Ideas Only the Rich Can Afford | Glenn Loury & Rob Henderson | The Glenn Show

There was also some survey data just from certain cities, New York City, Detroit, I think Minneapolis as well, where they found and you may have seen some of these data, Glenn, of white Democrats were more supportive of defunding the police than black and Hispanic brats. And I consider this to be maybe an example of what we're talking about here because even, you know, a lot of these people who are championing the defund the police movement, if they were to defund the police in their area, they already live in gated communities. They already live in safe neighborhoods. And so even if their police are defunded, they would incur a lower cost than when the police are defunded in poor, low income communities.

Hi everybody, this is Glenn Lowry. You've tuned into the Glenn Show. I am professor of economics and the Social Sciences at Brown University and John Paulson senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. And I'm joined today by Rob Henderson, who is a freelance writer, a psychologist, author of a memoir that's just coming out momentarily called Troubled A Memoir of Foster Care, Family and Social Class. I got it. He's a substacker. You can find robhenderson.substack.com he has his own webpage, of course, where his writings are available. Recent piece in the New York Times extolling the virtues of the sat. Recent piece in the Wall Street Journal talking about luxury beliefs, which is the thing that Rob has been writing about for a while. So thanks very much for joining us here. Oh, I forgot, affiliated faculty. What did you call yourself at the University of Austin? The new university that's starting up in Austin, Texas.

Right. The title they gave us was Founding Faculty Fellow. A lot of Fs there, alliteration.

So we are colleagues in a way because I'm an advisor to the University of Austin, Pano Canelos and company, and did some teaching there this past summer in their Forbidden Courses curriculum. So good to be talking to you face to face, Rob.

Yeah, likewise, Glenn. Yeah, this is our second encounter we mentioned offline we'd met briefly at Cambridge for a conference and yeah, it's great to speak with you. Looking forward to this for a while. And just to be clear, so the piece in which I defended the SAT and standardized testing more generally, that was, I believe it was in the Boston Globe, not the New York Times, although I've had pieces in the New York Times as well.

My bad. I aired Boston Globe. So now you're a graduate of Yale College, are you not? Yep.

I went to Yale for undergrad and then received a PhD from Cambridge.

That makes you an elite, doesn't it?

I guess it depends who you ask. You know, it's, it's funny when people use that term, elites, people who take offense will often respond with, well, yeah, aren't you an elite? Or what is the definition of an elite? They quibble with it. I suppose in some ways you could call me an elite. Although in the book I make a defense of the idea that if you, if you truly want to be a member of the elite or the upper class. There's a lot of interesting work in sociology that suggests that one of the strongest predictors of one's beliefs and attitudes and behaviors and sociopolitical outlooks is parental education rather than the education of the individual. And so a lot of sociologists and other social scientists will actually collect the education of parents of the individual to determine their class rather than the person themselves. And one way to think about this is if you have someone with two college educated parents, but this person dropped out of high school, they will still tend to have the same outlook and mannerisms and behaviors of their parents. And then if you have someone who is a first generation college graduate born to two people with high school diplomas or high school dropouts, they will be very different. Those are two very different people. And they will more likely hold the beliefs of their upbringing rather than the education level on paper.

Well, that's interesting. Tell us a little bit about your upbringing. You are author of a memoir of foster care and so on. How did that go for you?

Well, you know, I, I had this idea at some point, maybe in the distant future, maybe, maybe when I was closer to, to your age, Glenn. Not so distant future then, of maybe writing a memoir and. But, but the forces aligned at the right moment and I figured why not go ahead and do it? And it was the memoir. The first half of it in particular concentrates on my upbringing from three years old, when I first started forming memories, to age 17, when I fled and enlisted in the military as soon as I could. And in a way, I'm almost glad I did it this way because these memories are still very fresh. I just turned 34, and so my childhood and adolescent memories are still top of mind. I can still recall all of the vivid stories and vignettes from my early life. Born into poverty in Los Angeles, my mother was from Seoul. She came to the US as a young woman to study, became very addicted to drugs. My father I've never met. And so I have this file, thick documents of reports from. It was given to me by later on by my adoptive mother. Reports from socio social workers, forensic psychologists, school reports from teachers, just documentation of my experience in the foster care system in la. And according to these documents, even my birth mother didn't know who my father was. And so these reports indicate that my mother and I, we were homeless for a time. We lived in a car. We then moved to a slum apartment in Westlake, which is this rundown part of Los Angeles. And my mother would have visitors coming into our apartment at all hours of the day and night, trading favors for drugs. And at one point some neighbors called the police because they heard a child screaming in this apartment. And it was me. And I was tied to a chair with a bathrobe belt so that I couldn't break free and disturb my mother as she was engaging in her activities. Later, I did get some information about my birth father. I took a 23andMe ancestry test last year and went my whole life not knowing this, that my father was Hispanic, he was Mexican. And I went over this with a friend of mine, these DNA test results with a geneticist friend. And he was like, yeah, it looks like you have ancestry from kind of these indigenous communities in North America, some ancestry from Spain. And you were born in California, so it's not surprising that you're half Mexican. And so that's my sort of ethnic background. I was taken from my mother at age 3, placed into the foster care system and spent about the next five years, just shy of five years, living in seven different homes in la. And I describe in detail what those experiences were like in troubled. My mother was deported, so she was not a US citizen at this time. She was sent back to South Korea and I was a US citizen. I was born in la and so I remained in the system and was essentially cycling through these different homes. And eventually, Shortly before my 8th birthday, I was adopted by this white. Well, it was a working class family. My adoptive mother actually, interestingly enough, she was also Korean, but she was adopted by a white working class family. My adoptive father was a white working class guy. So I was, you know, we settled into this dusty blue collar town in Northern California called Red Bluff. This was in the late 1990s. And this was interesting because during this period of about 18 months or so, I did have a stable family with the Hendersons. I took their name and their birth daughter Hannah, who was my son, sister, adoptive sister, and I was adopted into this town at an interesting moment where in hindsight I understand what had occurred, which was that I got a front row seat into what authors like Robert Putnam and Charles Murray and other social scientists have been documenting for decades now, which is this sort of deterioration of working class and lower middle class communities across the U.S. and so my adoptive parents separated. My adoptive father was a truck driver. My mother was an assistant social worker. They. They managed to create a stable home temporarily, but then they divorced shortly thereafter. My adoptive father stopped speaking with me after this, completely cut off ties. And so after.

