How the luxury beliefs of an educated elite erode society
WEEKEND ESSAY | ROB HENDERSON
How the luxury beliefs of an educated elite erode society
Whether attacking marriage, calling out white privilege or seeking to defund the police, the university class espouse ideas that confer status on them at little cost. But it’s the least privileged who suffer the effects
Rob Henderson
Friday February 23 2024, 5.00pm GMT, The Times
Born in Los Angeles into what many would consider the American lower class, I entered the foster system aged three after my drug-addicted birth mother, originally from Seoul, was unable to care for me. Over the next five years, I moved through seven different foster homes. I grew up without knowing my father, only discovering his Hispanic heritage, with roots in Mexico and Spain, through a genetic test last year.
When I was seven, I was adopted by a working-class family and subsequently settled in a dusty town called Red Bluff, California, in one of the poorest counties in the state. My adoptive parents divorced shortly thereafter, and my adolescence was marked by substance abuse, violence, family tragedy and financial catastrophe. I fled as soon as I could at 17, enlisting in the US air force right after high school. Eventually, after several missteps, I managed to gain admission to one of the most prestigious universities in the world.
I came to Yale to major in psychology, but my curiosity soon overflowed the boundaries of my degree. In my attempt to understand class distinctions, I spent a lot of time thinking and reading about class divides and social hierarchies, and compared what I’d learnt with my experiences on campus. Gradually, I developed the concept of “luxury beliefs”, which are ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class at very little cost, while often inflicting costs on the lower classes.
The richest Americans showed the strongest support for defunding the police
MICHAEL SILUK/EDUCATION IMAGES/UNIVERSAL IMAGES GROUP/GETTY IMAGES
The upper class includes (but is not necessarily limited to) anyone who attends or graduates from an elite university and has at least one parent who is a university graduate. Research has found that parental educational attainment is the most important objective indicator of social class. Compared with parental income, parental education is a more powerful predictor of a child’s future lifestyle, tastes and opinions.
It is a vexed question whether first-generation graduates can truly enter the upper class. Paul Fussell, the social critic and author of Class, wrote that manners, tastes, opinions and conversational style are just as important for upper-class membership as money or credentials, and that to fulfil these requirements, you have to be immersed in affluence from birth. Likewise, the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu stated that a “triadic structure” of schooling, language and taste was necessary to be accepted among the upper class. Bourdieu described the mastery of this triad as “ease”. When you grow up in a social class, you come to embody it. You represent its tastes and values so deeply that you exhibit ease within it.
People with parents who are university graduates are often better equipped to gain and maintain status — they tend to be more adept at navigating organisations, smoothly interacting with colleagues and positioning themselves for advancement. Consistent with this, in 2021 the Pew Research Center found that among US households headed by a graduate, the median wealth of those who had a parent with at least a bachelor’s degree was nearly $100,000 greater than those who don’t have college-educated parents.
This bonus of being a “continuing-generation” (as opposed to a “first-generation”) college graduate has been termed the “parent premium”. I don’t have the parent premium. For extended periods of my youth, I had the opposite. It’s impossible to say that every individual in a particular class or category has the exact same features across the board. Still, graduates of elite universities generally occupy the top quintile of income, often wield outsized social influence and are disproportionately likely to hold luxury beliefs that undermine social mobility.
At Yale University Canada Goose jackets were a common sight
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For example, a former classmate at Yale told me “monogamy is kind of outdated” and not good for society. I asked her about her background and if she planned to marry. She was raised in a stable two-parent family, just like the vast majority of our classmates. And she planned on getting married herself. But she insisted that traditional families are old-fashioned and that society should “evolve” beyond them.
My classmate’s promotion of one ideal (“monogamy is outdated”) while living by another (“I plan to get married”) was echoed by other students in different ways. Some would, for instance, tell me about the admiration they had for the military, or how trade schools were just as respectable as college, or how college was not necessary to be successful. But when I asked them if they would encourage their own children to enlist or become a plumber or an electrician rather than apply to college, they would demur or change the subject.
