I Have Never, Ever, Not Even Once, Used The Term “Liberal Elites”

Don’t let partisanship disable your ability to think clearly about social class

Yesterday, a reader alerted me to this opinion piece by New York Times columnist Jessica Grose.

You can read it here. 

Responding to my recent podcast with Yascha Mounk, Grose takes exception to my idea of luxury beliefs as applied to the importance of married parents for young children. 

Weirdly, Grose wrote, “Henderson said liberal elites avoid talking about the norms they pass on to their children because they’re afraid to sound judgmental.” 

Let me just say that I have never used the term “liberal elites.” Never in my entire life. Not even once. 

Nowhere in my original article on luxury beliefs will you find the term “liberal elites.” 

You won’t find it in my follow-up article in Quillette. 

You won’t find the term anywhere on this Substack. 

I don’t use the term. But I always find it interesting that, so incredibly often, it’s what people (particularly cultural elites) hear. 

To me, it’s like someone saying, “People need to stop polluting the ocean (or whatever)” and listeners repeatedly shouting back, “Hey why are you attacking conservatives?” 

It’s what you call a “tell.” 

That New York Times piece is a weird one, in that it repeatedly contradicts itself, offers skepticism in the form of non-sequiturs, and conflates opinions with actions.

Look. The luxury beliefs framework is not partisan. It’s a lens through which to understand social class. And it’s just a fact that affluent people are, in general, duplicitous with regard to marriage. And it’s just a fact that elites are, on average, more likely to be left-of-center in their political orientation.

From my forthcoming book:

Among college graduates, only 25 percent think couples should be married before having kids.18 Their actions, though, contradict their luxury beliefs: the vast majority of American college graduates who have children are married. Despite their behavior suggesting otherwise, affluent people are the most likely to say marriage is unimportant. Gradually, their message has spread.

In my home state, 68% of Californians with a college degree say that it is personally important for them to have their own kids within marriage. But 85% of Californians with a college degree say that family diversity, “where kids grow up in different kinds of families,” should be publicly celebrated. 

“Yeah, I’ll be raising my kids in a conventional two-parent family, with all the privilege that entails, but my official public position is that the poors shouldn’t do this.”

Interestingly, according to her Wikipedia page, Grose was born to two married parents (their wedding was reported in the New York Times, no less), both of whom are doctors. Grose herself attended an Ivy League college and is now a columnist at the most prominent newspaper in the world. And (I hope you’re sitting down for this shocking piece of news), Grose is raising her two daughters with her husband within a marriage. Naturally, as someone born in the most fortunate circumstances imaginable, she also wrote a book ridiculing motherhood. It couldn’t be otherwise. 

Grose also writes this strange sentence:

“On the point that elites are perceived to be unwilling to be boosters for marriage because it might seem too judgmental, I am, again, skeptical — particularly since a lot of the folks who like to rail against elites are Ivy Leaguers.”

I’m a pretty good reader. But I’ll be honest. I actually don’t know how to parse this sentence. 

She’s saying she’s skeptical that elites won’t promote marriage because it might be too judgmental. And the reason for her skepticism is that many people who rail against elites went to Ivy League schools. A total non-sequitur. 

Responding specifically to Grose’s point that many people who ridicule elites are Ivy Leaguers—a point regularly made by other writers and commentators—yes, many elite college grads rail against elites. 

But the vast majority of Ivy Leaguers don’t criticize elites. In fact, elite college grads, generally speaking, love elites. People who defend elites tend to be Ivy Leaguers too. 

And the vast majority of people who criticize elites did not attend Ivy League schools. 

It’s a simple selection bias: Lots of non-Ivy Leaguers ridicule elites. But people in Grose’s world don’t hear about them because for the most part they only pay attention to people who went to the same types of schools as them. Would be nice if the elite college graduates staffing top media outlets had some familiarity with elementary statistics and cognitive biases. 

If a short-order cook at Denny’s criticizes elites, it doesn’t appear on their radar. But if a fellow college graduate says something, then cultural elites take notice. 

From my forthcoming book:

Occasionally, I raised these critiques to fellow students or graduates of elite colleges. Sometimes they would reply by asking, “Well, aren’t you part of this group now?” implying that my appraisals of the luxury belief class were hollow because I moved within the same institutions. But they wouldn’t have listened to me back when I was a lowly enlisted service member or back when I was washing dishes for minimum wage. If you ridicule the upper class as an outsider, they’ll either ignore you or tell you that you don’t know what you’re talking about. But if you ridicule them as an insider, they call you a hypocrite. Plainly, the requirements for the upper class to take you seriously (e.g., credentials, wealth, power) are also the grounds to brand you a hypocrite for making any criticism of the upper class.

Anyway, in the very next sentence of her piece, Grose writes this:

“But to the extent that liberals aren’t constantly banging the drum for marriage, my sense is that it’s because the benefits of marriage and two-parent families are pretty obvious to most Americans already. It’s not some big secret that having more resources and increasing the number of loving adults in a child’s life makes parenting easier.”

So she’s saying she’s skeptical that elites aren’t promoting marriage, but also that they aren’t promoting marriage because its benefits are obvious. 

In other words, elites are boosting marriage, and it’s fine that they aren’t. 

Zooming in on her argument, she’s saying that it’s obvious marriage makes parenting easier. So no need to promote something everyone already knows. 

This betrays just how fortunate a life she’s led. 

