defunding the police. It’s only a subset of academics, edgy college kids and non-profit types that do.

5. High income women are almost 2 times less likely to have experienced domestic violence than low income ones.