I'm sorry, excuse me, Rob. Your adoptive father stopped speaking to you after what?

After the divorce. So my adoptive parents divorced.

Oh, I see. Okay.

So my adoptive father was upset at my adoptive mother for leaving him, filing the divorce. His way to retaliate was to stop speaking with me because he knew this would hurt her.

I'm sorry.

And so this was very difficult for me after not knowing my birth father and then all the foster homes and then having a father and then not having a father. It was very difficult for me. And I describe throughout the book not just my experiences, but the community in general. Red Bluff is situated in Tehama County, Northern California, one of the poorest counties in the state at this point. This was late 90s. The median household income in Red Bluff was $27,000 a year, which was very low even for 1999. And so I described the families of my friends in this town. Single parents, a lot of them single moms. I had one friend raised by a single dad, one friend who was raised by his grandmother because his mom was addicted to drugs and his dad was in prison. And so I describe how this was a largely sort of working class white and Hispanic area. And ostensibly you would think that they would be able to form somewhat cohesive communities. There was a bit of economic deprivation and some poverty. But I try to convey that this was not really the main factor here. A lot of it was culture, bad decision making, self defeating behaviors, and how this tends to transmit to young men and talk about not just my difficulties getting through high school and how I managed to join the military and escape from all of this, but also my close friends from high school and where their lives ended up as well, which none of them went to college. I had five close friends in high school, no college graduates.

You mentioned Putnam. I assumed the book is our kids that you have in mind. Robert Putnam, the political scientist at Harvard, who is very concerned about schism and opportunity between classes in the country. Charles Murray, what was his book called?

Coming Apart.

Coming Apart indeed, in which he explores. It's kind of ironic putting them, a man of the left Hardened Democrat. And Murray, an AEI fellow, American Enterprise Institute, a notorious conservative. But they seem to agree on the importance of social class as a determinant of opportunities for people regardless of race in this country. You ended up in the Air Force. How'd that happen?

Well, I. It was. It was a halfway impulsive decision. So, you know, I. My, my academic record was very shoddy. This is something else I describe in the book is that academic inclination is a necessary but not sufficient ingredient to ensure a kid actually excels in school. And so, although I always had a bit of curiosity and a bit of, you know, aptitude for school and so forth, every time my home life was stable, I would do very well in terms of my grades, in terms of my academics. But after the. So during the foster homes, it was a mess. But there was actually one point clan I was doing so poorly in school in the final foster home I was in that they sent a psychologist to give me a test. They gave me an IQ test. They thought it might have had a learning disability because I didn't know how to read. And I just thought it was funny that I was doing poorly in school. I was changing schools every few months, changing homes every few months. The thought that occurred to the social workers and to the people responsible for my case was, oh, it's a learning disability. That must be why he's not doing well in school. It's not changing schools, changing homes, changing teachers all the time. I actually scored below average on this IQ test. And then later, once I was adopted and had a bit of stability in my life, my grades improved. But after the divorce, they declined again. And so you sort of see this, the ups and downs of my performance based on what was going on in the home and based on how it was affecting me. Towards the end of high school, I graduated with a 2.2 GPA, bottom third of my class. And I was like the definition of a slacker, C minus student. Spend more time getting into trouble with my friends and getting high and vandalizing buildings, and just wasn't in the right mindset to go to college. So there was a teacher that I had my senior year. It's a history teacher. He was a male teacher, pulled me aside, and he could tell that I was a smart kid who just refused to apply himself. And he showed me this picture on his computer of himself in an air force uniform. And I thought, oh, that looks pretty cool. And he was like, look, man, I can tell you're a bright kid. I don't know what's going on at home. I don't know what's going on with you, but this may be a good option for you. Just think on it. My senior year of high school, I'd also moved out of my adoptive mother's home and lived with my friend and his father. There were family issues, so I lived with my friend and his father. And his father had also been an Air Force veteran. And he basically gave me the same kind of advice. He was like this, you know, this may be, you know, I don't know if it's the right path for you, but the path you're on is definitely the wrong one. And so, yeah, I just visited the recruiter. We signed up to take the, the asvab, which is a military standardized test similar to the sat. And you know, I, this is how unserious I was signed up to take the ASVAB 1030 in the morning on a weekday. The night before. I realized this was a valid excuse to not go to school. I could ditch class and have a valid excuse, which was rare. And so I stayed up all night playing Xbox and drinking with my friends. Barely made it to the test examination center on time, hungover, possibly still a bit drunk, and took the test, Visited the recruiter a few weeks later. He went over the results and he showed me that you could convert ASVAB scores into SAT scores. And when I looked at this conversion, I realized that I had the same SAT score according to these charts as one of my classmates who was going off to college, who's always, always been a straight A student. And that was when it really clicked for me. It finally clicked that, oh, I actually did have the potential to go to college, but I just squandered all of my high school years and enlisted sign up. I left as soon as I could. I was still 17. I had to have my adoptive mother sign A and what amounted to a permission slip because I was still legally a child to join the Air Force right after high school. And I was the youngest guy in my unit. You know, guys, most of them were 18 plus and I was the only 17 year old guy there. And it turned out to be the best decision I ever made.

