Long read: What happens when you’re too rich to hear no?

Plenty has been written about the ills of wealth inequality. Yet Hanna Horvath brings in this dangerous consequence of extreme wealth. Hanna says this in the context of the bizarre situation where Anthropic and OpenAI founders and researchers say what they are building could destroy humanity yet wouldn’t stop doing it. Hanna is a certified financial planner who advises people on building wealth to attain financial freedom.

“We want money because it gives us the freedom to say no, whether to a terrible job, an emergency or a life with fewer choices. But taken to its extreme, wealth offers a more nefarious kind of freedom, which is the ability to insulate yourself from the people, institutions and consequences that everyone else has to deal with.

And once you can afford to escape nearly every inconvenience, disagreement and (importantly) mistake, you risk losing the information that keeps your judgment tethered to reality.

….Wealth-building, at its core, is an attempt to reduce how much control other people have over your life. That’s a perfectly reasonable thing to want (I’d go so far as to say it’s the whole point of my job!) right up until you have so much of it that the nature of the thing changes.

Past a certain level, an extra million (heck, an extra billion!) doesn’t change what you eat, where you sleep or how nice your sheets are. What it buys instead is control over your environment, your schedule and the people around you, which adds up to the ability to decide which parts of reality you have to participate in. Lines are for other people, as I’ve written about, and so are airport security, waiting rooms, public transit and, at its end stage, anyone who disagrees with you.

So rich people fly private and live in gated communities, who cares? But I’d argue something real gets lost when you can opt out of nearly every shared human experience, and it matters a great deal more when their decisions shape everyone else’s lives.”

So, the problem is not that wealthy people are disconnected with the reality of ordinary people, it is when they exercise enough power and hence influence over the very people whose lives are alien to them.

Hanna invokes Plato’s Republic where the power of becoming invisible makes one commit heinous crimes simply because he is not accountable anymore. “The thought experiment, known as the Ring of Gyges, asks what happens to human morality when people acquire the power to act without fear of consequences. Would somebody still behave ethically if nobody could observe or punish their behavior?

A surprising amount of human behavior is governed by our desire to generally not be regarded as an asshole. Gossip, embarrassment, the fear of being the person everyone at the dinner party talks about on the drive home … social consequences are an effective and wildly underrated form of regulation.

The point is that living alongside other people requires a certain amount of compromise. Social norms encourage cooperation and curb anti-social behavior (sometimes for worse!). They also help hold people accountable for harmful behavior.

But what happens when you have enough money to avoid most of that? And what happens when that money also gives you the power to make other people accommodate you?”

She cites psychology research that shows how power interferes with our ability to make good judgment: “Research has found that people who feel powerful can become less inclined to consider other people’s perspectives, more confident in their own judgment, and less willing to take advice, even when doing so would improve their decisions.

…Power and money are intrinsically tied together. Money gives you resources and the ability to withdraw from situations you don’t like, while power gives you influence over what happens to other people, whether that be through political authority, corporate ownership, employment, etc. When the two converge, as they increasingly do, you get people who can make decisions affecting millions of lives while remaining unusually protected from the consequences.”

She invokes Hans Christian Anderson’s The Emperor’s New Clothes to show how powerful people are cut off from reality, much like authoritarian leaders: “Imagine you’re a billionaire CEO who comes up with an absolutely “brilliant” idea after your third glass of wine at Zero Bond. Your employees think it’s terrible, but their salaries depend on keeping you happy. So do your advisers’ retainers, and probably a decent portion of your friends’ investment portfolios. By the end of the meeting, everybody agrees you’re a visionary, and you’ve learned absolutely nothing about whether your idea is any good.”

Whilst we all are subject to the hubris syndrome, the consequences for the world at large are not as dire: “There’s a concept called hubris syndrome, describing patterns of grandiosity, contempt for criticism, and excessive confidence that can develop in people who hold enormous power for years with few meaningful checks. The interesting part is that it’s acquired.

If you’ve spent years making decisions that other people praise, and rarely experience meaningful consequences when you’re wrong, you might start believing you’re exceptionally good at making decisions. And sure, perhaps you are. But no one is perfect, and no one should operate without checks and balances, especially when other peoples’ livelihoods are on the line.

…It’s one thing for an ordinary person to develop an inflated sense of their own intelligence. They might wind up making some bad investments, alienating their friends, or (many such cases) starting an advice podcast. It’s another thing when the person with the blind spot controls billions of dollars, thousands of employees, or a technology that their own researchers think might end the world.”

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