My guest this week is
, a Yale and Cambridge-trained psychologist, a writer, and a UATX affiliate who has just published a book, Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class. The book documents Rob’s harrowing early childhood and his journey from a declining working-class community to the Air Force to the elite strata of academia. It’s a remarkable story of someone who has transcended his upbringing and social environment without attempting to disavow them. If you know a little bit about me, you’ll understand why I find Rob’s story so compelling. (And if you don’t know a little bit about me, you’ll learn all you want to know and more from my own memoir!)Rob tells me about his early childhood in the care of his mother, whose drug addiction put Rob in increasingly dangerous situations. Even after moving through the foster care system and into an adoptive home, Rob seemed to be headed in the wrong direction, but intervention from some concerned adults pointed Rob toward the Air Force, where he spent eight years. Later, as a 25-year-old freshman at Yale, Rob began encountering the sort of elite attitudes that he would later study formally. We discuss and debate Rob’s concept of “luxury beliefs,” or beliefs that confer social status on bearers who are wealthy enough to insulate themselves from their consequences while harming those who aren’t. We consider how those beliefs and the resentments they stir up can prime different classes for political mobilization. And finally, Rob tells me what his recent trip to Malaysia taught him about poverty and social dysfunction.
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0:00 What makes an “elite”?
4:37 Rob’s very rough early childhood
7:39 Rob’s experience with foster care and adoption
12:35 Why Rob joined the Air Force
17:23 Ground News ad
19:43 The uses of military discipline
24:35 A 25-year-old military vet freshman at Yale
27:15 Luxury beliefs and cultural capital
32:16 Who bears the cost of defunding the police?
38:03 Two-parent households for me but not for thee
43:19 Revealed preferences and implicit understanding
43:17 Interclass resentment as a political weapon
55:04 How Rob became both the “token liberal” and the “token conservative”
1:00:22 Rob: Poverty doesn’t necessarily generate social dysfunction
Recorded February 19, 2024
Links and Readings
Rob’s memoir, Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class
Rob’s Boston Globe op-ed, “The SAT is pathway to more college diversity, not less”
Rob’s WSJ piece, “‘Luxury Beliefs’ That Only the Privileged Can Afford”
Robert Putnam’s book, Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis
Charles Murray’s book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010
Thorstein Veblen’s book, The Theory of the Leisure Class
Pierre Bourdieu’s book, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste
Michael Knox Beran’s book, Wasps: The Splendors and Miseries of an American Aristocracy
Rob’s NYT op-ed, “Why Being a Foster Child Made Me a Conservative”
Rob Henderson – The Cost of Luxury Beliefs