How so? What'd you do?

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Four years?

It was eight years, Glenn. Eight years.

You Re enlisted?

I yes. Well, so this is what I tell. You know, it's funny, some people want to hear about my eight years. It's a long time, right?

I mean that's especially for a 34 year old guy. Man, that's a third of your life. A quarter of your life.

Yeah, well, I mean it's funny.

So.

So sometimes people will hear about my life, how I behaved when I was a teenager and they'll say, you know, now when I talk to you I can barely make connect the dots like how you went from that to who you are now. And my answer is always because I spent eight years in the military. That's really what it was. Eight years is a long time for anyone, but for a young person, especially joined at 17, left when I was 25, which is those are generally the most formative years of any young man's life. And so I reenlisted. I did four years initially, then re up for four more. And I needed every single second of those eight years to sort of reorient myself in the world and change my mindset, give me some space to develop and to mature and to achieve some breadth of perspective that I didn't have, that I wouldn't have had if I had just stayed in Red Bluff in my teens and twenties. At some point in the book, I note that, you know, if I had stayed in Red Bluff, you know, all, you know, there's, there's no telling what could have happened. You know, there's a story we could tell where, you know, I realized I was smart one and maybe I would, I don't know, go on to be the manager of the local Walmart or something, but I could have just, I was doing all of the same things as my friends, drinking and driving and getting into fights and doing drugs and I could have easily wound up in prison where two of my friends ended up or, you know, dead in a car accident or worse, in some other sort of form of death. But yeah, I enlisted instead. And you know, it taught me all of the things you would expect, Glenn. I mean, it taught me discipline, camaraderie, focus, leadership. I had adults around me who really did seem to put my best interests first, even if I didn't enjoy it. I rebelled a little bit against the boundaries and the rigid structure. But the military is so suffocating in terms of what it expects from you. Every aspect of your life is tightly regulated, from how your uniform looks to how your bed is made, how your clothes are folded, the cleanliness of your living quarters, every single bit of it. And it almost doesn't leave any time for you to get into mischief. You know, you're on, you're on duty for these hours and then when you get off the clock, you're still sort of responsible for all these other things. And it didn't really leave much time for me to do anything completely reckless. It also, I mean, the structure is such that if you fail a drug test, you'll get court martialed and go to military prison. You're late for work more than a couple of times, same outcome. And so in the book I make this defense of. It's actually good to have boundaries, it's good to have rules, it's good to have discipline. Maybe complete freedom can work if you're a very smart young person with two upper Middle class parents, and there aren't a lot of opportunities around you, your life to go in a catastrophic direction. But if you're 17 years old in a place like Red Bluff or in other rundown parts of the country, complete freedom and lack of oversight will just give you opportunities to, you know, for your life to unravel. And then the military gave me the very much the opposite of that. The other thing was just a matter of time that it gave me the space I mentioned before to just mature and allow, whatever it is, frontal lobes to develop or, you know, just allow myself to grow and think and be in a place where, you know, my. I talk about the young male syndrome in the book, this finding from some psychologists that, you know, regardless of culture, time, place, society, males around age 19 or 20 are the most likely to be incarcerated or to be killed through reckless and dangerous risks. And in the military, you actually don't have those opportunities really. I mean, you have a bit of it, but it's all sort of channeled into the mission of this organization. And so it allowed me to sort of grow out of the young male syndrome. So by the time I was 25 years old, I realized that the military wasn't the right place for me to continue on. It was good for me for that period of my life, but after that I realized that I should actually sort of capitalize on my interests and academics and decided to go on to college. But yeah, I needed those eight years to get there. I couldn't have done it when I was 17. Wow.

I'm trying to picture you as a 25 year old freshman in New Haven. You had to be an odd duck.

