Good morning! It’s Wednesday, and here are this week’s five items for you.
1. A take I haven’t written elsewhere
The risk of rule by luxury belief
Late last year, a video went around Twitter in which Francis Collins, the former head of the National Institutes of Health (who happens to be an evangelical) apologized for having taken too narrow a view of policy options during the COVID-19 pandemic. Click the image below to watch the whole thing, or here’s a transcript:
As a guy living inside the Beltway, feeling the sense of crisis, trying to decide what to do in some situation room in the White House with people who had data that was incomplete, we weren’t really thinking about what that would mean to Wilk and his family in Minnesota, a thousand miles away from where the virus was hitting so hard. We weren’t really considering the consequences in communities that were not New York City or some other big city.
The public health people—we talked about this earlier, and this is a really important point: If you’re a public health person, and you’re trying to make a decision, you have this very narrow view of what the right decision is, and that is something that will save a life. Doesn’t matter what else happens. So you attach infinite value to stopping the disease and saving a life. You attach zero value to whether this actually totally disrupts people’s lives, ruins the economy, and has many kids kept out of school in a way that they never quite recover from, [causing] collateral damage.
This is a public health mindset, and I think a lot of us involved in trying to make those recommendations had that mindset, and that was really unfortunate.
Collins was both praised and criticized for his regrets—though I don’t think I saw anyone disagreeing with the substance of his apology, only with whether it was sufficient and sufficiently prompt for Collins to deserve any credit. I’m not interested in adjudicating the merit of the apology here, though. Instead I want to make a brief comment on the “public health mindset” he describes as prioritizing one good at the expense of all others.
It reminded me of the notion of “luxury beliefs,” which
postulated on his Substack a couple years ago. (If the idea is new to you, it’s worth reading that whole post.)The gist is this: High-status people like to display their status. In eras past, they typically did this through conspicuous consumption. Now, Henderson says, “because material goods have become a noisier signal of one’s social position and economic resources, the affluent have decoupled social status from goods, and re-attached it to beliefs.”
So a luxury belief is something you believe because you can afford to believe it, and the fact of belief signals what you can afford. (How consciously this happens is debatable and probably variable.) Henderson’s chief example is income-stratified support for defunding the police, which showed up in polls in 2020 and 2021. High-income people were about 50 percent more likely (32 percent vs. 22 percent) to support defunding the police than low-income people. Why? Henderson argues it’s because they’re less likely to need the police, “because they already live in safe, often gated communities,” while “a vulnerable poor person in a crime-ridden neighborhood can’t afford to support defunding the police.”
If you want more current examples, take a look at this recent poll, which splits respondents into “elites” (defined as “those having a postgraduate degree, a household income of more than $150,000 annually, and living in a zip code with more than 10,000 people per square mile”) and everyone else.1
Here’s an especially straightforward example: “Almost two-thirds of elites (70 percent) said they would pay $500 or more each year in taxes and higher costs to reduce climate change, while nearly as many average Americans (72 percent) said they would only be willing to pay $100 or less a year.” The difference is probably because the survey’s elites can afford it, literally.
Back to Collins. The “public health mindset” he described is a luxury belief—of a specific kind. It’s not the luxury of wealth but of expertise, and it’s adopted not to display status but to pursue a single good (within the realm of expertise) at the expense of other goods (outside the realm of expertise). It’s a smart, benevolent luxury belief, and one that can do a lot of damage if empowered and left unchecked.
Collins now seems to realize this, post-retirement from NIH. It’s something more policymakers must realize much sooner, and that realization is particularly urgent in our moment.
Our world is increasingly technically complex, and the last century has seen explosive growth of the administrative state. If the phrase “deep state” weren’t ruined by its ties to conspiracist thinking, it’d be a useful encapsulation of the reality that our government does many things that have significant influence on our lives at the behest of administrators whose employment does not generally depend on election outcomes and whose thinking is shaped by the real but myopic expertise Collins has come to decry.
We do not have to doubt that expertise to recognize the risk here. We do not have to impugn anyone’s motives to say that this kind of official will be prone to expertise-based luxury beliefs that should not be given free rein. And we can admit that those beliefs require balance and interrogation without falling into reflexive populist cynicism—after all, part of the balance will be the luxury of hearing from other experts seeking other goods.
2. What I'm reading this week
Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing up, by Abigail Shrier (forthcoming February 27, 2024). Starting tonight for review at CT.
3. An anti-recommendation
The Apple Vision Pro. Have I tried one? No. Will I try one? Unlikely. I submit that the whole concept is inherently wrongheaded, sad, and saddening. Here are my two (least) favorite parts from the intro video from last year:
If you need more convincing, I thought this Atlantic piece was illuminating regarding the actual work use experience. These might be good for watching a movie on a plane, or fun to try at a party for two minutes. Beyond that, pass.
4. Recent work
Out of Syria now | Defense Priorities (newsletter)
5. Miscellaneous
Thinking about this a lot lately:
From the Financial Times article accompanying the graphic:
Seven years on from the initial #MeToo explosion, the gender divergence in attitudes has become self-sustaining. Survey data show that in many countries the ideological differences now extend beyond this issue. The clear progressive-vs-conservative divide on sexual harassment appears to have caused — or at least is part of — a broader realignment of young men and women into conservative and liberal camps respectively on other issues.
In the U.S., U.K. and Germany, young women now take far more liberal positions on immigration and racial justice than young men, while older age groups remain evenly matched.
I’m not sure if there’s significance to it beyond the obvious, and I’d really like to see older poll data, if it’s available. (I haven’t been able to find any, but I also haven’t spent much time searching.) In the U.S., notice, the lines start with women more conservative than men, and the angles suggest that mirrored version of the current gap might have been substantial. Was it? And if yes, why?
Also, what happens if you control for education with the current numbers? In younger generations, more women go to college than men now. Is this really attributable to #MeToo, as the FT article argues, or is it simply the diploma divide?
Due caveats: The survey was commissioned by a think tank which promotes free-market (specifically, supply-side) economics, and the pollster, Rasmussen Reports, is cited in major poll aggregations but has a middling reputation. I’m pretty skeptical of the report’s claim that 86 percent of Ivy League grads expressed a favorable opinion of members of Congress, and I think some of this (especially the willingness to ban private air conditioning) is just spitballing on the phone: Yeah, sure, I’d ban AC to stop climate change. Totally. It’s cold today. Who needs AC, am I right? Still, even if you’re circumspect about the question design and assume a larger margin of error than the report admits (+/-3.1 percent), the numbers here are dramatic enough that I think it’s capturing something real.
Good evening, Bonnie,
I'm Wilk, the "collateral damage" guy in the video with Dr. Francis Collins. I am the host of the Derate The Hate podcast & someone who volunteers much of my time with Braver Angels and the work of depolarization. I just recently finished your book, "Untrustworthy" and I would be honored to discuss the topic with you. Please reach out to me on my website if you would like. Thank you in advance for your time and consideration!