Later, I would connect my observations to stories I read about tech tycoons, another affluent group, who encourage people to use addictive devices while simultaneously enforcing rigid rules at home about technology use. For example, Steve Jobs prohibited his children from using iPads. Parents in Silicon Valley reportedly tell their nannies to closely monitor how much their children use their smartphones. Don’t get high on your own supply, I guess. Many affluent people now promote lifestyles that are harmful to the less fortunate. Meanwhile, they are not only insulated from the fallout; they often profit from it.
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In the past, people displayed their membership of the upper class with their material accoutrements. But today, luxury goods are more accessible than before. This is a problem for the affluent, who still want to broadcast their high social position. But they have come up with a clever solution. The affluent have decoupled social status from goods and reattached it to beliefs.
Steve Jobs, the Apple co-founder, prohibited his children from using iPads
DAVID PAUL MORRIS/GETTY IMAGES
Human beings become more preoccupied with social status once our physical needs are met. Research has shown that sociometric status (respect and admiration from peers) is more important for wellbeing than socioeconomic status. Furthermore, studies have described how negative social judgment is associated with a spike in cortisol (a hormone linked to stress) that is three times higher than in non-social stressful situations. We feel pressure to build and maintain social status, and fear losing it.
It seems reasonable to think that the most downtrodden might be most interested in obtaining status and money, but this is not the case. Denizens of prestigious institutions are even more interested than others in prestige and wealth. For many of them, that drive is how they reached their lofty positions in the first place. They persistently look for new ways to move upward and avoid moving downward.
The French sociologist Émile Durkheim understood this when he wrote: “The more one has, the more one wants, since satisfactions received only stimulate instead of filling needs”. And research supports this. A psychology study in 2020 revealed that “Upper-class individuals cared more about status and valued it more highly than working-class individuals … Furthermore, compared with lower-status individuals, high-status individuals were more likely to engage in behaviour aimed at protecting or enhancing their status.” Plainly, high-status people desire status more than anyone else does.
You might think that, for example, rich students at elite universities would be happy because their parents are in the top 1 per cent of income earners, and that statistically they will soon join their parents in this elite guild. But remember, they’re surrounded by other members of the 1 per cent. For many elite university students, their social circle consists of baby millionaires, which often instils a sense of insecurity and an anxiety to preserve and maintain their positions against such rarefied competitors.
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The US sociologist Thorstein Veblen said the wealthy flaunt status symbols because only they could afford them
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Thorstein Veblen’s famous “leisure class” has evolved into the “luxury belief class”. Veblen, an economist and sociologist, compiled his observations about social class in his classic 1899 book The Theory of the Leisure Class. A key idea is that because we can’t be certain of the financial standing of other people, a good way to size up their means is to see whether they can afford to waste money on goods and leisure. This explains why status symbols are so often difficult to obtain and costly to purchase.
In Veblen’s day, people exhibited their status with delicate and restrictive clothing such as tuxedos, top hats and evening gowns, or by partaking in time-consuming activities like golf or beagling. Veblen suggested that the wealthy flaunt these symbols not because they are useful but because they are so pricey or wasteful that only the wealthy can afford them, which is why they are high-status indicators.
During my first year at Yale in 2015, it was common to see students at Ivy League colleges wearing Canada Goose jackets. Is it necessary to spend $900 to stay warm in New England? No. But kids weren’t spending their parents’ money just for the warmth. They were spending the equivalent of the typical American’s weekly income ($865) for the logo. Likewise, are students spending $250,000 at prestigious American universities for the education? Maybe. But they are also spending it for the logo.
As the New York University professor Scott Galloway said in an interview in 2020: “The strongest brand in the world is not Apple or Mercedes-Benz or Coca-Cola. The strongest brands are MIT, Oxford, and Stanford. Academics and administrators at the top universities have decided over the last 30 years that we’re no longer public servants; we’re luxury goods.”
