Contra Caplan Contra Henderson on Luxury Beliefs

Is there a Hypocrisy Skill Issue?

Rob Henderson’s most well known phrase is “luxury beliefs”, which according to him are “ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class at very little cost, while often inflicting costs on the lower classes.” This term is central to his theory that upper-class hypocrisy is responsible for the social degradation among the lower class.

Bryan Caplan disagrees with this causal theory. 

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.

Bryan asserts that beliefs have little to no effect in behavior, but I don’t think that’s true. I especially don’t think that’s true uniformly. Hypocrisy is a skill. I’m sure it’s a skill Bryan sees ubiquitously, as a university professor. 

At the same time, I would bet that Rob and I grew up with people who simply lack this skill. There’s empirical evidence for this too: more intelligent people are better liars and better at understanding hypotheticals. Why does this uneven distribution matter? Because luxury beliefs, or wrong beliefs in general, impact those unable to be hypocritical more. Take Caplan’s example of crime:

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.

For the purely hypocritical, this is true. But for less hypocritical people (regardless of whether it is due to being more moral or less intelligent), there’s pressure to behave this way in real life too. Believing that criminals are oppressed can easily lead to putting yourself at risk of more crimes and failing to defend yourself, with very obvious personal costs. 

Richard Hanania points out that “while only immigrants and white proles explicitly discuss [race and crime], every single person within the orbit of the city behaves as if they know the truth”. For ‘immigrants and white proles’, it’s closer to a direct choice of whether to speak the truth and act accordingly, or bear the consequences of higher crime. 

Bryan has three questions for Luxury Belief believers:

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?

I disagree with the premise of 1 for the reasons above.

Question 2 is a more interesting philosophical question. Its interpretation hinges on what he means by ‘consuming’. One interpretation actually supports the luxury belief idea, if ‘consuming a lower quantity’ means that their actions are less affected by luxury beliefs. Since Bryan is criticizing the luxury beliefs idea, I don’t think this is the intended meaning. 

Instead, I think ‘consuming’ means espousing luxury beliefs. This is an interesting question: does being hypocritical about a belief reduce your ability to persuade others to adopt those beliefs. I think that the answer is “probably yes”, but the differences in elites ability to persuade others due to both opportunity and persuasion skill are just much larger factors. 

I agree with Caplan’s explanation of 3:

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.

I don’t think this contradicts the luxury belief idea, though. The reason why noblesse oblige in shaping narratives for the lower class is important is because the lower class is worse at hypocrisy. Belief in tradition is much more impactful on their actions than it is for the upper class. 

This exchange serves as a good case study for my critique of pure hereditarianism. While I believe in most scientific results about genetics, I don’t think that this is a sufficient explanation for morality. At the end of the day, I believe social standards, moral pressures, belief in free will, and status rewards set out by elites matter.

I think the past half-century’s experiment with social norms has exposed a real hypocrisy skill gap. But morally, who does that reflect better upon?

PS: Interviews with both Rob and Bryan:

https://www.fromthenew.world/p/rob-henderson-the-hidden-scripts

https://www.fromthenew.world/p/bryan-caplan-moral-crusades-and-the