Should We All Be Shameless Lying Hypocrites?
How *not* to critique the theory of "luxury beliefs"
Noah Smith is one of the best Substackers out there, but he recently made one of the oddest arguments I've ever seen on the platform. It's so odd—and so obviously wrong—that I'm worried I must be missing something. If not, I suspect Smith’s misstep has a lot to tell us about the sorry state of intellectual debate today.
Let's dive in.
1.
Smith's post is a critique of the concept of "luxury beliefs," which was coined and popularized by the budding social scientist Rob Henderson. I'm not deeply familiar with Henderson's work, but the basic idea seems simple enough. Henderson argues that elites trumpet weird opinions as a way of showing off their high status. In the same way snobs might use obscure artistic tastes or strict codes of etiquette to set themselves apart from the hoi polloi, sophisticates learn to tout exotic political opinions as a way of signaling that they're members of the elect.
Henderson argues that this is a form of what Thorstein Veblen called "conspicuous consumption." Veblen, an American economist who developed his theories during the Gilded Age, argued that elites of his day had roundabout ways of displaying their wealth and power. Instead of simply waving dollar bills around, they bought rare art, developed expensive hobbies, and paid for their children to learn exclusive skills. You couldn't do these things without spending lots of money, but investing in luxury goods and services freed elites of the need to discuss anything so gauche as dollars or cents. Effectively, conspicuous consumption allowed elites to launder vulgar materialism as refined taste.
(Interestingly, Veblen also argued that the culture of conspicuous consumption could be traced back to the exploitation of women, an aspect of his work that rarely seems to make its into contemporary treatments.)
Things have changed since Veblen's day, but we still have elites, and they still need fiendishly indirect ways to flaunt their wealth. Henderson suggests that political opinions have come to fit the bill.
A "luxury belief," in Henderson's telling, is a belief that, if widely acted upon, would bring ruin to the lower classes while leaving elites relatively unscathed. He cites defunding the police as a marquee example. If police services were cut back or abolished, rich people, who can afford to pay for their own security, would get by. But poor people would have to deal with a spike in crime. Similarly, imposing strict environmentalist regulations would make life tough for coal miners and small business owners, but it would create new jobs for bureaucrats and lawyers. Eliminating tests and grades would make it hard for poor kids with scholastic chops to get into college, but rich people would have ways to game the system. And so on.
Henderson tosses out subtler examples, too, such as the view, trendy in elite circles, that traditional marriage should be considered a sham. Not only are well-remunerated people better able to make do in single-income households, but elites don't act on their own advice: they form traditional marriages at higher rates. Scoffing at the advantages of two-parent households frees elites from responsibility for the social forces that strand poor kids in broken homes.
In Henderson's telling, there are basically three ways in which "luxury beliefs" can indicate high status: they can denote real advantages, they can reflect comparative advantages, or they can leverage insider knowledge.
To see how this works, imagine a town built downstream of a dam. In this community, everyone lives in fear of catastrophic floods. Yet the elites of the town make a habit of campaigning against costly dam repairs. Why might they do this?
One possibility is that elites stand to benefit from floods. Perhaps they own boat companies. More floods mean people buy more boats, so neglecting the dam, in this scenario, brings direct benefits to elite boat owners. In the same way, complex regulatory systems might be good for elite bureaucrats but bad for ordinary joes.
Another possibility is that elites, while they don't own boat companies, own more boats. They'll still suffer if there's a flood. But they won't suffer *as much.* Being buffered against the worst outcomes makes it easier for elites to promote destructive policies. Cutting police budgets, for example, makes crime worse for everyone, but most of the fallout is felt in poor communities.
The third possibility is more subtle. Let's say elites have insider knowledge--they know the federal government will repair the dam no matter what local politicians decide. In this scenario, the dam gets fixed either way, so there's no downside to voting against needed repairs. Other people might panic if they hear others shrugging off the issue, but not elites. They can sit back and relax while touting a belief they know to be meaningless. In the same way, real-world elites might flirt with plans they have no intention of acting upon, like abolishing the family or emptying prisons. Since elites actually make the relevant decisions, they're clued into the fact that these are idle thought experiments. Non-elite people can't be so sure.