This is not to say that elite colleges don’t educate their students, or that Canada Goose jackets don’t keep their wearers warm. But top universities are also crucial for induction into the luxury belief class. Take vocabulary. Your typical working-class American could not tell you what “heteronormative” or “cisgender” means. But if you visit an elite university, you’ll find plenty of affluent people who will eagerly explain them to you. When someone uses the phrase cultural appropriation, what they are really saying is, “I was educated at a top college”. Only the affluent can afford to learn strange vocabulary, because ordinary people have real problems to worry about.
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White privilege is the luxury belief that took me the longest to understand, because I grew up around a lot of poor white people. Affluent white college graduates seem to be the most enthusiastic about the idea of white privilege, yet they are the least likely to incur any costs for promoting that belief. Rather, they raise their social standing by talking about their privilege. When policies are implemented to combat white privilege, it won’t be Yale graduates who are harmed. Poor white people will bear the brunt.
The upper class promotes abolishing the police or decriminalising drugs or white privilege because it advances their social standing. The logic is akin to conspicuous consumption: if you’re a student who has a large subsidy from your parents and I do not, you can afford to waste $900 and I can’t, so wearing a Canada Goose jacket is a good way of advertising your superior wealth and status. Proposing policies that will cost you as a member of the upper class less than they would cost me serves the same function. Advocating for sexual promiscuity, drug experimentation or abolishing the police are good ways of advertising your membership of the elite because, thanks to your wealth and social connections, they will cost you less than me.
A well-heeled student at an elite university can experiment with cocaine and will, in all likelihood, be fine. A kid from a dysfunctional home with absentee parents will often take that first hit of meth to self-destruction. This is perhaps why a 2019 survey found that less than half of Americans without a college degree want to legalise drugs, but more than 60 per cent of Americans with a bachelor’s degree or higher are in favour of drug legalisation.
Similarly, a 2020 survey found that the richest Americans showed the strongest support for defunding the police, while the poorest reported the lowest support. Throughout the remainder of that year and into 2021, murder rates throughout the US soared as a result of defunding policies, officers retiring early or quitting, and police departments struggling to recruit new members after the luxury belief class cultivated an environment of loathing toward law enforcement.
Consider that compared with Americans who earn more than $75,000 a year, the poorest Americans are seven times more likely to be victims of robbery, seven times more likely to be victims of aggravated assault and 20 times more likely to be victims of sexual assault. And yet many affluent people are calling to abolish law enforcement.
Most personal to me is the luxury belief that family is unimportant or that children are equally likely to thrive in all family structures. In 1960, the percentage of American children living with both biological parents was identical for affluent and working-class families — 95 per cent. By 2005, 85 per cent of affluent families were still intact, but for working-class families the figure had plummeted to 30 per cent. The Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam said at a 2017 Senate hearing: “Rich kids and poor kids now grow up in separate Americas … Growing up with two parents is now unusual in the working class, while two-parent families are normal and becoming more common among the upper middle class.”
Affluent people, particularly in the 1960s, championed sexual freedom. Loose sexual norms caught on for the rest of society. The upper class, though, still had intact families. Generally speaking, they experimented in college and then settled down. The families of the lower classes fell apart.
This deterioration is still happening. In 2006, more than half of American adults without a university degree believed it was “very important” that couples with children should be married. Fast-forward to 2020, and this number has plummeted to 31 per cent. Among university graduates, only 25 per cent think couples should be married before having kids. Their actions, though, contradict their luxury beliefs: the vast majority of American university graduates who have children are married. And yet, despite their behaviour suggesting otherwise, affluent people are the most likely to say marriage is unimportant.
Opinion | Everything I Know About Elite America I Learned From ‘Fresh Prince’ and ‘West Wing’ - The New York Times 2020
Everything I Know About Elite America I Learned From ‘Fresh Prince’ and ‘West Wing’
Television taught me how to move between social classes — but at what cost?
