The Rich Get Richer – and Then Stop Caring
A crime novel devoured in a day, feeding straight into Vincent Hendricks's work on hustlers, suckers and those who've stopped caring. The philosophy professor uses Daniel Silva's new thriller to unpack wealth and why the rich can afford to stop caring.
I had a crime novel ready for the summer holidays, don’t we all? I went through it in 24 hours, and yet I’m not much of a (true) crime buff in general. But this one is different. It fed right into my current game theoretic research on societal archetypes of hustlers, suckers and the ones who just don’t care …
Daniel Silva’s new novel, Ransom, begins with an image of contemporary perfection. Alice Winter is one of Britain’s most dazzling socialites. She has a lavish Knightsbridge home, a grand estate in Devon, a powerful husband and millions of social-media followers waiting for her next post. Then, while holidaying with three old Cambridge friends, she disappears.
"Immense wealth does not merely buy houses, land and influence. It buys the ability to construct a public identity, conceal a private reality and withdraw from many of the social consequences that discipline ordinary people."
Her husband, the property magnate Edward Knight, asks Gabriel Allon – the fictional protagonist of Daniel Silva's long-running espionage thriller series – to find her. But the immaculate surface soon cracks. Alice is not quite the woman her audience believes her to be. She has secrets and a reckless side. Her husband has secrets too—ones dangerous enough to draw Allon back into the violent world he thought he had escaped.
"The richer people become, the less they may need to participate in the reciprocal institutions on which everyone else depends."
Silva’s thriller is about kidnapping, deception and vengeance. But its opening also captures something fundamental about modern inequality: Immense wealth does not merely buy houses, land and influence. It buys the ability to construct a public identity, conceal a private reality and withdraw from many of the social consequences that discipline ordinary people.
"Wealth expands the range of available strategies. Poverty sharply limits it."
Hustlers, Suckers and Nobody Cares
To understand these dynamics, it is useful to distinguish between three recurring social strategies, the one of the Hustler, the Sucker and the Nobody-Cares agent.
The Hustler sees social life as a field of opportunities. Other people’s trust, cooperation and restraint are resources to be used. Hustlers cultivate visibility, connections and influence. They know when to flatter, threaten, perform virtue or exploit uncertainty. Their guiding question is not necessarily, “What is fair?” but “What can I get away with?”
"This is the Hustler's greatest ideological achievement: making the Sucker believe that exploitation is merely a superior form of self-development."
The Sucker approaches society in good faith. Suckers work, cooperate, pay what they owe and expect broadly reciprocal behaviour from others. They believe that institutions will reward effort, that contracts will be honoured and that those who benefit from society will contribute to maintaining it. The word “sucker” is intentionally uncomfortable. It does not mean unintelligent. It simply describes the vulnerable position of someone who continues cooperating in a system where cooperation is increasingly exploited.
"Cooperation becomes harder to defend when exploitation is visibly profitable."
The Nobody-Cares agent responds differently. Nobody-Cares agents reduce their investment in the common game. They stop expecting fairness, recognition or reciprocity. They may still comply when necessary, but without conviction. They do what is required, protect their private lives and disengage from institutions that no longer appear worthy of loyalty.
These categories are not fixed personality types. The same person can move between them. A worker may be a Sucker in the workplace, a Hustler in a property transaction and a Nobody-Cares citizen on election day. More importantly, institutions can reward one strategy so consistently that it gradually becomes dominant.
"At the beginning of the wealth journey, the Hustler asks: How do I win? At the end, the ultra-rich Nobody-Cares agent asks: Why should the consequences concern me?"
The history of extreme wealth often follows a revealing trajectory. Many fortunes are built through Hustler behaviour like relentless competition, aggressive acquisition, political access, tax engineering, control of scarce assets and the transformation of other people’s needs into revenue streams. Yet once the Hustler becomes rich enough, something changes. The successful Hustler increasingly acquires the option of becoming a Nobody-Cares agent.
Paradoxes of Contemporaty Capitalism
This is one of the central paradoxes of contemporary capitalism. The richer people become, the less they may need to participate in the reciprocal institutions on which everyone else depends.Yet, the poor cannot stop caring about the price of food, rent, transport or electricity. A delayed benefit payment matters. A medical bill matters. A missed shift matters. A landlord’s decision matters. So does the quality of the local school, the reliability of public transport and the accessibility of healthcare.
"A healthy society must make cooperation rational."
The very rich inhabit a different strategic environment. If public transport deteriorates, they travel privately. If public schools decline, they buy education. If neighbourhood security weakens, they purchase surveillance and protection. If healthcare waiting lists grow, they enter private systems. If one country introduces inconvenient regulations, their capital, residency or tax arrangements can often be reorganised elsewhere. Wealth therefore does not merely increase consumption. It reduces dependence.
"The political challenge of our age is to prove that trust is not foolish."
This matters because dependence is one of the foundations of reciprocity. People support common institutions partly because they require those institutions themselves. When elites no longer use the same schools, hospitals, transport systems or public spaces as everyone else, their practical interest in maintaining those systems weakens. They may indeed continue to speak ceremonially about community, opportunity and social responsibility, but they no longer experience public failure in the same way.
They become socially insulated Nobody-Cares agents. Realize, that this is not an argument that every wealthy person is selfish, corrupt or indifferent. Many wealthy people act generously, pay taxes without elaborate avoidance schemes and invest seriously in public institutions. Nor is poverty a guarantee of moral virtue. Hustlers exist at every level of society.
The issue is structural rather than psychological. Wealth expands the range of available strategies. Poverty sharply limits it. The poor person must remain inside the game. The rich person can increasingly choose which rules, jurisdictions and institutions will apply. That difference in strategic freedom creates a moral hazard. Those with the greatest capacity to shape society may have the least personal need for its shared institutions to function well.
