I’m really excited to release my first podcast! Occasionally, I will do podcasts with special guests, exploring themes which have featured on my Substack.

This week, I had the pleasure of speaking with Rob Henderson, an academic and essayist who is well-known for his theory of luxury beliefs. Rob is doing a PhD in psychology at the University of Cambridge and writes essays for a range of online outlets. In a series of essays which have gone viral, Rob has introduced the concept of luxury beliefs. Luxury beliefs are ideas that confer status on the rich at very little cost, while taking a toll on the lower class.

One example of luxury belief is that all family structures are equal. This is not true. Evidence is clear that families with two married parents are the most beneficial for young children. And yet, affluent, educated people raised by two married parents are more likely than others to believe monogamy is outdated or that all families are the same. Defunding the police is another example of a luxury belief.

You can listen to the podcast on the player above, or there’s a transcript below.

Tom: So Rob, thank you so much for joining us. If we could start with a general introduction to the concept of luxury beliefs, and perhaps you can also talk about your own background, because you’ve had an extremely interesting life.

Rob: Sure. Thanks again, Thomas, for welcoming me here today. Well, my idea of luxury beliefs I define as ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class while often inflicting costs on the lower class. I can give a few examples of this as we move along here. But the way that I arrived at this idea was through my unique life experiences and my interactions with students and graduate at elite universities. Right now I’m a fourth year PhD student about to finish my program here at Cambridge. Before this, I studied psychology at Yale as an undergrad, and I worked as a research assistant at Yale. Before my entrance into these posh universities, my life was a lot different.

I was born into poverty in Los Angeles. My mother was an immigrant from South Korea, and she became addicted to drugs, she didn’t know who my father was, I never met him, and when I was three she was no longer able to care for me, so I was placed into foster care in LA and spent my early childhood living in just a bunch of different foster homes all around the city. Some of these homes had 8-10 kids living in them, a lot of foster siblings, a lot of kids coming and going, it was really tough for me as a kid.

I was adopted by a working-class family when I was almost 8, and we settled in this rural town in northern California called Red Bluff. It’s consistently ranked as one of the most dangerous cities in California. My adoptive parents, we sort of had this nice little family together, but then they got divorced a couple of years, about a year and a half later, and my adoptive father subsequently severed ties with me. He was angry at my adoptive mother for leaving him. So that was hard on me, after not knowing my birth father, and then the foster homes, and then losing my adoptive father. It was just a really tough life. My adoptive mother, we subsequently moved into a duplex, and I was raised by a single mom for a while, and there was just a lot of drama and disorder all throughout my youth.

So, when I was 17 right after I graduated high school, I joined the military out of desperation, just to get out of all of this stuff I’d been mired in. All of my high school friends were in similar situations, in families and home life, just completely falling apart. All of us were doing very badly in school. So I left, enlisted, and then long story short, that process of military helped me get my life together and get on a better track. And that was how I ended up attending Yale and Cambridge.

So those experiences have shaped the way that I view the system, my interactions with these students. And, as well, my readings of these classic sociological texts, as well as more modern research from psychology. So, Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class, Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction, Paul Fussell’s Class: A Guide to the American Status System. And then you have recent research from psychology indicating that higher status, wealthier individuals tend to be the most preoccupied with status. And so, I became just extremely interested in exploring this idea of why it is that there are these interesting class divisions in political and moral views, and how things should be.

And the way that I think about it is, luxury beliefs are the new status symbol. In the past, the upper class displayed their status and their social rank with their material goods, and today they still do so to some extent, but as material goods have become more affordable, it’s a less reliable indicator of class. So now, affluent people, elite students of these top universities and the like, they display their positions now with luxury beliefs, which are these sort of novel and unusual beliefs, but they often have detrimental secondary consequences, these knock-on effects for people who don’t have access to the same kinds of resources.

Tom: That’s fascinating. You had an amazing life, and I recommend listening to Rob’s podcast with Bari Weiss for more on his life story. But today we’re really going to dig deep into the ideas. In your writings and podcast appearances, you emphasize economic drivers of luxury beliefs. But you’re a psychologist, of course. You’ve just submitted a psychology PhD at Cambridge. And so, I was wondering, can you tell us a bit more about the psychological drivers of this phenomenon, and also how they articulate with economic drivers? With regard to recent political developments, there’s a lot of talk about economic drivers. But in something like right populism, the academic literature shows that economic factors aren’t actually that great a predictor of right populist views. Unfortunately, there’s not much research at all on liberal or left-liberal views, but it’s a fascinating question, so if you can elaborate on that a bit.

Rob: It’s an interesting question. I guess there are different ways of thinking about it from a psychological perspective. So, I mentioned some research earlier. There’s this research from Cameron Anderson, I think at Berkeley, who’s basically found – and not just Anderson, but others – that the most highly ranking people in society, the people with the most wealth and the most prestigious occupations and high social standing, if you ask them questions about how interested they are in having influential positions, or power over others, or control over resources or all those other things, they’re the most interested in those things, which is perhaps a little counterintuitive. I think I would have predicted in advance that the people of the lowest end, the lowest rung of society would be the most interested in obtaining influence, resources and power and so on, but it’s not. It’s the people at the top who want more. So that’s one perspective here. It’s really something about wanting to gain more influence when you’re already in that position. And there’s also an evolutionary psychology perspective here about people who- naturally, humans favor having the respect and admiration of their peers, and they want to be well-liked and well-regarded because – very simplified – but in the ancestral environment, you needed the validation and acceptance of your peers in order to survive in those small-scale communities.

So, the psychology that arose in that environment remains with us today. So, when you’re around people who hold a certain worldview and certain socio-political beliefs, it’s very uncomfortable to challenge that. I can even feel that myself. I’ve ridiculed and challenged a lot of the luxury beliefs, but even I can feel myself… and I don’t know how much of it is conscious versus implicit or unconscious, but I can feel myself speaking in ways that I have never spoken in before, entertaining ideas that I would have never entertained 7-8 years ago when I was still a lowly enlisted service member. So, a lot of this is going on under the hood in our psychology. And this is because we want to get along. Now I’m in academia, I want to get along with my peers, I have to behave and speak in a certain way and so on. And even if I disagree, I have to couch it in a certain way, so that I’m not despised. So, all of these things are, I think, psychological drivers here. But there’s also the desire for - Pierre Bourdieu, he was a sociologist, but he called it ‘distinction’, which is this desire to signal against the group that you don’t want to be associated with. And so, if a belief is conventionally held by working class or lower middle class people, a very simple way for you to distinguish yourself is to question that belief or say you believe the opposite of that. And I think that’s what we’re seeing with upper middle class and upper-class people. What’s the prevailing view of the conventional, ordinary person in society? I’ll turn that on its head, challenge it or question it, or say something different just so that I can stand out from those people. So, those two things in common - wanting to distinguish yourself from the masses, but then also wanting to fit in with your social group, with your social circle – have cultivated what I call luxury beliefs.

Tom: Fascinating. It’s really notable that there’s so little recent research on the economic foundation of left-wing/liberal ideologies. There have been multiple studies of right populism. And I think that there’s little recent research on the economic foundation of left-wing/liberal ideologies because it goes a little too close to home for academic researchers.

Rob: Well, have yo...