Henderson's theory can be a little fuzzy around the edges. It's hard to see exactly how you'd evaluate it. Elites and non-elites are diverse groups, and bad beliefs are widely distributed. I'd love to argue, for example, that support for extended school closures during COVID qualified as a luxury belief. It was a fashionable view in certain elite circles, and the burden of the policy fell hard on poor communities. In truth, though, support for the policy came from all social levels and if anything varied inversely with wealth. What about vaccine skepticism? Shouldn't opposing vaccination be a luxury only the rich can afford, since they have better health overall? Yet anti-vax attitudes are also more common along the lower social orders. Banning abortion would also seem to be a policy that hurts the poor more than the rich, but, once again, the poor are more supportive. For that matter, any policy that has bad effects—or that one thinks will have bad effects—imposes unequal burdens, since the poor always tend to suffer more when policy fails. Am I just projecting my own values onto the poor, arguing that they don't know what's good for them? Maybe. The point is, I'm not sure how to apply Henderson's ideas. It's hard to explain, based on his theory, which opinions serve as luxury beliefs and which are just run-of-the-mill disagreements.
There's also something intuitively odd about the idea that privilege gives rich people the leeway to spout bad opinions. Elites are more likely to be public figures. They have more responsibility. They're subject to more scrutiny. And they hang around with other elites, who have the power to hold them to account. Poor people, by contrast, tend to fly under the radar. Wouldn't obscurity make it easier, not harder, to get away with saying crazy things? If a stockboy at Walmart thinks the store should invest heavily in tinfoil hats, who cares? If the CFO thinks so, that’s a big deal.
2.
There's more that could be said about the limitations of Henderson's theory. But Smith has chosen, it seems to me, the worst possible avenue of attack. Essentially, he argues that words are cheap--so cheap as to be effectively meaningless. Since anyone can say anything they please, language, in Smith's view, has no value as a class marker. Henderson's theory, after all, isn't about acting on weird beliefs. It's about pretending to hold weird beliefs. And pretending is easy. Even kids can do it. So where's the competitive edge? If elites show off by pretending to believe weird ideas, Smith argues, what's to stop anyone else from indulging in the same pretense?
Smith's case comes in three parts.
First, he argues that the way we talk doesn't necessarily reveal much about us. How do rich people convey their supposed "luxury beliefs"? By yakking about them. But what's so hard about that? Poor people can easily learn to mimic elite styles of speech, Smith says, and even if they can't, that's no big deal.
First, consider fancy vocabulary. I’m doubtful whether you really have to go to a four-year college to start spouting terms like “heteronormativity” and “cisgender”; really, you just have to spend ten minutes reading on Wikipedia and pick up context from how the words are used on social media. Maybe your understanding of these ideas won’t be quite as nuanced as if you shelled out $350,000 for a Yale sociology degree. But it won’t be that different. I bet many of the people throwing those terms around on TikTok are teenagers who haven’t even been to college yet.
But OK, suppose there’s some cost to learning about heteronormativity. In that case, rich people could use their knowledge of that term as a status marker. “Oh look at me, I use such big words, that’s how you know I could afford an expensive college,” and so on. But in that case, what sort of costs do poor people bear? If educated upper-class people go around using fancy words to remind themselves of how educated and upper-class they are, does that hurt poor people? No. It’s just snooty.
This argument leaves me scratching my head. Does Smith really think that learning to talk--and write!--like a Harvard graduate is as easy as skimming Wikipedia? If this were true, not only would the theory of luxury beliefs take a hit, but timeworn concepts like "taste" and "manners" would be instantly invalidated. The entire history of drama and literature would become virtually meaningless. Cross-culture exchange, within language groups at least, would be a breeze. What is Smith thinking?
Smith seems to be fixated here on the relative ease of picking up a few fancy words. But the point of Henderson's theory, as I understand it, is that an arcane culture of elite manners has developed around those words. What you don't say is at least as important as what you do. I have a Masters degree, work in an elite college, and read the New York Times, and I regularly get dinged for infractions. I know plenty of other people who do, too.
If Smith's indifference to the importance of manners is baffling, the second argument he makes here is shocking. The whole point of invidious distinctions is to shut people out of exclusive social circles and deny them opportunities. How is that not hurtful? Again, Smith seems to be focused on technicalities. True, heaping contempt on people who talk in a low-class way doesn't hurt the poor in the sense that, say, cutting social services does. But it still wounds feelings and restricts opportunities. Isn't this just commonly understood?
Next, Smith argues that it's trivially easy to go around saying things you don't believe:
Next, let’s consider behavior beliefs — drug use, single parenthood, and so on. First of all, Henderson thinks — probably correctly — that rich people don’t actually believe in these things as much as they claim to. Which means they’re not really paying any costs at all — not because they’re rich, but because they’re bullshitting.
But poor people can (and do) bullshit just as easily as rich people. If you’re poor, there’s nothing stopping you from saying “I think drugs are safe”, and then just not doing any drugs. There’s nothing stopping you from saying “I think single parenthood is fine”, and then getting married instead. The only cost you might pay is the social awkwardness of having to explain why you didn’t practice what you preached — but of course, rich people have to pay this cost too, and it’s not clear it’s any less severe for them.