The scale of the imbalance is extraordinary. Recent global inequality research estimates that the richest tenth of humanity owns roughly three-quarters of global wealth, while the poorest half owns only about 2%. Fewer than 60,000 people—the richest 0.001 per cent—are estimated to possess several times the combined wealth of the poorest half of humanity. These figures are so enormous that they become difficult to comprehend. But inequality is not just a comparison between larger and smaller bank accounts.
Wealth changes the rules of interaction
A person with no savings negotiates employment under pressure. Yet a person with enough wealth to live indefinitely without working negotiates from freedom. Now a tenant depends on the housing market. A large property owner can influence it. And a small business faces regulations as external constraints. But a corporation with sufficient resources can lobby to rewrite them.
The Sucker is told that society rewards hard work. The Hustler notices that ownership frequently pays more than work, access more than merit and strategic rule-bending more than dutiful compliance. The Nobody-Cares agent eventually concludes that the promises made by the system were never intended to be honoured equally.
This helps explain why widening inequality damages more than material wellbeing. It damages belief. When workers see executives rewarded after failure, taxpayers see fortunes shifted through tax havens, or young people see housing transformed from shelter into an international investment vehicle, the lesson is not merely that some people are richer. The lesson is that the rules are asymmetric. Cooperation becomes harder to defend when exploitation is visibly profitable.
The Sucker then faces a painful choice. Continue behaving responsibly and risk continued exploitation; become a Hustler and imitate the conduct that produced the inequality; or become a Nobody-Cares agent and withdraw emotional commitment from the system. All three responses may already be observed.
Some people embrace entrepreneurial self-promotion and treat every relationship as networking. Others remain dutiful, working longer while hoping that institutional reciprocity will return. Still others disengage as they stop following politics, distrust employers, avoid civic commitments or use whatever technologies will help them satisfy formal requirements with minimal effort. The result is a society rich in transactions but poor in trust.
Attention Economics at Ransom
Silva’s Ransom offers a fitting fictional parallel. Alice Winter’s existence appears to be composed of recognisable tokens of success of, say, elite education, prestigious friendships, expensive homes, social visibility and a marriage embedded in enormous wealth. Yet this carefully displayed identity is unstable. The public image conceals private conduct; prestige conceals vulnerability; abundance conceals danger. Social media intensifies this split. Alice’s millions of followers do not know her. They know a representation of her.
Realize that the representation is itself an asset. Visibility may be converted into influence, commercial value and status. The wealthy no longer simply possess more material resources; they can dominate attention and define the images through which success is understood. This creates a second layer of hustling. First comes the acquisition of wealth. Then comes the production of legitimacy.
A fortune may originate in property speculation, financial leverage, inherited advantage or market concentration. But its public presentation is likely to emphasise vision, courage, creativity and personal discipline. Social media turns structural advantage into an individual morality play. Success appears to prove deservingness.
The poor, meanwhile, are encouraged to interpret their difficulties personally. If they have not prospered, perhaps they failed to work hard enough, develop the right mindset, create a personal brand or seize available opportunities.
This is the Hustler’s greatest ideological achievement: Making the Sucker believe that exploitation is merely a superior form of self-development. Edward Knight’s world, as described in Silva’s premise, is one in which wealth, property, status and secrecy converge. When Alice vanishes, the usual protections of affluence are suddenly insufficient. Knight needs Gabriel Allon because some threats cannot be delegated to wealth managers, lawyers or public-relations professionals.
The thriller thus introduces a form of forced re-entry. A man insulated by fortune is dragged back into dependence. He must trust another person. He must reveal information. He must confront the possibility that his controlled life rests on concealed dangers.
The Societal Problem
Clearly, most very rich people will never encounter anything so dramatic. But democracies face a comparable problem – here is the central question: How can societies bring insulated elites back into reciprocal dependence before crisis does it for them? The answer cannot simply be moral exhortation. Asking billionaires to care more is not an institutional program. Philanthropy, however sincere, is not an adequate substitute for taxation, democratic accountability and high-quality universal services.
The aim should not be to punish wealth. It should be to prevent wealth from purchasing complete exit from social obligation. That requires closing avenues of aggressive tax avoidance, limiting the political influence that comes from concentrated wealth, strengthening labour’s bargaining position and maintaining public institutions good enough that influential citizens have a stake in using them. It also requires confronting asset inequality, particularly in housing, where existing ownership increasingly determines whether families accumulate security or transfer much of their income to those who already possess it.
A healthy society must make cooperation rational. It must ensure that Suckers are not punished for good faith, that Hustlers cannot permanently externalise the costs of their success and that citizens do not find withdrawal to be their only dignified response. The danger is not simply that the rich are Hustlers. It is that successful Hustlers can eventually afford not to care about the game they have helped create.
They may retain intense concern for their portfolios, reputations, families and private worlds. But that is not the same as caring about the shared systems that make collective life possible. At the beginning of the wealth journey, the Hustler asks: How do I win? At the end, the ultra-rich Nobody-Cares agent asks: Why should the consequences concern me?
Between them stands the Sucker, still paying, working and trusting that society is a cooperative enterprise rather than a contest whose winners are allowed to leave. The political challenge of our age is to prove that trust is not foolish.
Otherwise, Silva’s fictional world of immaculate façades, concealed lives and private danger will resemble more than a thriller. It will resemble the social order we have built. It might look dazzling from a distance, closely guarded at the top and increasingly unbelievable to everyone below …
Vincent F. Hendricks, a professor of philosophy at the University of Copenhagen, is the author of “Sucker Nation: The Philosophy of Trading Wits for Vanity” and “Nobody Cares: The Philosophy of Indifference.”