Yeah, I mean, I was even odder because I saw a lot of veterans. Glenn, when they get out of the military, it's like I don't have to work out anymore, I don't have to shave anymore. So they let. So I had a beard. So I looked even older than I do now, actually. I let the beard grow out and I looked a little older. And the students could tell. They didn't necessarily know about my sort of rough and tumble upbringing, but they could tell I was older. And they'd ask and I would just say, I'm called a non traditional student, mature student. I just told them I was in the Air Force before and yeah, it took some time. The first year I remember was a bit lonely for a lot of reasons, but even just for the reasons you would expect of just being a little bit older, being on a campus where most of my classmates were 18 or 19 years old. I would befriend some of the seniors because they were a bit older, maybe they'd done some internships, they'd had a little bit of a taste of adult life, and so I got along easier with some of them. But then they graduated and went off, and so it was tough to find my footing on campus, academically and socially. That first semester, I remember even the academics were difficult. I mean, I mentioned, yeah, I enjoyed school to some degree, but I wasn't prepared for the reading load, the problem sets, just the massive amount of it. And I'd been out of school for eight years, and even when I was in school, I was a bad student. And so I wasn't prepared in terms of my study habits, in terms of how to approach the curriculum, the coursework, how to properly prioritize the assignments on the syllabus. And so, yeah, I remember having a bit of difficulty there. But after the first semester, after the first year, the academics were. I was able to manage that. It was the social aspect that remained difficult for me because I arrived at Yale at a very strange time. Sometimes I say that I arrived at Yale at the, during the birth of what people now call wokeness. I mean, wokeness was around before 2015, but 2015 was the year where it really sort of exploded and spilled out of the universities because that was the year of what people now call the Halloween costume controversy with the Christakuses, I remember. And that was a very strange sort of introduction to elite campus culture for someone who came from where I came from.

Luxury beliefs. You, you did psychology at Yale. Is that where you first began to think about this concept and tell us a little bit about, about that?

Yeah, I, I, according to this term, a few years ago, luxury beliefs, the idea had been sort of stewing in my mind ever since those years in undergrad. But the term didn't develop until I had arrived at grad school, Cambridge University, during my first year, during my PhD program. But I remember I arrived on campus at Yale, and so after the Halloween costume controversy, I would see students talk about how, talk about the pain these professors had caused or talked about how they felt that they were in danger, that they felt unsafe on campus. They would use all of this provocative and charged emotional language. These were the sons and daughters of millionaires at one of the richest institutions in the world, ensconced in this bubble with campus security on every corner. I lived off campus, so I would walk through New Haven. I'd walk through a lot of poverty, a lot of Addiction, homelessness, mental illness. I'd walk through all of this in the New Haven green on my way to my apartment, and I would think about these students talking about how they were the ones who were in pain or how they were the ones who were being victimized. And, you know, I would go through that experience on a weekly basis or more and realize that, you know, a lot of these students have not had much contact with reality. Not, you know, some of the professors and administrators too, for that matter. It wasn't just the students, graduates and inhabitants and people who have associations or affiliations with these institutions would adopt these views. Luxury beliefs I define as ideas and opinions that infer status on the affluent while often inflicting costs on the lower classes. And there was sort of different moving parts to this. I mean, in the book I describe how to sort of developed out of the ideas of people like Thorsten Babelin and the idea of luxury goods, of conspicuous consumption.

A theory of the leisure class. That's Veblen's classic text from early in the 20th century, if I'm not mistaken.

Yeah, published in 1899. And yeah, in Veblen's time, the elites would exhibit their social status through material goods. Pocket watches, delicate evening gowns, tuxedos, attending lavish and expensive events. And my claim is that today, material goods, luxury goods, they're still useful for exhibiting one's position in society, but they're noisier signals. You know, my friends from Red Bluff have the same iPhone as my friends from college. In Vaplan's time, you could walk through the streets of any major city and immediately tell just by how people look, who was rich and who was poor. And that's less true today. And my claim is that now how does the most affluent segment of society set themselves apart? And my claim is they do it through these beliefs, these costly signals. I describe in the book this the idea of cultural capital from Pierre Bourdieu, the mid 20th century sociologist, who described how the at least of that period of time in mid-19, he wrote the book in the 1970s of how they would convert economic capital into cultural capital. They would expend their resources in order to learn intricate and arcane knowledge about wine and artwork and furniture, sophisticated vocabulary, attending certain schools. And through their opinions and their views, they would be able to reveal themselves to one another, sort of reveal these buried signals of I'm a member of the affluent, so that if they're in a space, they would be able to identify one another. Relatedly, I read this book From Michael Knox Baron called wasps the splendors and miseries of an American aristocracy. Wasps being white Anglo Saxon Protestants, the ruling class in America from the mid 19th to the mid 20th century. And Michael Knox Baron describes how the wasps, many of them, he called them the high wasps, the sort of the upper tippy, top segment of the WASP society. They would, many of them, intentionally support fashionable movements and causes because they would abhor the Bulgarians. They liked the fact that ordinary people would hear about these newfangled ideas and react with horror and revulsion. And this pleased the wasps because it indicated to themselves that, oh, you know, we're. We really are set apart from them. We really are. We've achieved distinction.