So if rich and poor people can B.S. equally easily about their willingness to take drugs etc., how does this sort of hypocrisy confer social status? Something can’t be a costly signal if there’s no cost.
What's missing here is the role played by intensity of belief. I can cope with having to pretend, once in a while, that I think Barbie deserved a best picture Oscar. But when elite friends pressure me to say that having kids is immoral, I have a harder time playing along. Heck, I have to bite my tongue when people say Nintendo games are high art. Lying may not cost me anything in material terms. But it isn't exactly easy.
How might this apply to Henderson's theory? Well, imagine a kid who grew up in a rough area. His dad left home when he was seven. His sister ran away and turned tricks to get by. He lost friends to booze and drugs. He lived in fear of getting jumped in the street. His mom and grandpa were both cops. He has strong opinions on all these subjects.
Now, let's say our scrappy hero beats the odds. He studies hard, makes good grades, and gets into a good college. It's a tough adjustment at first. Eventually a classmate pulls him aside.
"Look," the classmate says, "if you want to fit in here, it's simple. All you have to do is say you think marriage is a farce, sex work should be celebrated, drug use should be normalized, police should be defunded, and grades are meaningless. That's what your peers and professors want to hear."
"But I don't believe those things," the kid says. "I wouldn't be here if I did."
"So what?" answers the classmate. "That doesn't matter. You don't actually have to *live* by these beliefs. You just have to *say* you hold them. Easy."
The point is that our most passionately held beliefs spring from our life experiences. If poor people have different experiences from the rich--if they feel the effects of crime, addiction, and family breakdown in a more visceral way--they'll find it much harder to play along when people act like these issues are no big deal.
But that's not all. Some surveys have found that elite college students—the kinds of people Henderson is writing about—are highly likely to say that speakers they don’t like should be deplatformed. The research on this subject is a partisan mess, but if the finding holds up, our hypothetical dissenter not only has to pretend to hold values he deplores, he also has to pretend that people with his values should be booted out of public life. Smith isn't necessarily defending these practices. He just thinks the psychological burden is evenly distributed. I disagree.
And there's more. Even if the psychological burden *is* evenly distributed—if all kinds of people, rich and poor, hold passionate opinions they're forced to dissemble—so long as hypocrisy imposes *some* psychological cost, rich people, with their superior resources, will be better able to endure it. Suppose I'm gearing up for a job interview, and I need to pretend that working in health care administration is my lifelong dream. If I'm *also* worried about making rent, kicking my opiate habit, and bailing my brother out of prison, I'm going to have a lot less energy left over for grinning my way through a candidate presentation. Even something as simple as pretending to be cheerful is exhausting when you're dealing with mounting hassles on the side.
Finally, while this is just a hunch on my part, I have the strong sense that being full of shit is more severely punished in poor circles than elite ones. It's not just that poor people struggle to learn the art of hypocrisy. They've been encouraged all their lives, by friends and family, to disdain it. There's a real cultural divide.
Smith's third argument is similar to a point I made above. Individual beliefs, he suggests, don't ultimately have much impact on the world. If flapping your lips about police abolition doesn't actually change conditions in the streets, where's the harm? For most people, the stakes are low. If anything, this should give poor people more leeway to toss around ill-considered ideas.
What about costs in terms of social harms? Yes, if enough people believe that police should be defunded, crime might go up, which would disproportionately hurt the poor. But unless you’re an incredibly important individual like Donald Trump, your personal beliefs don’t change much. From an individual standpoint, choosing to support a “defund” campaign will make only a tiny, imperceptible difference to the actual outcome.
In fact, this is true for the poor as well as the rich. If I’m a poor person, and I say I believe in defunding the police, nothing much will change because of my individual belief.
This is, in my view, a potent criticism of Henderson's theory, but not in the way Smith seems to mean. Elites have more influence on social policy, so elite beliefs matter more. They consequently get more scrutiny. That makes it a bit of a mystery when elites go out of their way to express bizarre opinions. And, indeed, we see that professors, journalists, entertainers, and politicians often pay real costs for saying shocking things. Presumably, the finesse involved in navigating this high-stakes environment is part of what gives luxury beliefs their special currency. But I'm not quite sure how it's all supposed to work.
