Luxury Beliefs are Real

We just need a better definition. Here’s mine.

The news cycle has been genuinely nuts in the past weeks, and I’ve shared a good number of topical articles and podcast conversations with you. But what I’m most looking forward to in this new space is to write ambitious essays about big ideas that don’t need a news hook—essays like this one.

If you want to help make this project a success, please spread the word by forwarding this email to three friends or family members. Thank you for reading! 

- Yascha

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A luxury good on a campus that values luxury beliefs. (Why are AI renderings always so ugly in the exact same way?) Source: Dall-E.

In his excellent memoir, Troubled, the psychologist Rob Henderson recounts the alienating experiences he had as a mature student from a poor background at Yale University. One classmate told him that it was hopelessly outmoded for people who want to raise kids to prefer monogamy. Henderson, who spent much of his early childhood in the foster system, was taken aback. How, he wondered, thinking back to the chaos and heartbreak of his own childhood, could this girl fail to understand how important a stable family structure is to human flourishing? He pressed the classmate, who had grown up in an intact family, on her own life plans. Personally, she responded, she did plan to enter a monogamous marriage.

Henderson soon encountered political ideas that touched on different areas of social life but were, he felt, similarly performative. Students who hail from extremely safe neighborhoods argued that we should abolish the police. Classmates who loved to talk about how much they hate capitalism went on to stellar careers with J.P. Morgan or Goldman Sachs.

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All of these different ideas and positions, Henderson came to think, are “luxury beliefs.” As he explained on my podcast a few months ago,

Luxury beliefs are defined as ideas and opinions that confer status on the affluent while often inflicting costs on the lower classes. And a core feature of a luxury belief is that the believer is sheltered from the consequences of his or her belief. There is this kind of element of duplicity, whether conscious or not.

Once upon a time, Henderson argues, the upper classes used to signal their status by purchasing expensive material goods. But as the kinds of goods that used to be reserved for members of the upper classes have become available to a much wider stratum of society, the affluent and highly educated have resorted to different status symbols to signal their superior standing. This is why luxury beliefs—jargon-heavy political slogans calling for positions that are widely unpopular among the general population—have substituted for luxury goods.

The concept of luxury beliefs achieved a feat shared by few neologisms: it entered “the discourse.” It is now frequently invoked on social media. It has been used in a key speech by a British Home Secretary. It has its own Wikipedia page.

What Shocked Me About the Culture at Yale

But “luxury beliefs” have also become a victim of their own success. As a series of critics from Noah Smith to W. David Marx have argued, the concept’s popularity has made the charge that something is a “luxury belief” morph into an all-purpose epithet, with social media users applying it to all kinds of views they happen to dislike.¹ And that is at least in part because something about the original definition doesn’t quite seem to add up.

There are two primary problems with Henderson’s definition, particularly its emphasis on social status. First, it is unclear how effective these beliefs actually are as a way to signal superior social status. Ruxandra Teslo, the concept’s most trenchant critic, for example, challenges us to picture a cocktail party:

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?

The answer, she suggests, is obvious: It’s the guy who has access to luxury goods, not the one who goes on about kooky luxury beliefs. (Although the best description of the situation, as I argue below, is a bit more subtle than either Henderson or Teslo suggests.)  

Second, the emphasis on social status implicitly ascribes nefarious motivations to people who embrace luxury beliefs. At times, it even seems to push Henderson to the insinuation that those who profess particular luxury beliefs are consciously lying about what they believe. At least some of his classmates who decried capitalism only to take jobs in finance, he argues in his memoir, “were broadcasting the belief that such firms were evil in order to undercut their rivals. If they managed to convince you that a certain occupation is corrupt and thus to be avoided, then that was one less competitor they had in their quest to be hired.” But many people who embrace luxury beliefs appear to be perfectly sincere about them; and even if some are not, a concept which requires us to make an armchair psychological diagnosis of a person’s underlying motivation before being able to use it would lose much of its utility.

These two problems pose a serious challenge to the concept of luxury beliefs. For it to hold water, it cannot make sociologically dubious assumptions about the role that such political positions play in accruing status in society. Nor can it make psychologically dubious assumptions about the true motivations that drive those who hold luxury beliefs.

Is it, as Teslo bluntly put it, time to “shut up about luxury beliefs?”

No.

