The Green Eyed Monster: Philosophical and political notes on envy

Editorial note: This is adapted from an email I sent to Jordan Walters, who wrote a very good paper on Envy which you can read here.

1. One of the buzzwords in the study of inequality and ‘envy’ is ‘relative income effects’, that is the degree to which the income of someone else may affect my utility or the utility I draw from my income. Relative income can be positive (joy at having so much more income than someone else) or negative (upset at someone having more income than me- or even perhaps upset at the poverty of others). In practice, when used without modifiers, relative income effects usually refer to a negative effect on me of the high income of others. These effects are real and are very well documented in the literature. Taken at face value, they suggest a utilitarian redistribution should be steeper than it might otherwise be, in fact perhaps very steep indeed.

Now some economists say we should disregard relative income effects from our utilitarian calculus of how to improve the economy because they are merely envious. We shouldn’t, so the argument goes, give into the bad temper or cantankerousness of citizens who want to drag the rich down to their level just so they can feel better. Sometimes this is framed in terms of not giving into ‘sadistic’ preferences, for either instrumental or inherent reasons. In answering this we need to have some idea of the overwhelming range of factors ‘relative income effects’ can represent. Here are some things relative income effects can be- just a tiny fraction of the total:

A) Upset at being mistreated because you look ‘shabby’ or buy relatively ‘shabby’ things- the effects of discrimination against yourself by higher status persons in general.

B) Difficulty finding any shops in your area that sell anything in your price range. Difficulty navigating a society that it is built, more and more, for people richer than yourself.

C) A, perhaps innate, ‘humiliation reflex’ at being surrounded by much higher-status people than oneself, regardless of how they treat you.

D) A sense that society has not recognized the value of your work. A sense -perhaps quite defensible!- that the distribution in society does not correspond to fair rewards or other ethical norms of distribution.

E) Plausiably, political systems becoming more stacked towards the rich as inequality increases. This could lead to harmful, oligarchically inspired decisions by the government. Harm to me of the income of others might represent both the harms of these decisions and of my concern about them.

Thus there are many ways for relative income to affect us that have nothing to do with envy, even on a very broad construal of that term.

2. People love to get out of debating issues on their merits by ascribing to their enemies bad motives. Nowhere is this more true than in debates about whether or not egalitarianism is motivated by envy. It’s so commonplace to say in these debates “ahh, these egalitarians aren’t idealistic, they’re only motivated by spite, why even argue with them”.

Walters calls this “The politics of dismissal” The idea is very interesting to me- it smacks of what was once called “Bulverism”- the style of argument where one assumes one’s opponent is wrong about x and explains why she would think x. It often happens in debates about value when the two sides simply don’t have much to say to each other- and so a kind of Nietzschean argument over which viewpoint reflects the noblest psychology is one of the few options left for continuing dialectic.

I’ve been struck by the degree to which more and more, it doesn’t feel like some conservatives are even pretending to buy into a certain kind of broad, humanistic, welfarist consensus, where we all agree (in many cases, pretend) that we all want what is best for everyone and are just disagreeing on the means. Arguments about what should be done depend on shared objectives, so as the humanistic consensus deteriorates, bulveristic arguments are often the only means we have to keep tussling. It’s very interesting that the term Bulverism was invented around the time of the Second World War.

3. Walters suggests that the process of deciding which instances of envy are justified is necessarily very hard for an individual to do neatly- instead it must be a social process. I agree, but I wonder how a fair social process of considering desert and feelings about desert could proceed under conditions of inequality- especially wide inequality. I don’t mean a perfect social process, I mean a merely adequate one. If you want to see what I mean, imagine as a microcosm a small group of people, with vast differences in power and voice, set to match in proportion those that exist in our society, making a decision on some subject during a debate with all the differences in potency that exist in our world. Would you consider that result democratic?

This opens up an interesting sort of transcendental argument for egalitarianism- a transcendental argument with implications far beyond the topic of envy:

A). We cannot have discourse to decide what is justified unless the discussion happens under conditions where everyone can be heard.

