The Paradox of Prosperity: Gratitude vs Expectations
Why improvement breeds complaint.
“Low expectations, high standards” has long been my motto. I’m all about gratitude.
Over the past year, I’ve found myself thinking hard about how expectations actually work in global sympathy. While the world’s (and especially the UN’s) outrage have centered overwhelmingly on Palestine, enormous humanitarian, diplomatic, and financial support has flowed toward a society that is not even close to the poorest on Earth. Objectively poorer states with shorter life expectancy, weaker infrastructure, worse governance, and almost no international support are begging for help.
This led me to what I jokingly started calling in my head the “bratty welfare paradox”: the idea that those who receive significant aid and attention often become more demanding, more resentful, and more critical than societies living in far harsher deprivation. I think to the only Willy Wonka movie that matters, where our hero is a poor child, who watches his peers demand they win an entire !@#$ing company. Of course, I’m not the first to think of this phenomena. Scholars have already explored this dynamic in deep and fascinating ways for decades.
Below is a quick guide to understood this paradox — why human beings so often respond to improvement not with gratitude, but with grievance. Yes, Chat GPT assisted in writing these synopses.
Tocqueville
Long before modern theorists, Alexis de Tocqueville noticed something unsettling while studying the French Revolution. He observed that political grievance intensified not during the worst oppression, but during periods of improvement:
“The most dangerous moment for a bad government is when it begins to reform itself.”
— Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution (1856)
And his broader insight still resonates:
“As conditions become more equal, even small inequalities become unbearable.”
Improvement sharpens the sense of injustice rather than dulling it.
The Central Idea: Expectations Rise Faster Than Reality Improves
Political sociologists James C. Davies and Ted Robert Gurr mapped this long ago. Davies famously argued that revolutions do not erupt at the point of maximum suffering, but after periods of rising prosperity and hope:
“Revolutions are most likely to occur when a prolonged period of objective economic and social development is followed by a short period of sharp reversal.”
— James C. Davies, Toward a Theory of Revolution (1962)
Ted Robert Gurr turned that intuition into the concept of relative deprivation — the idea that what angers people is not their absolute condition, but the gap between what they believe they should have and what they actually get:
“Relative deprivation refers to actors’ perception of discrepancy between their value expectations and their value capabilities.”
— Ted Robert Gurr, Why Men Rebel (1970)
In other words, suffering alone does not generate political rage. Disappointed expectation does. Aid, improvement, hope, and global attention do not simply relieve hardship. They reset the baseline of what feels deserved.
Once that baseline rises, disappointment hits harder than deprivation ever did.
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Kerens
Abraham Maslow never wrote about geopolitics, but his framework explains why improvement creates room for anger. When survival is at stake, people cling to gratitude. Once food, safety, and basic order exist, people escalate to demands about dignity, identity, autonomy, justice, and narrative power.
Stability does not pacify. It unlocks room for more complicated grievances.
Aid, Ironically, Leads to Power Struggle
Development literature explains why aid can heighten resentment rather than gratitude.
Anthropologist James Ferguson showed that aid creates entire political environments of expectation and dependency:
“Development is not merely a technical operation, but a profoundly political one.”
— James Ferguson, The Anti-Politics Machine
Economist Dambisa Moyo argued sharply that sustained aid can entrench dysfunction:
“Aid has been, and continues to be, an unmitigated political, economic, and humanitarian disaster for most parts of the developing world.”
— Dambisa Moyo, Dead Aid
William Easterly added that aid consistently overpromises, and nothing generates anger like a broken promise:
“The West spent trillions on aid and still has not managed to get twelve-cent medicines to children to prevent half of all malaria deaths.”
— William Easterly, The White Man’s Burden
Angus Deaton warned that heavy outside funding undermines accountability:
“Aid is a substitute for what a government should provide its citizens. It undermines local political institutions and accountability.”
— Angus Deaton, The Great Escape
The pattern repeats: external support lifts expectations, politicizes identity, and alters what feels “owed.”
Rentier States: Benefits Without the Social Contract
Rentier State theory (Hazem Beblawi, Giacomo Luciani) explains what happens when a population receives resources without being taxed for them. The state distributes benefits, citizens expect them, and political grievance grows without the civic ties usually created by shared accountability.
Citizens move psychologically from “fortunate beneficiaries” to “rights holders with unmet claims.”
More Quotes on Charity Entitlement: When Help Becomes a “Right”
Once something becomes a right, limiting it feels like injustice, not scarcity.
T. H. Marshall described how welfare becomes woven into citizenship:
“Social rights imply claims to a share in the social heritage.”
— T.H. Marshall, Citizenship and Social Class
Albert Hirschman famously described what follows:
“Voice is the weapon of those who care.”
— Albert O. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty
The moment a population has enough stability to complain, it will.
Social Media Amplifies Misery
[Go back to my early posts to see a heavy ‘anti-social media’ focus and deeper explanations into this.]
If all of this was true in the 19th and 20th centuries, it is exponentially truer now. Social media intensifies relative deprivation by exposing people constantly to curated fantasies of prosperity, dignity, justice, and luxury.
Platforms do three things:
Raise expectations by showing endless lives “better” than yours (often filtered or fake).
Create moral comparison universes — who deserves more, who is treated better, who is validated.
Mobilize grievance at scale, especially among younger populations whose political identity is shaped online.
Researchers documenting youth unrest from South Asia to Latin America repeatedly note how social media feeds accelerate dissatisfaction by showing not simply suffering, but the illusion that everyone else is thriving while you are not. That is rocket fuel for relative deprivation.
Improvement created the expectation.
The internet created the megaphone.
Outrage Fanaticism
By the time a community reaches visibility, receives sustained aid, enjoys institutional attention, and commands symbolic global loyalty, it is no longer in the survival zone. It is in the expectation zone.
That is where:
• Upward trajectories become moral obligations
• Benefits transform into entitlements
• Aid becomes emotionally reinterpreted as a right
• Social meaning outweighs material need
• Disappointment feels like betrayal
• Grievance becomes identity
Meanwhile, the world’s truly invisible hungry — the collapsed states with no attention economy — often lack the capacity, platforms, or political leverage to demand anything.
It is not that some groups are “bratty.”
It is that human beings, everywhere, respond to expectations, not conditions.
And expectations rise fastest precisely where prosperity improves.
If You Want to Read More, Start Here
James C. Davies – “Toward a Theory of Revolution”
Ted Robert Gurr – Why Men Rebel
Alexis de Tocqueville – The Old Regime and the French Revolution
James Ferguson – The Anti-Politics Machine
Dambisa Moyo – Dead Aid
William Easterly – The White Man’s Burden
Angus Deaton – The Great Escape
Hazem Beblawi & Giacomo Luciani – The Rentier State
T.H. Marshall – Citizenship and Social Class
Albert Hirschman – Exit, Voice and Loyalty
What do you think? Is the hedonic treadmill deccelerating globally as lives objectively improve? Are figures like Greta Thunberg elevated not for solutions but rather for perpetual outrage? Have movements like BLM amplified grievance while doing little to materially improve the lives of the very people they claim to champion? And most importantly: if expectations keep rising faster than reality, what does that mean for the future of politics, activism, global empathy and mental health?
