The Double Life of America’s Elite

I was interviewed by a Kristeligt Dagblad, a Danish newspaper in Copenhagen. The piece was published in Danish.

You can read the English translation below:

“He grew up with drug addicts, murder, and neglect. At university, he was shocked by the elite’s view of family”

A stable family is the single most important factor in determining a child’s success. But this is often overlooked in universities and the upper echelons of society, argues American psychologist Rob Henderson.

Family structure is the most important factor when explaining why some people fall through the cracks in society. Yet, remarkably little is said about the importance of family for our future in life.

So says American psychologist Rob Henderson in his new book Troubled, which has topped several American bestseller lists.

In the book, he criticizes a widespread tendency among researchers, politicians, and opinion leaders to focus on factors like parental income, education, or health when trying to explain why some children fare better than others. While those factors matter, he argues, they miss the most important one:

“The strongest factor contributing to a child earning a university degree is whether they grew up with two married parents. If we care about social mobility, we have to look at the family,” says Rob Henderson.

He accuses the intellectual elites of society of having developed certain ideals that they rarely live by themselves. Meanwhile, the more vulnerable segments of society—those at the bottom—are the ones most affected by these elite ideals, such as experimental family structures.

Henderson calls these attitudes luxury beliefs—convictions that one doesn’t necessarily live by or suffer consequences from, but that end up harming less privileged people.

Better a stable upbringing than a university degree

Rob Henderson himself grew up at the bottom of American society. In Troubled, he describes how his mother was a drug addict and how he endured severe neglect. When he was three years old, his mother was arrested; he was taken away, placed in foster care, and never saw her again.

In the foster system, he was repeatedly moved between families to prevent children from becoming too attached to their foster parents. Several of Henderson’s short-term “siblings” ended up as addicts, criminals, murderers—or were themselves killed.

Still, he made it through high school—not with flying colors, but he graduated. He then enlisted in the U.S. Air Force, and after completing three and a half years of service, Henderson was accepted to the prestigious Yale University through a veterans’ program. He later earned a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Cambridge in England.

“As someone who didn’t have a stable family during my upbringing, I’ve accomplished all the things that policymakers and education researchers want for a child growing up in poverty. It’s obviously good to have a university degree from some of the world’s top institutions, and personally, I’m guaranteed a solid income. But if I had the choice, I would have rather had a stable, conventional, secure upbringing.”

Henderson believes that the upper classes have lost sight of how crucial a stable family background is for a person’s future opportunities. As a result, society overemphasizes the role of education in trying to improve the lives of the disadvantaged. It’s not that he’s against education—he simply believes it’s more important to focus on keeping people out of prison than getting them into college. That requires a stable upbringing, which only families can provide.

“I had two friends who ended up in prison, and one friend who was shot and killed. If they had grown up in more stable homes with two married parents who prioritized their children’s well-being, maybe they wouldn’t have made it to university—but they wouldn’t have ended up in prison or dead,” he says.

In contrast, people in the lower social classes adopted the new norms set by the elite in popular culture. They had children out of wedlock and got divorced, Henderson explains.

But even though elites stayed together, they still spoke negatively about marriage and monogamous relationships, Rob Henderson observed when he started at Yale in 2015.

“Many students looked down on marriage and family. When I asked about their own upbringing, it turned out that most of them had been raised in families with two married parents, and they planned to get married themselves. So they had personally benefited from this family institution but outwardly said others should avoid it.”

The elite’s harmful luxury beliefs

These are the kinds of attitudes Henderson calls luxury beliefs. In Troubled, he offers numerous examples of such beliefs in American discourse—for instance, that hard drugs should be legalized or that police funding should be cut. He’s also weary of elite hypocrisy, such as people condemning fat-shaming while obsessively monitoring their own weight.

In the book, he describes how it was the wealthiest Americans who, in the wake of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, supported the idea of defunding the police. This led to actual cuts to police funding in 2021, making it harder to recruit officers. In reaction to anger over police treatment of Black Americans, society undermined the legitimacy of law enforcement. The problem, however, was that this made life much worse for the poorest Americans, who are the most exposed to crime.

“That idea was born on university campuses in the 1990s. Then the graduates got jobs in American media, where they began writing about it,” says Rob Henderson.

It’s especially when these ideas spread into popular culture that Henderson becomes concerned. Not necessarily for the middle or upper classes—but if opposition to stable marriage becomes widespread across media, television, magazines, film, and social media, it can harm children who don’t encounter alternative models in their daily lives.

“If you hear about open marriages, polyamory, and one-night stands in pop culture, you can still, as a middle-class child, observe that your parents are married and surrounded by families where two people are committed to each other. But if you’re in foster care and everyone around you has similarly fragmented family structures, you’ve never seen what a marriage actually looks like. You don’t have a counterweight that pushes you toward marriage like middle-class kids do.”

Henderson sees luxury beliefs as a new way of signaling membership in the upper class. In an era where nearly anyone can buy expensive clothes or smartphones, consumer goods no longer effectively display elite status. Instead, people demonstrate their social capital through their beliefs.

“People who can afford to attend expensive universities can also afford to follow the latest ideas and debates. Luxury beliefs are a way to show how you stand apart from the masses.”

It’s about adopting an elite form of speech to signal class affiliation.

In the book, he writes:

“When someone uses a phrase like ‘cultural appropriation,’ what they’re really saying is, ‘I was educated at one of the best universities.’ [...] Only the wealthy can afford to learn strange words, because ordinary people have real problems to worry about.”

Precisely because it’s about maintaining class status, Henderson finds little willingness to debate these ideas.

“At Yale, I’d sometimes ask what people meant when they said that academic freedom was harmful or that free speech could lead to hate speech. If I asked how those things connected, they’d sometimes say I had to figure it out myself. They thought I was a philistine because I didn’t know the language they had learned,” he says, emphasizing that his critique should not be seen as a protest against elites.

“I have great respect for people at the top of society. I just want us to have a better elite, one with more thoughtful analyses. It’s fascinating to see how group dynamics play out even among the most educated.”

He’s also not critical of all values promoted by elites. For example, he believes it’s entirely appropriate to challenge homophobia, racism, sexism, and misogyny. The problem arises when, in deference to these concerns, people become incoherent or laissez-faire in criticizing genuinely harmful things like drugs and crime.

He suggests that anyone introducing an idea into public discourse should take responsibility for understanding its consequences.

“If you have influence, I believe you’re also obligated to consider how your ideas will affect people who aren’t as fortunate as you.”