That's by the way, the title of Bordeaux's book, Distinction. And then he has a subtitle. I just want the audience to know in case somebody wants to do their research. But I have a question, because as I understand it, the signaling idea is an idea that I can convey information by taking an action which is relatively less costly for me to take than it would be for somebody else to take. And that action then becomes an indicator of my. My status, like luxury goods that I can buy that are visible, automobile clothing and things of that kind. And I'm wondering if that's not distinct from there coming to be a consensus within a class of people about what the right side of history is. What, what, what is virtuous? Saving the planet is virtuous. And to take on that belief is an indication of my membership in this plan, but it's not a signal in the classical sense of the term because I'm not really bearing any cost one way or the other. But I'm conforming to a trope or a norm that is class specific. Is that a reasonable distinction? And what do you think?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I understand that. I mean, the luxury beliefs idea is a bit of an amalgamation, sort of integrating these two ways of thinking, of exhibiting class while also engaging in some costly signaling or some, what some biologists call self handicapping. And a point that I've made in some essays and in the book as well, is that even if members of the luxury belief class, when they do partake in some of these beliefs, it does affect them less. They are able to engage in it and incur lower costs than people who are not members of educated and affluent circles. And so a simple example of this might be the Defund the Police movement. I mean, it's funny, I coined the term luxury beliefs in 2019, and I never would have imagined in a million years that within a year's time people would be calling to. Well, at a certain point they were calling to abolish the police. And then I think they walked it back a little and said, defund the police. I reported some data in the book from survey data from YouGov indicating that when. So this was a representative sample of U.S. citizens, when they broke down the data by income category, the highest income Americans were the most in favor of defunding the police, and the lowest income Americans were the least supportive. There was also some survey data just from certain cities, New York City, Detroit, I think Minneapolis as well, where they found, and you may have seen some of these data, Glenn, of white Democrats were more supportive of defunding the police than black and Hispanic Democrats. And I consider this to be maybe an example of what we're talking about here, because even a lot of these people who are championing the defund the police movement, if they were to defund the police in their area, they already live in gated communities. I mean, they already live in safe neighborhoods. And so even if their police are defunded, they would incur a lower cost than when the police are defunded in poor, low income communities. And so, I mean, and even for a lot of these, these affluent communities, when the crime wave did eventually sort of come into contact with their lives, there were reports of affluent neighborhoods in Chicago hiring off duty police officers or security guards or private bodyguards and so on. And so even when it does go on to affect them, eventually they will find ways to protect themselves. And the whole defund the police thing, I mean, to me, that was interesting. I mean, of course, a lot of people are familiar with the cry stats that homicide rates increased, violent crime rates increased through 2020 and 2021, and the majority of the victims of these crimes were poor. I cite data for federal statistics indicating that relative to Americans who earn $75,000 or more a year, Americans in the poorest income category, which I believe in these statistics that I looked at, were Americans who earned less than $20,000 a year. They're seven times more likely to be victims of violent crimes, seven times more likely to be victims of robbery, assault. One thing that shocked me was that low income Americans were 20 times more likely to be victims of sexual assault than Americans who earn more than $75,000 a year. And so these all get folded into aggregate statistics, but occasionally. There was a story in San Francisco of a tech executive who was stabbed and he was named. He was described by name in the papers in San Francisco, Chronicle and so on. There were a couple of journalists, one in New York City, one in Philadelphia a few months ago. They were also identified by name in national media targeted by violent crime. And I just found it fascinating that when ordinary people are killed, when the peasants kill each other, that just gets folded. That's just a statistic. But when members of the aristocracy are killed, they get identified by name, they get, they get articles written about them and you can look them up and there will be pieces about how, oh, actually maybe crime has gone too far and we should rethink these policies. And this is very much reveals whose lives really matter in this country and how class really does affect how people treat their views.

What are some other controversial issues where you think the upper class, the elite, have views that are noticeably distinct from the masses and hold those views in part as a result of being indemnified against the consequences of thinking that way?

Well, you know, I, I, I tell this, this anecdote which is, you know, which helps to illuminate sort of broader statistical patterns in the country. And so I spoke with a classmate of mine at Yale years ago and somehow we got around to talking about family and marriage and these kinds of things. And she told me that she thought that marriage was outdated. That is a patriarchal, oppressive structure born out of a desire to, I don't know, oppress women or something, families. And then I asked her about her own life and her own upbringing and she told me that she had two married parents, which is the case for almost every single Yale student, by the way, if you look at the data for students at elite universities, something like 90% of them are raised by two parent families, possibly more, and by both of their birth parents in particular. So she told me this about her own upbringing and then I asked her, okay, you know, what do you plan, like, do you have, like in the future, do you plan to have a family? What would you like to do in your own future with regard to relationships or family? And you said, oh, well, you know, I was raised that way. I'll probably do the same thing. I'll probably get married, have some kids, do the same thing my parents did. But just because I did it doesn't mean everyone should do it. And to me, the way that I interpreted this was she benefited from this age old structure that led her to go to a place like Yale. She planned to carry those benefits forward for her own children. And her official public position though was that people shouldn't do this. This was a bad idea. That it was patriarchal, that it was oppressive, that it would, it was harmful. And you know, yes, this is one student. But then if you look at broader statistical data which I report in troubled 25% of college graduates, only 25% say that it's important for children to be raised by two married parents. In other words, 75% of college graduates say it's not important. That's an unimportant thing. But then if you look at the rates of marriage for people with college degrees relative to people who have less education, 90%, 90% of college educated parents are married, the vast majority of them. And so their actions contradict their, what I call luxury beliefs. Many people are well aware that the out of wedlock birth rate has been climbing in the country. It's kind of leveled off. And so people will hear. I think in the US now it's somewhere around 40% of kids are born to an unmarried mother. But that is almost entirely concentrated within poor and working class communities. If you look at college educated communities, it's almost everyone, almost everyone is married to two parents. I cite some data from Coming Apart which found that across class lines, in 1960, 95% of children were born to two parents, two married parents by 2005 for the upper class, for college educated, affluent white collar parents, children born to those kinds of families, it dropped to 85%. So it was 95% in 1960, dropped to 85% in 2005. If you look at children born into working class families, non college educated, blue collar, it went from 95% in 1960 to 30% by 2005. And when I read that, it mirrored exactly my own experiences. I'd mentioned I had five close friends growing up. When I was in Red Bluff, after I left the foster homes, out of the six of us, none of us were raised by two married parents, by both of our birth parents. And that was the norm in that community, this kind of rundown working class area of Northern California. And then when I think about my college friends, every single one of them were raised by both of their birth parents, even the students who like me, were veterans. You know, I had one of my best friends at Yale, was a former Marine and he came from sort of, you know, his parents didn't go to college. They were more sort of middle class though in terms of income, they were married. And to me it's just, it's just not a coincidence that when you look at the people who end up incarcerated or working menial dead end jobs or who are just or one of my friends that I grew up with, he has two children with two different women who he doesn't speak with. People who live that kind of life, they themselves were raised in very sort of emotionally and socially impoverished conditions and people who didn't were not.

