The Inheritance Games

The Inheritance Games describes two possible models of charity: a model where people give to others out of empathy and a desire to help one particular individual, and a contrasting impersonal model where people give on a purely rational basis to achieve structural change. The novel ultimately suggests that both models are valuable and praiseworthy. Protagonist Avery Kylie Grambs, a poor, working-class high school student, uses money she wins hustling her classmates in poker to buy breakfast for Harry, a homeless man with whom she plays chess in the park. Avery helps Harry because she knows him and she feels for him, and she does this despite her own economic vulnerability. After Avery unexpectedly inherits billions from eccentric philanthropist Tobias Hawthorne, one of the first things she does is try to use her new wealth to find Harry a place to live. The hope and the implication is that this meaningfully improves Harry’s life by giving him a roof over his head and some degree of security.

The novel illustrates the contrasting impersonal model of charity through Grayson Hawthorne, Tobias’s grandson, who spends the year after he graduates high school researching the most efficient ways to give money to create structural change on behalf of his grandfather’s foundation, the Hawthorne Foundation. After Avery inherits the bulk of Tobias’s wealth, Grayson argues that Avery has a moral responsibility to give up the empathetic and impulsive model of charity and give only where she can do the most quantifiable good. Yet ultimately, the novel reveals that Harry is none other than Grayson’s uncle, Tobias Hawthorne’s long-lost and presumed dead son Toby. This revelation hints that Tobias may have made Avery his heir precisely to reward her empathetic care for Harry/Toby. In turn, this hint implies that—at least in Tobias’s eyes—Avery’s interpersonal empathy makes her a more trustworthy philanthropist on a structural level: she will make better, more ethically rational choices about where to allocate her massive wealth precisely because she is capable of caring for other people. Thus, the novel implies that interpersonal empathy as well as rational, structural understanding of social problems is necessary to engage in charity responsibly.