A Better Definition of Luxury Beliefs

There is a good reason why the concept of luxury beliefs has become so popular so quickly, one that goes beyond the fact that Henderson is a compelling writer: It really does capture something important about politics. There are all kinds of ideas and policies that would have bad effects if implemented. But there is a special class of bad ideas and policies that proliferate in good part because those who hold them, being insulated from their effects, have never seriously thought about the consequences that would ensue from their implementation. The reason why the concept of luxury beliefs has resonated so widely is that it gives a name to people who treat as a parlor game questions that potentially have very serious consequences—just not for themselves. In other words, these beliefs are a luxury not because they are costly to acquire or serve predominantly to accrue social status but rather because those who hold them have the luxury to adopt them without being exposed to their real-life consequences.

Henderson’s examples are primarily drawn from the American culture wars he is—for understandable reasons—most interested in. But the concept’s potential utility is much wider than that. Indeed, it’s easy to think of examples of luxury beliefs drawn from different geographical or ideological contexts:

• Western environmentalists campaigning to stop poor African nations from cultivating genetically modified foods in part because nobody they know suffers from life-threatening malnutrition or blindness-inducing vitamin deficiencies.

• Affluent conservatives opposing the idea that the state has a responsibility to help citizens access medical care in part because they and their loved ones have never been unable to see a doctor for financial reasons.

• European pacifists who hate the United States for the country’s “militaristic culture” in part because the security guarantee provided by Uncle Sam has long absolved their own nations from the need to defend themselves.

A big part of what makes these examples so enraging is that they share a strong whiff of hypocrisy. When confronted with a particular luxury belief, its critic wants to scream: “You think you’re such a great person because you hold onto these radical views of yours, and yet you haven’t even taken the time to think through what would actually happen if we adopted them?!” 

So to rescue the concept of luxury beliefs, we need to capture the core of the intuition that has made it so popular, while circumnavigating the problems with its current definition. Here is my suggestion for a definition of luxury beliefs that accomplishes both of these purposes:

Luxury beliefs are ideas professed by people who would be much less likely to hold them if they were not insulated from, and had therefore failed seriously to consider, their negative effects.

What Luxury Beliefs Are (and Aren’t)

When trying to define a concept in a rigorous way, it’s important to distinguish between what makes up its essence and what is merely typical of it. 

Ferraris, to give a simple example, are typically red. Anyone who wants to understand the car’s cultural connotations needs to know that. And so it’s hardly surprising that, when I asked Dall-E for a picture of a “Ferrari on the Yale campus,” the options it generated all featured a red car. But if I were to propose a definition of what makes a car a Ferrari which stipulates that it must be red, my error would be obvious. If I bought a red Ferrari and painted it blue, nobody in their right mind would claim it had ceased to be a Ferrari.²

The same is true for many of the elements which Henderson has mistakenly made part and parcel of the definition of luxury beliefs. In today’s United States, it may well be typical of luxury beliefs that they are widespread among the elite, and that many of those who profess them are engaged in status games. But if we want the idea of luxury beliefs to endure beyond the present moment and geographical context, we must resist the temptation of baking such features into the concept’s core definition. In that spirit, here are a few observations about what is, and isn’t, entailed in my own definition of luxury beliefs.

1. The Elite

Luxury beliefs are a characteristic feature of the contemporary American elite, or at least a certain segment of it. But this does not mean that somebody needs to be elite in order to embrace a luxury belief.

Let us stipulate, for the sake of argument, that English majors at Yale are especially likely to embrace the belief that it is good to defund the police, and that they are also likely to enjoy lives of affluence and influence. While they might choose to live in an “edgy” neighborhood upon graduation, they have the money and social networks to move to a safer place if they prefer—and typically do so once they are a little older. They clearly hold a luxury belief.

Now, let’s imagine a middle school English teacher in Kansas. She got her teaching degree from a local community college, earns an average salary, and lives in a reasonably safe, if thoroughly undistinguished, neighborhood. But since she reads literary novels, subscribes to lefty magazines, and listens to a certain kind of highbrow podcast, she too believes that we should defund the police. Though she may not be as characteristic an example of the phenomenon—not all Ferraris are red, remember—it is surely true that she too holds a luxury belief. This obvious point is something we would need to deny if we insisted on making elite status part of the very definition of a luxury belief; and that’s precisely why the elite status of those who embrace luxury beliefs should not be part of the concept’s core definition.

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2. The Search for Status

On Henderson’s definition, the social signaling function of luxury beliefs is part of their nature. Their whole point, he says, is that they “confer status on the affluent.”

