Review: A Former Foster Child Lambasts the 'Luxury Beliefs' of Wealthy Elites

Rob Henderson's new book documents his journey from a troubled adoption to Yale and Cambridge.

Troubled is a memoir of a harrowing childhood. Separated from his drug-addicted birth mother, Rob Henderson was passed around to seven different foster homes before finally being adopted by a couple that divorced soon after. Despite a nagging sense that he had academic potential, Henderson became listless in adolescence, earning abysmal grades and spending much of his free time drinking, smoking, and committing petty crimes. A stint in the Air Force helped Henderson escape self-destruction. Not without struggle, he managed to get accepted into Yale and then Cambridge.

Henderson devotes much of the final stretch of his memoir to articulating his theory of "luxury beliefs"—the idea that members of the upper class use certain views about lifestyle to signal their elite status, even if they live in ways contrary to those stated values. Judgments such as "single parenthood is fine," "drugs should be legalized," and "you can be healthy at any weight," he argues, come from a largely married, sober, and thin elite. He comes to see such stances as not just hypocrisy but actively destructive to working- and lower-class Americans, for whom fatherlessness, drug addiction, and obesity are persistent ills.

Henderson's theory of luxury beliefs has some value as an examination of how people signal their membership in the educated elite. He's less convincing when he argues that many working-class people take this elite rhetoric seriously—or that the chaos and dysfunction in many working-class communities could be ameliorated if only society's most educated members talked a different talk.