By Rob Henderson
Mr. Henderson is a Ph.D. student at the University of Cambridge.Oct. 10, 2020
At first, I thought class was about money. “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” taught me that it wasn’t.
I started off in what most people think of as America’s lower class. I was given up for adoption when I was 3; I spent the next four years in seven foster homes. When I was 7, I was adopted and subsequently settled in Red Bluff, Calif., a working-class town, population 13,147, median household income $27,029. Two years later, my adoptive parents got divorced; after that, my adoptive father severed ties.
When I was 15, I got my first job, as a dishwasher at a pizza restaurant, and on breaks, all my conversations with co-workers eventually turned to the topic of money. We would fantasize about what we would do if we suddenly had it: vacations, cars. In high school, we’d hear rumors that so-and-so was rich, because their parents had a second house or a boat. We all thought that money was the important thing: If you had it, you were “rich” — which for us was indistinguishable from “elite.” If you didn’t, you weren’t.
This was true, to an extent. But it wasn’t the whole story. How did I learn it wasn’t? From television.
It’s possible I watched more TV from birth to age 17 than most upper-class Americans watch their entire lives. In my foster homes, the television was playing constantly. My foster siblings and I fought over which shows to watch. Early on, we’d argue over “Power Rangers” or “Rugrats”; later, it was “Family Matters” or “Full House.”
Later, after my parents got divorced and my mom began working full time, the duplex we lived in was often empty. I’d turn the TV on first thing in the morning and again as soon as I got home from school. Certain shows were staples that I watched with rapt attention; others played in the background whenever my mom wasn’t around, telling me to turn them off.
Today I’m a Ph.D. student at Cambridge University. As someone who has had to navigate a long journey through a variety of social milieus — first foster care and my hometown, then the military, then Yale — television has been a constant and lifeline. It’s been both entertainment and social guide, teaching me the language and the ways of thinking I needed to move fluidly, more or less, from one environment to another.
Along the way, I’ve learned about the complicated ways that class interacts with taste, and what different social classes view as desirable. What I’ve come to realize, as I reflect on different influences in my life, is that the television I’ve watched has made me a different person than I would otherwise have been; choices I’ve made have been guided to a large degree by what TV has taught me about what constitutes a good life. Looking back, I can see that my decisions stemmed from a set of values — but whose? I thought I was building the life I desired, using fictional stories as a road map. Now I wonder how these stories shaped what I desired all along.
One of my favorite shows growing up was “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.” It taught me that social class wasn’t just about money — college was important, too.
On “Fresh Prince,” Will, a teenager who grew up in West Philadelphia, is sent to live with his aunt and uncle in Bel-Air, Calif. He attends “Bel-Air Academy” along with his cousin, Carlton Banks. He doesn’t quite fit in; in a poignant moment in Season 3, Will describes the difficulties he’d experienced trying keep up with the wealthier, more polished people around him. “It was like everybody had two skates, and I was trying to keep up with one,” he says.
It’s in the third season that college becomes a major plot point. For Carlton, the question was not whether he would attend college, but whether he would follow in his father’s footsteps and go to Princeton. But he doesn’t get in. Will, on the other hand, is offered a spot, if he improves his grades.
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The same themes come up in “The O.C.,” one of the biggest shows of the mid-2000s. In The O.C. — what a friend called “‘Fresh Prince’ with white people” — Ryan, a teenager from a rough neighborhood, moves in with a rich family, the Cohens. At first, he is seen as a troublemaker, but we soon find out he’s a talented student (though he, too, feels out of place at his new private high school). In the third season, college again becomes a crucial plot point: Seth Cohen wants to attend Brown, but he doesn’t get in. Ryan, who is less concerned with academics but nonetheless scored in the 98th percentile on the SAT, goes on to attend Berkeley.
It sounds absurd now, but this obsession with college genuinely puzzled me. The Banks family lived in a beautiful house and had a butler. Seth Cohen had his own sailboat. Why was college such a big deal?
