Don't be surprised that the rich are kinder than the poor (2025)

One viral tweet I’ve heard quoted a few times goes like this: “Broke people will buy you a drink with $20 in their bank account and say, ‘Don’t worry about it’, and rich people will Venmo request you for $1.25”. I often hear anecdotes about a tuk-tuk driver going the extra mile but refusing a tip, and the selfishness of someone’s CEO.

And yet a study reported this week found that richer people are in fact nicer than poorer people. Or something like that. Essentially, the report found that people from a higher economic class were more likely to donate, volunteer and display other forms of kindness, by a statistically significant margin.

This was the largest study of its kind, with data spanning 2.3 million people across 60 societies over 56 years. The richer were found to be kinder regardless of age group, society, continent or culture.

These findings were presented with incredulity by much of the media. Hardly surprising: we’ve always romanticised poverty as bestowing nobility and a sort of groundedness. In Dickens, there is Bob Cratchit, the foil to his stingy employer Scrooge. And Roald Dahl’s Charlie Bucket, with his one chocolate bar a year, behaved with far more class and decorum than Veruca Salt, heiress to a peanut factory fortune.

The rich, meanwhile, are perfect objects for satire: think of the level of betrayal and villainy in The Great Gatsby or, more recently, Succession. Nowadays we have whole franchises of reality TV based around the depravity of the rich.

You couldn’t now parody the poor as we once did with Vicky Pollard and the “chav” era. So we tend to only talk about the poor’s goodness and godliness – which in a way, sanctifies and legitimises their destitution.

Yet the reality is that economic insecurity makes us resource-poor – obviously in terms of money, but also in time and energy. Having less makes us resentful of those who have more, and less generous – rightly so. There’s a reason morality is pretty much the angel at the top of the Christmas tree in terms of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, and can only be achieved after the base layers of food and safety.

So much of left-wing discourse, anti-capitalist or based in Marxist thinking, emphasises the idea poverty affords virtue (often through the concept of working-class solidarity). And yet the evidence suggests otherwise: last month it was reported that Nordic countries top “wallet return rate” indices – the rate at which a lost wallet is both expected to be returned, and is returned in reality.

It feels relevant here that Nordic countries have high tax rates and a strong social safety net – surely you’re more likely to return money when you think you have enough. Indeed, five of the top seven spots in the latest World Happiness rankings were occupied by Finland, Denmark, Iceland, Sweden and Norway, in line with trends of previous years.

That we can be less generous-minded in times of scarcity is evidenced by post-election analyses of why voters turned out for Donald Trump. Unlike the Democrats, Trump’s campaign was vocal about advancing the national interest over aiding immigrants, welfare programmes or other minorities. Studies have shown that economic hardship correlates with reduced empathy and increased bias towards one’s own community.

The most interesting thing about the study, really, is that the correlation between class and kindness wasn’t stronger. It only measured kindness in absolute terms, rather than relative: yet you’d surely hope a man worth £20m would give away 1 per cent of his wealth more readily than a man on £20,000 a year. The wealthier were significantly kinder in terms of “actual behaviour” rather than stated intention i.e. perhaps poorer people would give more if they could.

And last of all, the researchers found that the relationship between economic clout and benevolence was stronger in circumstances where others could see them being charitable i.e. maybe richer people are more performative in their kindness. I’m thinking of the Kardashians episode where they give a homeless man a makeover – donating their stepdad’s designer shirt and showing him how to use a loofah, before driving him back to where he was sitting before.

Indeed, perhaps the real thing we should be shocked by is the egocentrism of the ultra-rich. That they could do so much for society, yet often end up achieving the opposite. Think the hedge funder Martin Shkreli who raised the price of Daraprim, a life-saving drug for Aids and cancer patients, more than fifty-fold overnight – from $13.50 to $750. Or Jeff Bezos – this week launching his fiancé and celebrity gal pals into space – despite reports Amazon workers have to urinate into bottles.

There’s nothing romantic about poverty – but there’s plenty that’s ugly about extreme wealth.