Excuse me, I want to go back to my. A question earlier which is, is this an indication of the signaling of virtue or class membership or is it conformity to some norm that is like, it's an identity thing, you know. So in economics we have this concept, maybe you've heard of it, called revealed preference. I watch what a person does and I infer from their actions what their preferences are. Rather than asking them what they value and taking their answers seriously, instead of taking the answer seriously, I infer from their behavior. So it sounds to me like you're describing a situation which could be interpreted as say, on this family structure issue, let's watch what they do. Well, what they do is they marry and you know, before they have kids and they more or less they in the marriage together as they raise their children and so on and so forth. That's telling me what they really value. But if they say the nuclear family is obsolete or pass, should I really take that as anything other than enchanting? Enchanting, the mantra that I know that I'm supposed to say to be a member in good standing of this community. Right. So, I mean, I don't. It's a quibble. It's not really an objection. But no, I wonder what you think about that.

That is interesting. And I, and I think it's important. So I guess my, my concern of course is sort of building the structure and helping to understand what's going on here, why the beliefs of the elite in many cases stand at odds with conventional opinion on all kinds of what used to be common sense positions like family around law enforcement and so on. And so I think it's a bit of both. I think the revealed preference thing is useful to understand what they personally value. I'm not sure how much of it is just conforming to a certain class. I mean, I think there is this desire, of course. I mean, I think conformity and signaling. I mean those two, you're signaling that you do conform, that you are a member of this class, that you did go to an expensive college, that you have the kind of job where you can imbibe these kinds of opinions and recapitulate them and you're not working on your feed all day. You have the ability to whatever browse social media and listen to the right media outlets to recapitulate the right opinions. But I think it's important because.

If.

In your personal life you behave in a certain way, so I'm speaking here specifically about the effects on the rest of society. So if the members of society who hold the most cultural, political, social, economic influence, if privately they live, you know, but they, I once heard this great phrase, I don't know who to attribute it to that if you privately walk the 50s, but you publicly talk the 60s, this is actually, this is still going to have a detrimental effect on the rest of society. Because, you know, if, if I'm a member of a working class area, I'm not, you know, I don't have access into the private lives of the elites and how they actually behave. And I don't, I'm not exposed, I don't have visibility on, oh, this person's actually been married their whole life, and that this is what they actually believe and this is what they actually do. What I tend to have immediate superficial access to is, you know, I, I open some media outlet or I turn on Netflix or I consume kind of passive media and all of these things are produced by this upper segment of society. And I'll see depictions of certain kinds of families and certain kinds of attitudes and beliefs and so on that are at odds with the elites. And so if you're. One way to think about this, Glenn, is if you're a kid who grows up in an upper middle class family and yeah, maybe you and your parents talk about how marriage is passe or that we should defund the police and so on, or that drug use should be legalized or what have you. Hard drugs should be legalized and everyone should have access to fentanyl and so on. But then you look around you in this sort of upper crust neighborhood, this gated community that you live in, you do have visibility on how people actually live their lives. You do sort of have implicit understanding of this duplicity going on. And you see good role models around you who maybe are speaking that their opinions contradict their views, but you are seeing how people behave. And if you grow up in a working class community and you don't have access to role models, maybe you were like me and you never knew your father or your mother's working full time. You don't have a lot of adults around you who are modeling good behavior. And the only opinions you tend to have access to are through media and through entertainment and through social media and screens and so on. Those things take on Even greater importance in terms of how you live your life because of the fact that you don't have role models. So you are more likely to listen to some poisonous influencer on TikTok or you're more likely to watch your favorite show on Netflix, and those become your model of what a good life might look like or what would be fun or interesting or exciting to do. And so I think, yes, the revealed preference thing is an important thing to understand, but in terms of sort of practical consequences and outcomes, I mean, I almost wonder if it would be preferable. You know, some. Some conservative authors have. Have made these sort of defenses of hypocrisy, you know, but I almost wonder if. If what? If the elites performed the opposite. If privately they, you know, whatever, they. They were completely polyamorous and did drugs and did, you know, had all the fun that they like to speak about, but publicly, you know, they. They were hypocrites and promoted the bourgeois values. If this might actually be better for society.

