I’ve yet to meet Rob Henderson, but I’ve watched some of his cultural criticism, and he seems like a great guy. Troubled, his best-selling autobiography, is both moving and harrowing. Qua social scientist, though, Henderson’s claim to fame is “pioneering the concept of ‘luxury beliefs.’” As he explains in this excerpt:

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.

If you’re in a rush, it’s easy to conclude that Henderson is just reinventing (or relabeling) my notion of “rational irrationality” — the idea that people are much more irrational on topics where error has near-zero private cost. But on closer look, the parallels are illusory. In fact, our chief conclusions are almost diametrically opposed.

He’s correct, I grant, that elites suffer almost no negative consequences from their crazy political views. But this fact has nothing to do with their elite status. Why not? Because selfishly speaking, virtually no one ever suffers any negative consequences of any political view they happen to hold.

To see why, imagine that in the next election, you vote for the opposite of everything to believe in. What happens? The answer, regardless of your station in life, is: The same thing that would have happened anyway. Why? Because, the superstars of politics aside, the probability that one individual flips an electoral outcome is roughly zero.

So yes, a Harvard Ph.D. who denies the efficacy of criminal deterrence suffers no consequences of his error. But a high school dropout who believes the same thing also suffers no consequences of his denial. In both cases, individual influence on crime policy is roughly zero.

My point: It is bizarre to call something a “luxury belief” when everyone, no matter how poor or humble, can easily afford it. People don’t buy their political beliefs at exclusive restaurants. They get them gratis at all-you-can-eat buffets.

Henderson is correct, of course, to claim that pro-crime policies are objectively much worse for the poor than they are for the rich. Even if bad policies doubled victimization rates for all groups, doubling a high rate is much more harmful than doubling a low rate. But to calculate the personal cost of support for pro-crime policies, you have to multiply the cost to you if such policies prevail by the probability that you personally cause such policies to prevail. Since the latter probability is almost always zero, the selfish cost of support is almost always zero regardless of income.

Imagine a wealthy man declares, “I donate blood because I might need it one day.” Why is this a silly claim? Because he’s rich? No! This is a silly claim because no individual, regardless of income, noticeably affects the blood supply. The selfish benefit of blood donation, like the selfish cost of absurd political beliefs, is near-zero for rich and poor alike.

The luxury beliefs story starts making some sense when Henderson moves from politics to lifestyle. The belief that “illegal drug use is low risk” is genuinely less costly if your rich parents are ready to bail you out. In his words:

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.

Fair enough, but the natural prediction is that the rich will freely experiment with drugs, while the poor with prudently gasp, “Too rich for my blood!” and abstain. That’s how luxury goods work: The rich consume far fancier cars, clothes, and vacations than the poor. Luxury beliefs should work the same way. As I’ve explained before at length, you can’t sensibly blame X on poverty if poverty is a strong reason to avoid X.

The same goes for Henderson’s other lifestyle beliefs. This passage sounds reasonable enough:

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…

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.

If you take luxury beliefs seriously, however, the following puzzles should vex you.

1. If people can use hypocrisy to disarm dangerous luxury beliefs, how are they costly for anyone?

2. If elites are especially hypocritical, isn’t there a crucial intensity-weighted sense in which they are consuming a lower quantity of luxury beliefs?

3. If non-college adults remain a little more pro-marriage in theory, why are they vastly less pro-marriage in practice?

Notably, Charles Murray’s Coming Apart grapples with the same class divide in social dysfunction as Henderson, but offers a much more coherent explanation. Long Murrayian story short: Tradition and social pressure for responsible behavior used to be strong, so all classes lived fairly responsibly. As tradition and social pressure relaxed, high-status people had the intelligence and impulse control to keep living responsibly, but low-status people didn’t. That’s why the high-status continue to have high family stability and low substance abuse, while the low-status now have low family stability and high substance abuse.

Like Henderson, Murray is annoyed at elites who fail to preach the bourgeois lifestyle they practice. But instead of building on the shaky foundation of luxury beliefs, Murray straightforwardly blames elites for lack of noblesse oblige. If you’re doing well by the power of bourgeois virtue, you ought to altruistically aid the less successful by loudly sharing the secrets of your success.

Henderson and I agree that (a) people are much more likely to embrace absurd beliefs when the selfish cost is low, and (b) individuals’ absurd beliefs do immense collective harm. What he misses, though, is that the selfish cost of absurd political beliefs is near-zero for virtually everyone. Furthermore, since the selfish cost of absurd lifestyle beliefs normally falls with status, we should expect dysfunction to rise with status. Tacking on elite hypocrisy to explain why the opposite holds in the real world is a desperate epicycle. And a totally unnecessary epicycle, because Charles Murray elegantly explained the whole situation over a decade ago.

P.S. Georges Pratt’s critique of Henderson’s theory of luxury beliefs is also good despite the low overlap with my critique. The same goes for Ruxandra Teslo’s critique.

I have a new piece up at Discourse looking at what just might be the real productive promise of artificial intelligence, and it’s not what you probably think—or at least, it’s not what we have mostly been discussing for the past year or so.

Writing fake articles and substituting for stock photos (which people used to use in their blog posts instead of AI-generated illustrations) is replacing work that is already relatively low-paid and not, alas, central to the economy….

The comment making the rounds on the internet, in various forms, is that AI should be doing tedious tasks for creative people, but instead it’s doing creative tasks for tedious people.

With that in mind, perhaps the really transformative use of AI, the one that would free up large amounts of creative effort, is one that is largely being overlooked. What we need is the old dream of the household robot servant—an AI Jeeves who will fold your laundry and make sure coffee and breakfast are waiting for you in the morning.

