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This makes me think of "Skin in the Game" by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. I think noblesse oblige arises naturally when powerful people have skin in the game, and it

• bigred100 7y ago
  We’ll see if it happens, but I think that people are going to become less and less accepting of entitled or narcissistic behavior like that as time goes on.
• bobthechef 7y ago
  No, skin in the game is merely the intertwining of self-interest. Taleb is talking about ways to incentivize those with power, authority, whatever to act in conformity with the common good by entwining their good with the good of everyone else such that a loss to any party is a loss to both parties. Noblesse oblige is about one's higher moral obligations toward others as a person of noble rank, full stop, such that the person in question lived up to the noble ideal of magnanimity. Incidentally, as it turns out, people are social in nature and thus contribution to the common good (when it is truly such in keeping with one's own good) is by definition common. Thus, what Taleb is talking about is the narrow understanding of the common good. A "powerful" person who doesn't give a crap about the common good and actually does harm to it is actually harming himself by harming the society he is a part of. Taleb is suggesting that we deal with such people in positions of authority by working to entwine their interests (monetary, in his case) with the interests of others.