Well, I want to ask you about politics because when I was reading you on Luxury Beliefs, I was thinking about the deplorables about Donald Trump's deplorables and whether or not there isn't potential for that kind of insurgency. I'm talking about the Donald Trump phenomenon built into the social class landscape that you described. A lot of people on the bottom know that all this talk about heteronormativity or whatever is foreign to their experience and to their values and see it as an indication of a certain effete, privileged status. Doesn't that create an opportunity for a politician, or dare I say a demagogue, to appeal to people on exactly that basis?

I think there's something to that idea that if. If people's values aren't being represented in media and entertainment and the press and so on, and they feel like they're being overlooked or unnoticed. And, yeah, demagogue appears and starts to give voice to those concerns. And I can easily see how, yeah, this, this, you know, they. They finally find a figure that they can attach themselves to that this could contribute, I think, to some of the polarization. I can feel it a bit myself sometimes, you know, this sort of hostility now, this sort of interclass hostility, Glenn. So sometimes, you know, if I'll. If I'll go home to Red Bluff or visit my old friends and stuff, I still stay in touch with some of them. You know, we'll go out somewhere and, you know, they. They like to tease me. They like. They know how my life has turned out and Everything. And if they ever want to make me uncomfortable, if we're at a casino or out to eat or something, and they'll say, oh, did you know he went to Yale? And you know, this is like a good way to sort of make me feel self conscious because they know that that means something now that, you know, if you are a member or you graduate of one of these kinds of institutions that people who feel left out or unnoticed or overlooked in this country, you know, they'll. It's a good way to sort of get their ears to perk up. And so, yeah, but then, you know, my, my defense is always, but, but I was in the military, you know, that's my sort of get out of jail free card kind of thing. And I grew up around here anyway. So, yeah, I do think there's something. I mean, there's some interesting research. There's this guy, Michael Bang Peterson, who's done some research on populism. He's, I think he's this social psychologist by training, but his research on populism indicates that, yes, that people who actually have sort of less, less interest in politics overall and just sort of don't really pay as much attention to the goings on of the country. And people who have, they sort of score lower on need for dominance and these other kinds of personality variables that psychologists like to measure, that these are the people who are the most likely to be interested in populism, that they. Them. So the stylized narrative here is that people who are actually uninterested in leadership positions, they're not interested in sort of getting into the arena and changing society and changing the world. What they like to do is appoint a leader on their behalf. Like, you know, I want this guy Trump or whoever it is, you know, to just take care of it for me to just like somehow implement my preferences. But I just want to live my life, be left alone, what have you. Whereas people who are very much opposed to populism, they actually tend to score higher on personality traits of social dominance and so on. And the idea here being that they don't want a strong man. Maybe they don't want to be the strong man, but they want to be a member of the committee that gets to decide how society should be operated. And they don't like the idea of a demagogue or a populist or someone, some strongman leader in that role. And to me, I think that stylized fact kind of fits with what we see, that the people who feel represented, that feel that their cultural values are being Reaffirmed and so on. And they tend to have a lot of interest in politics. They don't like populism. And then the people who do like populism are the ones who actually don't have a great interest in politics and don't have a great interest in how society should be run. They mostly just want to be left alone and maybe see their values reflected back at them when they open the newspaper or turn on the television. And this was one of the. Just to go back to my experience when I first arrived in college is, you know, I grew up in an environment where people weren't really reading national media that closely. You know, we didn't have enough money to pay for cable, so there was no CNN or Fox or any of this. We read the local newspaper, the Red Bluff Daily News. We didn't talk politics at the dinner table. It just wasn't a part of our lives. Maybe we talk about local things going on in, in the county or in the town. But then when I got to college, I found that another element of class membership was to keep up with current events and to have a cursory awareness of, you know, what's the latest fashionable op ed in the New York Times or what did so and so write in the Atlantic or, you know, what's the sort of topical, trendy item of the day that we should all be focusing on. And to me, I was completely unprepared for this, that students would talk about, oh, did you see what so and so wrote here? Or what? And I just was not keeping up with the news. I'd never learned to do that. And I think that this is also you know, maybe indicative of the sort of class divides that most people who didn't go to college who aren't interested in saving the world or saving some segment of the world. Yeah, they're just not sort of day to day, constantly trying to keep up with it all.

Do you have a political affiliation of your own that you're willing to talk about?

