22 Life Changing Insights, Social Mobility, The Times
Links and recommendations
You can now watch my conversation with Elliot Bewick on The Next Generation podcast.
Links for Spotify and Apple Podcast.
My essay in The Times:
I recently accepted a role as a regular contributor to The Times. Here is my latest piece:
NYC mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani is poster child for ‘luxury beliefs’
Excerpt:
Take the New York City subway early in the morning from the outer boroughs and you’ll find it packed with cleaners, nannies, restaurant staff, hotel workers and construction workers coming off the night shift. Some are heading home. Some are just starting their day. It’s “the help” arriving and departing.
Like many other large cities, New York runs on a two-tier system. There’s the professional class clustered in the centre, and there are the people who keep the centre running but can’t afford to live in it.
And so they must endure long rides on public transportation to get to work. They keep their heads down and ignore the trash, the smell, the homeless men passed out across the seats. Working-class commuters see the sprawled-out bodies and try to make it through the ride without being harassed or stepping in puddles of urine.
[…]
It’s in this polarised environment that the mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani has gained traction among the city’s richest voters. At only 33, Mamdani is one of the youngest people ever to run for mayor of America’s largest city. Mamdani, a nepo baby who has spent four years as an Albany assemblyman and is described by The New York Times as a “a TikTok savant”, has virtually no experience for the job, but polls show the self-described socialist closing in on the former New York governor Andrew Cuomo’s lead. Whoever wins the Democratic primary Tuesday will be the victor in the general mayoral election come November, as there are no viable Republican candidates in play.
And yet, what’s really worrying about this candidate is that he’s a poster child for luxury beliefs.
“Luxury beliefs” — a term I coined years ago — means opinions that confer status on the upper class at little to no cost for them, while inflicting serious cost on the lower classes. And the very people who back Mamdani are the ones who most resemble him: affluent, overeducated, and eager to prove their virtue at someone else’s expense.
[…]
Before being elected to the New York state assembly in 2020, Mamdani only managed to string together three years of employment. This includes a short-lived rap career and a spell on a film project for his mother, Mira Nair, the director of Monsoon Wedding. He has even joked: “You know, nepotism and hard work goes a long way.”
To appear humble and relatable, he wears hoodies and stages photo ops of himself eating fast-casual meals on the subway. In reality, these are the self-fellating theatrics of the kind I witnessed as a first-generation student at Yale, which helped inform my theory about luxury beliefs.
But while Mamdani pretends to be an ordinary person for political advantage, working-class New Yorkers see right through him.
A recent Emerson poll projects him winning 57 per cent of white voters, but only 26 per cent of Black voters and 35 per cent of Hispanic voters. While 57 per cent of college-educated voters support Mamdani, only 23 per cent of those without a college degree do.
Read the whole thing here.
The Only Reading App I Use:
I’ve been using Readwise since April of 2021.
If you follow me on Instagram or Twitter/X, you’ll know I regularly share screenshots like this from books or articles I’ve read:
These screenshots come from my Readwise app.
Readwise aggregates your reading highlights from various sources like Kindle, Apple Books, Substack, Twitter, and so on. It stores your highlights in one place, making it easier to stay on top of your reading.
Each morning, it emails me 8 random excerpts from different books I’ve read. Since 2021, that daily message has been a quiet ritual for me: fragments from books I half‑forgot are resurfaced, like my own past self giving me a tap on the shoulder.
Moreover, when I’m thinking about a particular topic, a quick search pulls up not just my notes but every highlighted Kindle passage I’ve ever saved on the topic.
Exclusive Offer for My Readers
Use this link → https://readwise.io/robkhenderson/ to try Readwise free for 60 days (double the length of the standard free trial).
I suspect, like me, you’ll wonder how you ever read without it.
Links and recommendations:
Intelligence, Education, Personality, and Social Mobility by Michael Hogan
Is America Experiencing an Infidelity Epidemic? by Daniel A. Cox
Mental-health lessons in schools sound like a great idea. The trouble is, they don’t work by Lucy Foulkes
Patterns of Collective Violence by Jason Manning
When a progressive utopia burned by Johann Kurtz
To Improve College Education, Try Ditching Student Course Ratings by Roy Baumeister
Follow me on Instagram here. The platform is less volatile and more chill than Twitter/X, so I post some spicier excerpts from my readings on my IG stories
You can follow me on TikTok here
Three interesting findings:
1. Most Americans understand the link between homelessness and crime. But activists and academics reject the connection, insisting the homeless pose no elevated crime threat. The median state’s share of sex offenders among its homeless population is 20%. (source).
2. Couples where the husband’s total income was more than $38,000 per year greater than his wife’s income were the least likely to divorce. Couples least likely to divorce were those where the husband had a much larger income than his wife. (source).
3. Intelligence is no guarantee against foolishness. The image of an absent-minded philosopher goes back at least to the story of Thales, the ancient Greek philosopher, mathematician, and astronomer, who stumbled into a well while gazing at the stars. The reason why individuals with high IQ tend to fail in understanding and coping with basic human situations is that they try to apply complex and abstract thinking to problems for which instinctive strategies are more adaptive. (source).
"Couples where the husband’s total income was more than $38,000 per year greater than his wife’s income were the least likely to divorce. Couples least likely to divorce were those where the husband had a much larger income than his wife."
This ties in with my theory as to why upper-middle-class people have more stable marriages than working-class people. If you're married to a professional who makes a lot of money, you stand to lose a lot more financially by divorcing - so you are more inclined to work it out.
I know a lot of upper-middle-class wives who do nothing but complain about their husband's myriad shortcomings; but they would never consider divorce because how else could they afford to live in a town with good schools, save for college tuition, afford a nanny or for the wife to stay home with the kids? Not to mention all the expensive activities that kids need to do to be "competitive" on college applications. When you have a kid who is playing sports, studying an instrument and taking Japanese lessons, you need to have at least one parent who is available most of the time to chauffer the kids around, or else a nanny with a driver's license. Most of these women either do not work, or if they do work it is often a part-time job, or a prestigious but low-paying sort of career.
However, I also know a lot of working class women who are in relationships with men who are semi-employed or unemployed; so they are much more likely to kick him out when he crosses a line as he is often a net drain on her finances and is also not contributing much in terms of childcare (especially if the children are hers from a previous relationship).
My working-class friends all tend to stay in their hometowns and rely on their mothers, aunts and sisters as a support network for childcare. But upper-middle-class people often end up relocating to a different city or state for their careers, and thus lack the extended family around to help out - so another incentive to stay married, in the absence of any other support network.
Item number three is all to true and funny in a sad sort of way as well.