Just because you know something is beneficial, doesn’t mean you’ll actually do it. 

When you’re an upper middle class person surrounded by intact and stable families, you don’t need to be reminded of the importance of marriage. It’s obvious. Obvious to you. When you seldom see such arrangements, cultural messages from publicly recognized and respected people can help. 

It’s not some big secret that smoking is bad for you. And yet anti-smoking ads continued for decades after people already knew smoking was bad for them. To this day, packs of cigarettes have large warnings about their detrimental effects on health. Doctors ask if you smoke and will tell you how bad it is, as if you didn’t already know. 

If you are a highly educated and conscientious person living in a place where few people smoke and will give you the side eye if you do, then you don’t need these constant reminders. But if you live in a place with few resources and low exposure to good role models, where lots of people smoke and there’s no local stigma about it, then in the aggregate having these ads and warnings and reminders can make some difference in your interest in tobacco use. 

Repeated messaging can help create collective knowledge that some behaviors are better than others. 

It’s not some big secret that vegetables are good for you. But people still order the fries instead of the side salad. Knowledge alone doesn’t motivate action. 

Here’s another example. No one around me went to college. It wasn’t in my milieu. But I watched TV and saw affluent upper middle class characters who I liked watching go off to college, and it planted the seed in my mind that maybe college was something worth aspiring to. 

The same could be true of marriage. 

Grose also cites research suggesting that the absence of good marriage prospects might be contributing to the decline in marriage in low-income communities. 

It seems like she’s saying elites’ lives are so great and they have benefited so much from marriage that they have no need to speak of its benefits because it’s so obvious. And poor people have such miserable prospects why even bother telling them how good marriage is. 

Personally, I’m not even saying to promote marriage. If you’re single, do whatever you want. But if children are involved, then yes, short of spousal mistreatment or abuse or truly irreconcilable differences, marriage is better. It is the best arrangement, on average, for kids (if you doubt this, again, consider that most college graduates choose this arrangement for their own kids). Maybe people who wield the most influence on culture and policy could reconsider how frequently they denigrate marriage or romanticize its dissolution.  

From Grose’s column:

“It’s easy to point the finger at elites, cherry-pick their statements and stir a moral panic about the decline in the marriage rate over time. It’s harder to meaningfully expand the safety net so that fewer children live in poverty — which really should be the focus of all this — even if their parents don’t get hitched.”

I knew this was coming. References to money and finances repeatedly appear throughout the piece. Nothing about love, attachment, emotional security, of nurturing for children. I lived in poverty and it’s just a fact that being poor isn’t nearly as bad as feeling uncared for and unloved. 

Grose says to expand the safety net. As I’ve mentioned before, childhood poverty has little to no link with detrimental outcomes or well-being in adulthood. 

In contrast, childhood instability (as indexed by divorce, number of different romantic partners your caregiver has, etc.) is a strong and reliable predictor of future incarceration, substance abuse, teen pregnancy, and unhappiness in adulthood. 

The renowned behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman has written: “Income is an important determinant of people's satisfaction with their lives, but it is far less important than most people think. If everyone had the same income, the differences among people in life satisfaction would be reduced by less than 5%.” 

Giving people a bunch of money isn’t suddenly going to improve their lives. But since highly-educated people primarily understand value in terms of dollars, it’s worth noting that in terms of effect on happiness, being married is worth earning an extra $100,000 a year. 

But now imagine we tell a happily married couple, we are going to forcibly separate you two, but it’s okay because we’re going to give each of you $100K. Are they just as happy as they were before? 

Another study found that equalizing life outcomes for children raised by single parents to match those raised by married parents would require a transfer of $59K per year (in 2023 dollars) to close the gap in educational and employment outcomes. 

Imagine you tell a kid raised by two parents, we’re going to forcibly separate your parents, or permanently remove one of them from your life. But it’s okay because we’re going to give you $59K a year. Is the kid just as happy as he was before? 

Elites love money. That is one thing that I have learned over the last few years. How about love? Attachment? Security? For themselves, sure. But for everyone else, the prevailing view seems to be that they’d happily liquidate those things for cold hard cash. 

Look, I’m not anti-elite in general, and I’m not even anti-the current elite. I just want our elites to be better. I want them to understand that there are other ways to help poor and marginalized people besides throwing money at them. 

Elite messaging makes a difference. From my interview with Yascha Mounk:

In the last couple of months, I've talked to two readers of my Substack, both upper middle class. Both of them told me that they were having some difficulties in their marriage, kind of bored and a little bit unhappy, thinking maybe this marriage had just kind of run its course. But they both had small children, and they on the fence about whether or not to dissolve their marriage. But then they had read some things that I had written and reflected on some of my thoughts about it, and they reconsidered, and now they're speaking with their wives. And one is enrolling in couples therapy. They went a different direction simply because of something they had read. And to me this does illustrate that the opinions that we encounter from people that we like to read, that we admire, that we respect, do play a role in our lives. Ideas matter just as much as economics. 

I’m just a guy with a Substack. Imagine if cultural messaging more broadly adopted a similar stance on family and marriage. In the aggregate, a lot of people would make different choices. But what do I know—I’m no psychologist. 

Listen to the elite newspaper columnists. They’re more qualified than me. 

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My book comes out in less than 3 weeks. In Troubled, I speak (a lot) more about the hypocrisy of elites.

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