I mean, when we talked before, I don't have a strong sort of affiliation with any institution now. So maybe I'm allowed to without getting myself in trouble. Well, I did write this op ed, excuse me, in the New York Times. This was 2018, the year I graduated from Yale. It was published. Why? So they chose the headline. I mean, you're probably aware of this, I know editors choose the headlines, but the title of it was why Being a Foster Child Made Me a Conservative. And you know, I talk about values, I talk about personal Responsibility. I talk about the importance of family. How throughout my life, anytime I excelled in school and felt happy as a kid was when my home life was stable and when I felt my needs were cared for by the adults in my life. And so to me, this is just, yeah, family, responsibility, these two things are very important in terms of success, especially for people who grew up the way that I did. And so this, you know, this got turned into this sort of conservative headline. It evolved out of it. After speaking with the editors and so on, I said it was fine. But the thing is, I never really thought of myself in political terms, in terms of my views. My adoptive mother, she's a working class Democrat, voted Democrat her whole life. And this is the other thing why I think the luxury beliefs thing, it's not a partisan issue. I really think it's more about class. Because when I speak with my mother and her friends, people who didn't go to college would vote Democrat. I mean, they have views that are very much at odds with the kinds of Democrats that I encounter at elite institutions. The college educated Republican can fit in much better with college educated Democrats than working class Democrats can at any kind of social engagement. Because college educated Republicans have immersed themselves in the class mannerisms and speech, speech patterns and so forth. You can fit in. But by the time I got to the military, you know, a lot of these guys were libertarians or conservatives, more right wing types. And I would argue with them. You know, I wasn't very engaged politically, but I would, I would defend Obama. He was president during this time. I thought some of the things he said made sense to me. But then I get to Yale. So in the military, sometimes I was referred to as the token liberal. And again, this was like 2011, 2012. There's a different, maybe, arguably the Democrat Party was a little different, but I was the token liberal. Then I get to Yale, 2015, 2016, suddenly I become the token conservative. Despite the fact that my views hadn't really changed. I'd always thought of myself as kind of a centrist or a moderate or something. So generally I would say that I'm probably. Well, I'm definitely to the right of the typical elite university graduate, but compared to the typical American, I'm probably right there, maybe even left, depending on what the topic or the issue is. But I find that once you join whatever the polite society, the educated class, the typical person is much more to the left than the typical member of society. I had this interaction, Glenn, when I was in grad school. One of the other Students in our department was like, he was trying to, he found out a little bit about my views. And he was like, yeah, you know, I'm open minded too. I like to listen to conservatives. He was like, you know, I like to listen to some conservative psychologists. And I was like, oh, like who? And he said, you know, like, I listen to right wingers like Steven Pinker. And I was like, oh, you know, in the back of my life I'm thinking like, you know, to the typical American, Steven Pinker is the like archetypal, you know, Democrat, Harvard professor, liberal Democrat. But to this student at an elite institution in the department of psychology, Inker is a right winger.

Yeah, because he writes books like the Blank Slate in which he criticizes certain shibboleths, you know, certain presumed to be true verities about the infinite malleability of the human mind and all that kind of stuff. And as a trained psychologist looking at the evidence, he can't go along with that program.

So. Yeah, yeah. And so, so, I mean, and I'm a, I'm a big admirer of his, I, his book how the Mind Works. I mean that was one of the first books that sort of directed my interest into psychology. But that's sort of where, where my views are now, I suppose is, you know, center. Right. But within these circles, I mean, it's funny, when I talk with my mom, when I talk with people who are outside of these circles, we agree on just about everything. But now that I find myself ensconced among fellow college graduates, I get this label. And at this point I'm not going to fight it anymore and I'm not going to hide my views. But people now it seems even if you quibble with political correctness, you get labeled a right winger. I mean, that's just the world we live in now.

Good to hear. I happen to know you're just back from Malaysia. What was that about? Can you say?

Yeah, yeah. So my girlfriend, she's Malaysian, she's ethnically, she's Chinese. But her family, they fled China. I think this was during the Civil war when Mao took over. So they fled. Her grandparents or great grandparents fled to Malaysia. And so, yeah, just visiting her family for Lunar New Year and you know, visiting. So I visited a few times now and to me it just really, it puts into perspective how our issues in the US they're not solely economic because I see people in Malaysia and it's a multi ethnic society. There are Malays, there are Chinese, there are Indians, there are different ethnicities. It's a very poor country. A lot of inequality, a lot of poverty, and the divorce rates aren't as high, the single parenthood rates aren't as high. I mean, they're. They're actually the opposite. Neighbors know one another. You know, I visited a village, my girlfriend's extended family, we visited them. And some of the houses in that area, they were made of corrugated metal and, you know, sort of sheet sheetrock and, you know, molded wood. And it's just like rundown shacks. Some of them didn't have carpets. It was just sort of concrete floors. But the neighbors know one another. They bring each other food, they watch each other's children, they take care of each other. The other day I was speaking with a friend of mine from Kenya, and he was describing I've never been there, but he was describing similar situation there, that it's very poor, but the families know one another, they take care of each other. Social capital is higher there than in many poor areas of the US So when I hear people blame our social ills on poverty alone, I just find it very hard to believe. I think that there is room for values, for guidance and instruction and teaching. And there was a boy in this neighborhood in Malaysia, must have been 10 or 11 years old. He was raised. So his father was an alcoholic who had been in and out of prison. And he was raised by his mom and the aunties and the sort of. They all kind of looked out for him and they made sure he stayed out of trouble. And the other fathers in the area also took an interest in his life, and he was very helpful. He would visit my girlfriend's aunt and uncle who are getting older in age and are unable to sort of do the house maintenance and chores and so forth. And this kid, 11 or 12 years old, would come over and check in on them every couple of days and ask if they needed anything. And it is very rare to see those kinds of interactions now in impoverished areas of the U.S.

Okay, well, we're at the end of the hour. Rob, I thank you for your time and look very much forward to reading your book. My guest has been Rob Henderson. Thank you. Oh, I didn't even. However, my team will make sure that those who view this podcast know about my forthcoming memoir. I don't have to say anything more about it. It's going to be published on May 14, and it's. It' called Late Admissions Confessions of a Black Conservative out from Norton, W.W. norton & Company in May. But Rob Henderson's Troubled A Memoir of Foster Care Family and social class is out momentarily, and people should go and take a look at it if they like what they heard here. I certainly will. Thanks a lot, Rob.

Thank you, Glenn. It's been an honor.

Sam.