Henderson is, I think, right that luxury beliefs do often confer social status on those who hold them. Indeed, some of his most astute critics obstinately miss the force of that observation. Take Teslo’s example of the cocktail party, which we considered earlier. Surely, she is right that the profession of luxury beliefs cannot compensate for steep differences in social status. But that is precisely why they play the biggest role among people who have a similar level of material or professional success. The lawyer who sends his kids to a fancy private school doesn’t need luxury beliefs to feel superior to the mailman who sends his kids to the local public school; he needs them to compete with the doctor whose kids attend the same private school as his own.³

So luxury beliefs do often confer social status on those who hold them. But that doesn’t mean that their tendency to do so should be seen as part of their core definition. Some people who adopt such beliefs may be highly status-conscious and succeed in raising their social standing thanks to adopting such views. But others may simply be naive about the world, going along with the consensus of their peers without thinking about it too much. They may even miscalculate, professing their beliefs in front of an audience that laughs at them in response.

Once it becomes clear that those who hold luxury beliefs need not be engaged—or if they are, need not succeed—in status-seeking, the concept loses the conspiratorial undertones that have understandably worried its critics. Rightly understood, the concept of luxury beliefs remains agnostic about the underlying motivations of those who hold them. Some may indeed be nefarious; but, like Teslo, I suspect that most are merely naive or morally unserious.

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3. Not Just a Left-Wing Problem

One common criticism of the concept of luxury beliefs is that it has become a lazy way for conservatives to beat up on liberals and progressives. As W. David Marx complains, nearly all of the examples of luxury beliefs given by Henderson “are associated with liberals on college campuses or professionals in coastal urban areas.” And yet, he believes, “ideas associated with ultra-wealthy conservatives, not young liberals, inflict the highest costs on poor people.” 

Critics like Marx are right that the concept of luxury beliefs has largely been taken up by conservatives. And it is surely also true that some conservative political positions could equally classify as luxury beliefs. Conservatives who oppose greater public funding for mental health, for example, don’t tend to live in the neighborhoods which have to deal with a great number of mentally unwell people roaming the streets.

Still, the fact that the concept of luxury beliefs could fruitfully be employed in many different ideological contexts surely is not a reason to doubt its usefulness. On the contrary, it is a reason for more liberals and progressives to make use of it for their own purposes.

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The Right Kind of Disagreement About Luxury Beliefs

Some concepts, like liberty or democracy, are “essentially contested.” Because they have a positive connotation, people with a particular vision of politics will always try to make it serve their own ends. And since we won’t ever agree on our ultimate vision for politics, we’re also likely to keep disagreeing about how to define those terms.

The concept of luxury beliefs falls into a similar, but subtly distinct, category. We can, I think, arrive at a coherent definition of the concept that should be acceptable to people of widely varying ideological predilections; I’ve made my best attempt at doing so in this essay. But even once we agree on the most coherent definition of the term, we will, because of its inherently evaluative nature, likely continue to disagree about the best way to apply it.

We should all be able to recognize that the concept of luxury beliefs is intellectually useful and, if defined with a bit of care, coherent. But because we will have persistent disagreements about the nature of the social world, we will continue to disagree about, for example, whether a specific belief like “people need not get married if they have kids” constitutes a luxury belief.

The concept of luxury beliefs, in other words, isn’t essentially contested. But, to coin a new phrase, its applications are likely to be persistently contested. And that, it seems to me, is a feature rather than a bug: to call an idea a luxury belief is to raise a certain kind of suspicion about its nature, one that should deepen—rather than end—the debate about it.

1. Ruxandra Teslo and other critics are right that the concept is used in too broad a way on social media; but that, of course, is a feature of social media much more than it is a feature of this particular concept. If you judged the coherence or usefulness of a wide variety of concepts—from socialism to facism, and from freedom to justice—by the way that people on social media use them, you’d end up dismissing all of those as well. The right response to the inflationary use of such concepts in political debate is not to expunge them from our vocabulary; it is for those of us who are trying to think seriously about the world to be more judicious in how to use them.

2. The same goes for definitions of more complex social phenomena. A lot of populists, for example, enjoy disproportionate support among lower middle-class voters; but while strong electoral performance among that segment of the population is characteristic of populism, it should not be seen as part of its definition.

3. This, along with their relative paucity of life experience, helps to explain why luxury beliefs play such a large role among undergraduate as well as graduate students. Since, relative to peers at the same school, they have few external markers of achievement to point to, their need for demonstrating their social status in less tangible ways is especially high.