The Luxury Beliefs of the Elites

The major lesson that reviewer Christine Rosen extracts from Rob Henderson’s new memoir, Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class, is: “The people who control a great deal of our cultural and political conversations are a rarified elite with little understanding of how most people live their lives.” (I have not yet read Troubled, though I’m eager to do so. What follows draws primarily on Rosen’s review in the Free Beacon and on Henderson’s op-ed in the Wall Street Journal.)

To comprehend the gap between those elites and the vast majority of Americans, consider a recent Rasmussen survey of what the authors call “elites” — more than one post-graduate degree, an annual income of $150,000 — and a subset of those “elites,” who attended an Ivy League school, or another elite private school, such as Stanford or University of Chicago, whom Rasmussen dubs “super-elites.”

Three-quarters of the elites and nearly 90 percent of the super elites describe their personal incomes as on the upswing, while almost none describe their incomes as on the decline. For all Americans, however, nearly twice as many view their income as worsening as view their financial situation as improving — 40 percent to 20 percent.

Despite having eventually made it to Yale as an undergraduate in his mid-twenties and later earning a PhD in psychology at Cambridge University, Henderson most certainly did not stem from the elite class from which so many of his classmates came. Students at Yale from families in the upper 1 percent of wealth are more numerous than those from the bottom 60 percent.