I would later realize that these shows were my first glimpse into a world that wasn’t mine. These shows were intended for a middle-class audience, with plot points steeped in middle-class values. In “Class: A Guide Through the American Status System,” Paul Fussell argues that the criteria we use to define the tiers of the social hierarchy are in fact indicative of our social class. For people near the bottom, social class is defined by money — in this regard, I was right in line with my peers when I was growing up. The middle class, though, doesn’t just value money; equally important is education.
I didn’t know this at the time, of course; as a kid watching “Fresh Prince,” I just figured if Will was going to college, then maybe I should too.
But it would take some time for me to get there. My early life had been a mess, and I’d been a terrible student. I graduated with a 2.2 G.P.A.; I didn’t even sign up to take the SAT. (While the characters from my favorite shows were offered admission to Princeton and Berkeley, the smartest kid in my high school class — the one everyone knew was going to college — went to California State University, Fullerton). Instead, I enlisted in the military.
Members of the military are disproportionately from the middle class, and throughout my enlistment, I learned from actual rather than fictional people about the importance of education. Service members who had college credits or a degree were typically promoted faster, and supervisors often urged subordinates to take night classes. The military offered veterans the G.I. Bill to cover tuition; I finally started making college plans.
One year before my enlistment was over, but before I knew where I’d be headed next, I attended the Warrior-Scholar Project, an organization that hosts “academic boot camps” to teach military veterans how to succeed in higher education. I learned a lot: how to write an essay, tips for studying, making the most of office hours.
Equally useful, though, were the insights I gleaned from the unstructured time. The tutors were either students or graduates of top universities like Yale, Dartmouth and Amherst. Between lessons and writing workshops, the other students and I would hang out with them; sometimes I’d overhear them chatting with one another.
I became close with one, a recent Yale graduate. One evening, I saw him watching something on his MacBook. He told me it was “The West Wing.”
I’d never seen this show, nor did I know anyone who’d watched it. My military friends watched “Two and a Half Men,” “Family Guy,” “Game of Thrones.” But when another tutor overheard him recommend the show to me, she nodded vigorously, saying I had to watch it.
I took the recommendation seriously. This was the first show that two Ivy League graduates had ever recommended to me. It suddenly seemed important to understand. What if I attended college and someone referenced the show and I didn’t get it?
I started watching “The West Wing.” As I watched, I had an uncomfortable realization: “The West Wing” is not very good.
The show had the pacing of a 90s TV drama (fair enough); the way the characters spoke seemed strange to me (though I’ve since grown to enjoy “Sorkinese”). Still, I kept watching, because I was intrigued by what it told me about the people who’d recommended it.
It turns out, as the show’s creator, Aaron Sorkin, has explained, if I didn’t like the show, that’s in part because I wasn’t really meant to. The pilot episode didn’t test well with people like me. But, according to Mr. Sorkin, it tested “extremely well” with certain audience segments. Among them: households that earned more than $75,000 a year, households with at least one college graduate and households that subscribed to The New York Times.
And though the show was not my favorite, I was fascinated by its characters. They were constantly engaged in debates about contentious social and political issues. One plotline I found particularly interesting was when President Bartlet’s deputy communications director, Sam Seaborn, loses a debate against a Republican woman named Ainsley Hayes. To her surprise, Hayes is subsequently offered a job in the Democratic administration; the president cites her “sense of civic duty.”
The more I watched, the more the characters reminded me of the Warrior-Scholar Project tutors. Characters like Josh Lyman and C.J. Cregg were educated at elite universities and, despite their flaws, tried to live up to their moral principles. They engaged in fierce debate with political foes, but respected them too. The characters who staffed the Bartlet administration were highly educated, extremely witty, clever and idealistic. It made me wonder: Was this show so popular among elite college graduates because they saw aspirational versions of themselves in it? And if this was how they aspired to be, was this also how I should aspire to be?
Early on, I thought of television as a window into another world. I would watch it to escape the one I was in, and to learn more about others. Later, though, it became more like a mirror. The more I saw, the more I learned what I wanted; the shows I chose to watch, in turn, reflected my desire to build a better life for myself, and I took my cues from them on how to construct it. Either stay like this, I thought, as I gazed at the TV, or try to live like that.
