Envy and Evolution

According to a New York Times editorial on Sunday, “Alan Krueger, chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, noted in a speech on Thursday that the median income in the United States had actually declined since 1999, shrinking the middle class while the income of the top 1 percent soared. Such inequality is corrosive. And pointing it out has nothing to do with envy and everything to do with pressing for policies to help America’s struggling middle class.”

I agree that income inequality is a serious problem (especially in the U.S., where it is more egregious than in any other developed country), and that corrective measures of some sort are definitely needed. But it might surprise the Times editorial board—and many Brainstorm readers as well— to learn that, in fact, concern with income inequality has a great deal to do with envy.

Take this little test. Which of the following worlds would you prefer to inhabit?

1. You earn $50,000 and others earn $25,000, or
2. You earn $100,000 and others earn $250,000.

When graduate students in public health at Harvard were asked this question, more than one-half of them preferred situation No. 1. This result is so startling that it is worth repeating: More than one-half of presumably intelligent young adults decided that they would rather earn less money (a whole lot less!) so long as it was more than their neighbors and colleagues. Traditional economic theory has a very hard time making sense of this, since it assumes that individuals, being rational “utility maximizers,” should seek to maximize their income whereas in fact they are more concerned with maximizing their income relative to that of others … i.e., they are very much in the grip of envy, maybe even spite.

Interestingly, this result didn’t apply when the same people were asked to choose between these two conditions:

1. You have two weeks’ vacation and others have one week

2. You have four weeks’ vacation and others have eight weeks

Here, only about 20 percent of the respondents chose option 1. The likelihood is that there is something about conspicuous “goods”—i.e., income and the stuff it enables—that render them especially liable to generate envy.

Some more evidence for the role of envy: According to a National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper, an increase in the average income in a state where you live decreases your average happiness by fully one-third as much as raising your own income increases it. And as reported in the Journal of Public Economics in the UK, an increase in salary for workers in one’s own area of specialization reduces one’s job satisfaction as much as an increase in one’s own salary raises it!

Yet another startling finding for anyone who doubts the potency of envy: It has been shown that if a woman’s sister’s husband earns more than the first woman’s husband, the second woman is more likely to go to work—evidently trying to keep up with her sister’s family’s income.

I believe that envy must be taken as a real component of “human nature,” although it remains to be seen whether similar patterns occur in non-Western societies. If they do, then I’d like to suggest a possible underlying reason: The simple fact (about which I’ve written previously in The Chronicle) that natural selection operates far more via differential payoffs than by objective measures of success. Under certain conditions, such as when an ecological niche is comparatively unoccupied, evolution favors strategies that simply maximize one’s own reproductive success. However, as competition develops, selection inexorably shifts to favor individuals and genes that perform not just well, but better than their alternatives. I am not suggesting that individuals and genes are necessarily aware of what they are doing or why, but rather that part of our underlying biology may well incline us to evaluate our positions relative to others rather than simply by any objective criteria.

If I am correct, then economists need to take the ideas of some of their own (notably Thorstein Veblen) more seriously, just as political scientists would do well to resurrect the work of Ted Gurr, who developed the concept of “Relative Deprivation” as a major contributor to Why Men Rebel (Princeton University Press, 1970). And all of us should acknowledge that even though envy is an unattractive trait, even downright troublesome, it’s probably quite “natural.”