‘This is dangerous’ – America’s new elites are opting out of society
If you are fortunate enough to become wealthy, you have obligations to the society that made that possible. Americans have forgotten that, writes Lewis Liu
I’m dictating a big part of this while driving down Sand Hill Road, perhaps the most concentrated stretch of economic ambition in America. On either side are the venture firms that have funded some of the most consequential companies in modern history. I spend a lot of my life with founders and investors around here. I live exactly one mile away from Sand Hill Road.
And yet I increasingly think there is one thing Europe still has that America is rapidly losing: a sense of duty.
I don’t mean duty in some nostalgic, aristocratic Downton Abbey sense. I mean something much simpler: the idea that if you are fortunate enough to become wealthy, powerful or influential, you have obligations to the society that made that possible.
A divide between Brits and Americans
When my wife and I decided to move back to America after almost 15 years in London, this was genuinely one of our biggest concerns. We wanted our children to grow up ambitious, competitive and unafraid of risk, all things America is exceptionally good at producing. But we also wanted them to recognise that the country, the community, perhaps even civilisation itself, is bigger than them.
Among many of my European friends, particularly those from old establishment families, that idea is almost instinctive. They talk about wealth and power as things they are stewards of rather than things they simply own and wield.
I remember this during Liz Truss’s spectacularly short premiership. When her government proposed cutting Britain’s top rate of income tax, some of the strongest objections I heard came from friends who would personally benefit. Their response was basically: no, I should pay this.
Try imagining that conversation in Silicon Valley or Wall Street.
I spend a lot of time mentoring young founders and tech professionals. Many are extraordinarily talented. Some will become exceptionally wealthy. But when I push them on duty, I often get a brutally rational response.
“Lewis, duty is old-fashioned.”
The logic is straightforward. If everyone else is optimising for themselves and I optimise for society, I lose. If I lose, I have less money and less ability to protect myself. So the rational strategy is to win first and worry about society later, if at all.
I recently told one founder that if he was going to devote his life to building something, surely part of that ambition should be making America better.
“Why do I care?” he asked, “America is full of people of different races, backgrounds and values. They have nothing to do with me.”
I said, “fine, but if America breaks, you are in trouble as well.”
His response was revealing: “I can’t control whether America breaks. I can only control what happens to me.”
The old Silicon Valley
To be fair, this is not all of Silicon Valley. Some of the most encouraging conversations I have had recently have been with what I think of as the “old Silicon Valley”, people who made their careers and fortunes in the Google era or even before it.
I often spend time with some pre-eminent post-IPO founders and investors from the previous era, and we have had long discussions on how to bring a sense of civic duty back to Silicon Valley.
What struck me was how naturally they talked about responsibility, community and what successful people owe to the society around them. There was no contradiction, in their minds, between enormous ambition and enormous obligation.
And it made me wonder whether what I am describing is not simply an American problem, but partly a generational one. Somewhere along the way, perhaps the definition of success changed from “what are you responsible for?” to simply “how much have you won?”
That, to me, is the problem.
It is essentially game theory. If you believe you are playing a repeated game over generations, cooperation is rational. You need good schools, safe cities, competent government, infrastructure, social trust and millions of people prosperous enough to buy whatever your company is selling.
But if your time horizon is five or ten years, defection looks rational. Make the money. Sell the company. Move the assets. Buy concierge healthcare, private education, fortressed security.
And once enough people at the top think that way, something dangerous happens.
The system gets worse. The people with the greatest capacity to fix it are the least dependent on it, so they withdraw further. Public institutions weaken. More people feel economically and politically disenfranchised. Trust falls. Anger rises.
This is not a stable equilibrium. It is a ratchet: the more the elite defects, the worse common systems become. The worse those systems become, the larger and angrier the permanent underclass becomes. And eventually, the incentives change again.
At first the instinct is withdrawal: I will simply look after myself. But eventually the instinct becomes control. You find ways to keep people distracted, fragmented, surveilled, dependent or politically weak. Again, there does not need to be a grand conspiracy. Each decision can be individually rational: protect the company, protect the neighbourhood, preserve order, prevent unrest.
But taken together, amoral defection can evolve into something much darker: oppression.
And oppression is not stable either. It produces human suffering, resentment and eventually rupture. Maybe that rupture is political. Maybe it is economic. In the worst case, it becomes violent.
How do we get back on track?
I am not interested in playing armchair historian and predicting some American version of the French Revolution. But logically, a society cannot indefinitely sustain a small group extracting enormous value while a growing majority feels the system no longer works for them, especially if the response to that anger is not reform, but greater control.
So how do we stop the ratchet?
Not by making ambitious Americans less competitive, but by changing what they compete for.
America used to have multiple ways to be elite. A great professor, scientist, judge, diplomat or public servant could hold enormous status and influence without being wildly rich. Now we have collapsed the scoreboard onto one axis: money.
Look at who we put at the top table, who gets invited, listened to and celebrated, including the latest state banquet from Xi Jinping’s visit. We tell ambitious people that the pinnacle of success is becoming extremely rich. Then we act surprised when they optimise accordingly.
So one mechanism is status.
Universities, governments, boards, foundations and the media need to attach prestige and actual influence to service and stewardship again. Not simply philanthropy once you have already made billions, but genuine service.
The second mechanism is more uncomfortable: pay.
America has become so expensive that for many talented graduates, public service feels like financial martyrdom. If you graduate from Harvard or Stanford with loans, a young family and a desire to live anywhere near the institutions where you might serve, a public-sector salary often makes very little economic sense.
Singapore takes a radically different approach, paying senior public servants extremely well precisely because it wants the government to remain a credible elite career.
There is something important in that.
Duty cannot survive on morality alone. It needs an incentive structure.
Europe still has some of the status and tradition. Singapore uses economics. America probably needs some combination of both.
We do not need to make ambition less rewarding. We need to make service more powerful.
Because if the people who benefit most from the system feel no obligation to sustain it, eventually there will not be much left to win.