B). We can only all be heard, and heard reasonably and fairly, under conditions much more equal than we have now.

C). Therefore, even to decide what degree of equality is justified we need equality- at any rate, a lot more of it than we have now.

This seems like an interesting way of motivating egalitarianism. To democratically decide how much equality we should have, we would need equality, ergo we need equality.

4. Consider the argument “egalitarianism reflects mere envy”. But this suggests an easy reversal– “Okay, differences in income are generating envy, envy is socially poisonous, so we’d best reduce differences in income then!” Of course, that argument is, on its own, far from persuasive, but then, the argument that egalitarianism is bad because it’s motivated by envy is also far from a one-hit winner. Why don’t we see this flip more often? It seems obvious enough. If you admit- argue even!- that differences in wealth are generating poisonous feelings, surely that gives us a reason to level those differences in wealth, not preserve them.

I wrote about this years ago. The take I ended up with is that positional concerns are probably evolutionarily embedded. Being hurt by huge positional differences- call it envy if you want, (although as discussed, I think that’s wrong)- is written into us. Our ancestors weren’t made for such huge gaps. Since we can't escape these feelings about positional gaps, that gives pro tanto reason to do something about them.

5. Years ago I wrote about what I called Yvne-Yvne is my neologism. Whereas envy is upset about the happiness of those who have more than you, yvne (pronounced Yev-knee) is its converse- a sense of happiness at the misery of those who have less than you. Perhaps the most interesting feature of yvne is its silence, despite arguably being a stronger force in history than envy, and certainly more cruel and reprobate, it has been invisible- not condemned one-tenth as much as envy by the great world religions, so obscure as to not have a name in English. Yvne is the secret pleasure of the masters of the world.

In more academic terms, there is good evidence that relative status concerns are a motivating factor for many rich and powerful people- that maintaining not just their absolute wealth, but their relative wealth and the relative deprivation of the poor, is very important to them. So why do we let the rich off the hook in these discussions- why are the poor and their champions held to account for envy but not the rich for Yvne?

6. Aristotle’s definition of envy is often thrown around: “Envy is pain at the good fortune of others”. Suppose envy is indeed hurt at someone else’s good fortune- I observe that the semantics are difficult to pin down.

If I feel anger at your extra wealth, because it gives you great unearned power in the community which you are using to bad effect, and your wealth could be used to relieve many people of hunger, is that “pain at your good fortune”, to quote Aristotle? I mean yes, in a sense, in that it’s pain that you have so much, which is a form of good fortune for you. But in another sense, it’s not really pain at your good fortune, but at some of its flow on effects and opportunity costs. Similarly, if you have a huge amount of power and I resent that, there might be a sense in which my resentment is not ‘at’ your good fortune in having that power, but rather about the dangers of that power.

Exactly what these emotions are directed 'at' can be such a tricky question. In a lot of putative cases of envy, particularly of the sort egalitarians are accused of, there seems to be precious little evidence that the upset is at the good fortune. Suppose Scrooge has an enormous amount of money which he is merely hoarding, harming countless others through his actions. Yet there is a button I could press, that would remove and redistribute Scrooge’s excess wealth, but give him numerous extra blessings, making him the happiest and most fortunate man alive. All the egalitarians I know would press this button, yet this seems incompatible with the idea that they are motivated by hurt at Scrooge’s good fortune, or at least that this is a potent motive.

7. I wonder if the slipperiness of envy- a term that can sometimes literally just mean 'wanting more than you have' and sometimes means a very particular kind of Iagoesque spite reflects its historic usage as a political weapon. The concept is thus a sort of Motte and Bailey. 

8. Though envy is real, I suspect that people drastically overestimate its prevalence. Saying someone is ‘just envious’ is a way to get out of thinking about deeper reasons they might feel the way they do. It’s also a terribly convenient explanation from the point of view of self-esteem- to say that others are mean towards you makes you feel good about yourself, and prevents you from having to think critically about your own behavior, or the social context in which you are interacting with the other. It’s a thought-stopper.