I use this as an excuse to talk about a report I came across recently which describes and quantifies the revolution in household appliances that transformed the 20th Century.

According to a recent study by the National Bureau of Economic Research, “Back in 1900, without household appliances, the average US household spent 58 hours per week on meal preparation, laundry, and cleaning.” As they used to say, every mother is a working mother. Despite the rosy conservative view of the traditional family, you can see why most women didn’t work outside the home. It wasn’t a luxury made possible by their husbands’ well-paying factory jobs. (In fact, most families enjoy a substantially higher standard of living today.) Rather, it was a necessity due to the sheer volume of menial labor required inside the home.

The number of hours required to maintain a household was reduced in 20th Century from 58 to 18. The different is a full 40-hour week—which explains the migration of women into the paying workforce.

I also look at an interesting study about why Western Europeans work fewer hours than Americans. It’s not because they’re living la dolce vita. It’s because they spend more time on “home production”—housework—because they can’t afford as many labor-saving appliances.

But the really interesting statistic is that this revolution in household work leveled out in the developed world by the 1990s.

Household machines have taken away or simplified much of the brute physical work. What remains is tending to the machines: gathering the dishes, sorting the clothes, folding them when they’re dry, preparing the ingredients to be cooked and so on. It’s not a huge amount of labor, but it is a significant expenditure of valuable time, and it can’t be automated mechanically. It requires intelligence and judgment—or something like human intelligence.

The idea of an artificially intelligent robot butler—a Jeeves to our Wooster—is still a long way off. What we have now are the first incremental bits, like a robot vacuum that will help keep your floors clean but is just learning how not to smear around dog vomit. There are some early attempts to devise a robot that can fold laundry, but it can’t yet match up your socks….

Interestingly, a group of executives from Cruise, one of the robotaxi companies, has just raised money for a new startup devoted to “household robots.” It is unlikely we will get the robot butler of science fiction, a humanoid automaton that does all our tedious domestic tasks itself. But that’s as unimaginative as expecting our robot butler to operate an old-fashioned hand-crank clothes wringer. We tend to make the mistake of assuming machines will do things the way we do them, rather than the way that is easiest for a machine to do them. It is more likely we will gradually get a variety of appliances or specialized robots that perform specific tasks. One to gather, sort, clean, fold and return your laundry; another to gather and clean dishes and put them back on the shelves; another to take ingredients from the fridge and make breakfast; another to mow the lawn and weed the flower beds. And so on.

I acknowledge that this is a long way off, “perhaps as far away as our contemporary household appliances were in 1900.” But it’s worth speculating what the results would be, both in terms of the other work it would free up, and perhaps more important in terms of the direct gains to our well-being and lifestyle, a sort of “Downton Abbey Effect.”

Read the whole thing.

The Peak and the Trough

In some respects, this is not the best time for excited expectations about the promise of artificial intelligence, because the whole field seems to be sliding from last year’s Peak of Inflated Expectations down into the Trough of Disillusionment. I’ve been seeing a lot of people on social media making fun of the extravagant and obvious errors produced by ChatGPT and other AI chatbots, and I point out in my article the palpable disappointment that we still don’t have widely available self-driving cars.

An Axios report names the phenomenon.

Grumbles about generative AI's shortcomings are coalescing into a "trough of disillusionment" after a year and a half of hype about ChatGPT and other bots…. The "trough of disillusionment" was first named and defined by consulting firm Gartner in 1995 as part of its theory of hype cycles in tech.

On expert quips, “"No one wants to build a product on a model that makes things up," while another gets more specific about the economic: “The valuations anticipate trillion dollar markets, but the actual current revenues from generative AI are rumored to be in the hundreds of millions.”

This is all a demonstration of the difference I explained in depth some time ago between actual consciousness and the ability of artificial intelligence to process data.

Not being able to tell the difference led both to exaggerated fears of AI and inflated hopes.

But remember that the next stage of the hype cycle is the Plateau of Productivity, when people begin to identify the most useful applications of a new technology and optimize it for those purposes. So it’s still worth spending some time to anticipate what those applications might be.

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"The fact of birth is an absolute -- that is, up to that moment, the child is not an independent, living organism. It's part of the body of the mother. But at birth, a child is an individual, and has the rights inherent in the nature of a human individual." -- Ayn Rand
A report at Popular Information reveals the the still-growing threat anti-abortion theocrats pose to reproductive-age women in Louisiana. The headline is bad enough: "Louisiana Lawmakers Insist Child Rape Victims Must Carry Their Pregnancy to Term."

Yes. An attempt to add an exemption to the state's abortion ban for minors who have been victims of rape was shot down. But the real news is a proposal covered a bit later:

Anti-abortion lawmakers in Louisiana are also pushing a bill that would classify abortion medication as Schedule IV drugs, the same treatment as opioids. If the bill becomes law, Louisiana would be the first state in the country to classify mifepristone and misoprostol as controlled dangerous substances.

Under Senate Bill 276, anyone who possesses mifepristone or misoprostol -- the two pills used in a medication abortion -- without a valid prescription could face up to "five years in prison and $5,000 in fines." The bill includes an exemption for pregnant women who use the drugs for their "own consumption." But it still makes acquiring abortion drugs for future use -- a practice known as advanced provision -- effectively illegal.

If you live in Louisiana (or any other red state) and have a daughter, pay attention to this.


The article goes on to note that -- on top of violating the rights of women -- such a move will pose problems for anyone who needs mifepristone or misoprostol (which is often used with it for medical abortions) for other reasons, and complicate prenatal care.

This is horrible news, but unsurprising: By being fundamentally mistaken about what constitutes a human life, anti-abortionists are trampling over the rights of actual human beings as they instead protect the imagined rights of potential human beings.

-- CAV