Smith argues, by contrast, that individual views don't matter at all, save at the very highest levels. Not only does this ignore gradations of power—an editor may not have as much influence as the president, but she clearly has more than a gas station attendant—it bizarrely scants the role of social dynamics in shaping public behavior. Smith draws an analogy to voting, where individual decisions matter only in aggregate. But votes are kept private specifically because public acts, including speech acts, can spark unpredictable dynamic effects. Sure, your own beliefs might not have a huge impact, but if you inspire enough people to jump on the bandwagon with you, you can nudge mass opinion toward supporting awful policies. Worse, the resulting consensus might be illusory. People might pretend to support those awful policies out of an urge to go along with the crowd.
Put it all together, and Smith seems to be arguing that public speech is strictly meaningless--that there's nothing to stop any of us from casually saying whatever it takes to get by. If it suddenly became fashionable to say that mentally ill people should be euthanized, there'd be nothing to stop me, in this view, from bruiting that belief all over town, even if I passionately disagreed. What if the very idea makes me sick? What if my conscience troubles me? What if I have family members who struggle with schizophrenia? What if I'm worried about contributing to a dangerous trend? In Smith's analysis, none of that matters. Everything we say is just a lot of hot air, so we might as well be shameless conformists and go along with the crowd.
This argument isn't only cynical, it's ludicrous. I don't believe for a second that Smith himself buys it. So what's really going on?
3.
All this niggling over signaling mechanisms and social costs feels to me like the kind of abstract chatter people rely on when they don’t want to say what's really on their minds. Smith has done his best to write a technical rebuttal of Henderson's theory, using concepts from social science and economics, in a way that demolishes the concept of "luxury beliefs" while still hewing to the norms of respectable debate. But I'm not sure Henderson's ideas can support that kind of treatment. It may be the case that, somewhere in his body of work, Henderson has developed his pet theory into a robust sociological analysis. But the versions that circulate online--the versions I've seen, and the ones Smith's responding to--are woefully underdeveloped. I personally find Henderson's ideas intriguing, but the theory of luxury beliefs is still more of a sketch than a full-blown thesis. You can't attack it on intellectual grounds, because there's not much of substance to engage with, just a cloud of loosely related concepts that might crystallize, one day, into a coherent whole.
In the past, an aspiring intellectual like Henderson might have put years into refining his theory, researching examples, anticipating objections, engaging with critics, tinkering with formal models. He'd eventually have put together a hefty monograph laying out his thesis in painstaking detail. Over time, as other intellectuals grappled with the work, the theory would be purified of its imperfections and compacted into a nugget of time-tested wisdom, like John Rawls's writings, or Max Weber's, or, for that matter, Thorstein Veblen's. That kind of thing still happens once in a while--see Thomas Piketty's blockbuster doorstop--but the internet has its own uses for ideas, and tends to rush to the end of the process, skipping over the hard work of self-critique.
Henderson's theory is no exception. Whatever the intrinsic merits of his idea, in practice, talking about "luxury beliefs" has come to serve as a slightly more respectable way of griping about “wokeness.” Those who champion the theory are content to leave it in a half-finished state, because their real goal isn't to figure out how the world works but to mount certain kinds of rhetorical attacks. Henderson's inchoate theory suits the anti-wokist cause quite well. It clothes a stock conservative complaint in the dispassionate language of behavioral economics, and thereby presents itself as a handy weapon for those who want to skewer woke academics without coming across as know-nothing MAGA grunts. And, unlike, say, Daniel Kahneman's work, the theory is still too vague and wishy-washy to be pinned down and convincingly refuted. Critics like Smith who march up to do battle with it end up flailing at shadows.
Personally, I think that's a shame. The idea that fashionable strains of anti-elitism can themselves become elite status markers, or that mastering the art of hypocrisy is a form of conspicuous consumption, or that flirting unseriously with ruinous social policies serves as kayfabe for intellectual insiders--these are all notions that deserve a fuller treatment. How does the history of Christianity factor? The evolution of Marxism? The strains of rightwing populism? Is there any way for elites to legitimately champion anti-elitist ideas? And how do age and education relate? The kinds of pseudo-radical beliefs Henderson's complaining about follow on a long history of bourgeois romanticism. The nineteenth century cult of fashionable dissipation, or the early American utopian movements, or the tension in many religious traditions between asceticism and imperial display, are all intriguing forerunners.
Alas, we live in a world where Henderson's work is cynically exploited by one culture-war faction and carelessly rejected by the other--and where Henderson himself, I ought to note, seems more or less happy with that arrangement. Could it be that Henderson doesn't care about the strength of his own ideas, and simply wants to devise clever-seeming ways to say that people who annoy him are, in fact, full of shit? If so, perhaps he ought to heed the lessons of his own abortive theory. He ought to dispense with fancy academic language and say, in plain terms, what he really believes.