Henderson shares that anecdote in his new memoir, Troubled, an account of his upbringing in foster care and his escape into the Air Force and higher education. For him, “Monogamy is kind of outdated” is a “luxury belief,” a term he coined. He defines it as an idea or opinion “that confer[s] status on the upper class, at very little cost, while often inflicting costs on the lower classes.” Henderson suggests that members of the upper class know, on some level, that these luxury beliefs are harmful, because, like the woman at Yale, they have no intention of putting them into practice in their own life.

He developed the concept while observing how social class operates at Yale, where he felt like an outsider because he had such a difficult childhood. In his telling, people become more preoccupied with social status when their material needs are met, and people at prestigious and thus influential institutions are more interested than most in seeking still more prestige. This upper class once signaled status with “material accouterments,” Henderson argues. But now luxury goods are so widely available that the affluent “have decoupled social status from goods and reattached it to beliefs.”

“Luxury beliefs” is a clever, thought-provoking conceptual framework that pithily captures some truths about American culture and politics. But when he applies the concept, Henderson sometimes makes ungenerous assumptions about why others believe what they believe, or assumes the superiority of his policy conclusions without making adequate arguments that they are in fact best.