There is a phenomenon called the treadmill effect, similar to what we saw with neomania: you need to make more and more to stay in the same place. Greed is antifragile—though not its victims.

Back to the sucker problem in believing that wealth makes people more independent. We need no more evidence for it than what is taking place right now: recall that we have never been richer in the history of mankind. And we have never been more in debt (for the ancients, someone in debt was not free, he was in bondage). So much for “economic growth.”

At the local level, it looks like we get socialized in a certain milieu, hence exposed to a treadmill. You do better, move to Greenwich, Connecticut, then become a pauper next to a twenty-million-dollar mansion and million-dollar birthday parties. And you become more and more dependent on your job, particularly as your neighbours get big tax-sponsored Wall Street bonuses.

This class of persons is like Tantalus, who was subjected to an eternal punishment: he stood in a pool of water underneath a fruit tree and whenever he tried to grab the fruit it moved away and whenever he tried to drink, the water receded.

And such a permanently tantalized class is a modern condition. The Romans circumvented these social treadmill effects: much of social life took place between a patron and his less fortunate clients who benefited from his largesse and ate at his table—and relied on his assistance in times of trouble. There was no welfare at the time, and no church to distribute or recommend charity: everything was private. There was little exposure to the other wealthy biggies, just as mafia dons don’t socialize with other mafia dons but with their constituents. To a large extent, that’s how my grandfather and great-grandfather lived, as they were local landowners and politicians; power was accompanied by a coterie of dependents. Provincial landowners were required to maintain an occasional “open house,” with an open table for people to come help themselves to the fruits of the wealth. Court life, on the other hand, leads to corruption—the nobleman comes from the provinces, where is now brought down to size; he faces more flamboyant, wittier persons and feels pressure to prop up his self-esteem. People who would have lost their status in the cities conserve it in the provinces.

You cannot possibly trust someone on a treadmill.