This was what happened with “The West Wing.” At first, I watched to learn why the tutors recommended it to me. I continued to watch because it showed me what I wanted. I watched two full seasons before stopping, but scenes from the series have stayed with me. Josh Lyman boasted about how he’d attended Harvard and Yale. C.J. Cregg asked President Bartlet on behalf of a journalist onboard Air Force One why he’d attended Notre Dame when he’d gotten into Harvard, Yale and Williams. For me, the show confirmed that education was indeed a necessary ingredient for a better life — important not just for money, but for respect — but that not all educations were created equal.
Watching “Fresh Prince” and other shows taught me that higher education was important. “West Wing” reinforced the value of elite higher education, with a helping of idealism on the side. Television, in other words, gave me an aspirational road map for upward mobility. (Both shows, coincidentally, are planning reunion specials this fall.)
But it wasn’t just a way to learn how the other half lived; TV was also a gateway into an unknown media landscape. Through my habit of reading about my favorite shows via “episode recaps” and “analyses,” I discovered various prestige media outlets I’d never read — The Atlantic, Vanity Fair — where I later read articles about topics besides television. These publications, in turn, lead me to discover new and yet more prestigious shows: When in 2014 I read a column in The New Yorker in which Emily Nussbaum observed that the characters in the Showtime series “The Affair” are the kind of people who would watch “The Affair,” I knew I had to watch. (You know when the main characters on a show went to Williams College it’s intended for a niche audience — if it had been intended for the mainstream, they would have gone to Princeton or Harvard.)
What I’ve come to appreciate in the years since is that the stories portrayed were not exactly value neutral. Television, like all forms of fiction, contains implicit messages about how to be a good person and what sort of aims are worth pursuing. This is especially true for prestigious television shows, which one can view aspirationally, as I did, and which can make the implicit messages carry even more weight. There is a well-known idea that liberal Hollywood indoctrinates audiences, leading them to change their values or beliefs. (One study suggests that “Will & Grace” positively changed Americans’ attitudes toward gay people, for instance.) My story is a real-world example of how cultural power operates. It’s far more subtle than any indoctrination-type process — but that doesn’t mean it’s not real.
In the show “Mad Men,” the rags-to-riches protagonist Don Draper also watches movies and television to help blend into the world of New York’s upper class. It works well enough, but even so, he can’t quite smooth all his rough edges: In one episode, for example, Roger Sterling, Don’s boss, invites himself over to the Drapers’ house for dinner. After a few drinks, Roger says to Don, “By the way you drop your G’s every once in a while, I always thought you were raised on a farm.” Don, visibly uncomfortable, changes the subject.
For me, too, watching television took me only so far. I still didn’t quite fit in when I finally went to Yale. Though I didn’t drop my G’s, people on campus were fluent in a language I still could not speak. I remember being bewildered the first time I heard another student describe a joke I’d made as “gendered,” for instance — I’d never heard that word before.
But going to Yale also meant I no longer needed television to learn how to fit in among elites — I could learn from them in real life.
Recently, I was at an academic program in Washington, D.C. There, for the first time in my life, a stranger mistook me for having come from a wealthy background. “I’m not rich,” I said. “I just watch a lot of TV.” I said it as a joke, but it really wasn’t. My “bingeing to belong” approach wasn’t foolproof, but it helped. TV helped me to understand people who were worlds away from how I grew up. It gave me an understanding of the ingredients of social mobility. What I can’t quite disentangle is whether it taught me how to get what I had always wanted or taught me what to want.
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Rob Henderson (@robkhenderson), who served in the Air Force, is a Ph.D. student at the University of Cambridge.
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A version of this article appears in print on Oct. 11, 2020, Section SR, Page 5 of the New York edition with the headline: ‘I’m Not Rich, I Just Watch a Lot of TV’. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
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