Why Envy Might Be Good for Us

“Namibian hunter-gatherers deride those who stand out.“

It depends on what the goal is. If the goal is to produce abnormal outsized returns: they likely come from standing out. Being somewhat contrarian against the tribe helps with finding new pastures - infact it might be the only way.

If the goal is to maximize egalitarianism, which is a worth-while goal, then having mimetic/conforming attitudes would be a virtue. Envy is a by-product of our mimetic desires.

Similarly, having grown up in a Socialist Republic with a Communist party, envy was a big motivator for crime against your neighbor.

While some would never have a thought of harming another over perceived better off neighbor, most would take action as some form of irrational justice. And if they were found out or caught, the 'actual' justice would never be forgiven, despite all this being their own doing.

Many leave this type of village environment for different cultures and more maturity.

would love to read more about this if you have recommended resources

I've figured there's exactly one place where envy makes sense: If someone else has more than you because some authority is distributing things, and is supposed to do it one way but is doing it another way, then it makes sense to be mad... at that authority. It still doesn't make sense to be mad at the recipient of the extra stuff, unless they are in some way aiding and abetting the authority in its unfair behavior.

The author's final conclusions take, as a matter of fact, that inequality is what drove revolutions of the past. It seems that the more precise cause of these revolutions throughout time has not been the lack of equality, but the lack of fairness. And these are two very different things. If we take 1000 people and give rewards in proportion to performance at some task, it will be extremely unequal - yet fair. If we take these 1000 people and instead give identical rewards in accordance with who a grand arbiter thinks would be somehow 'better', it would be radically unfair. Even if the final result in the distribution of rewards is the same, the general view and tolerance of such distribution would be very different.

The example most commonly cited as a revolution of inequality is the French Revolution, yet the people did not protest because the ruling class enjoyed feasts of wine and meat while they ate grain and water, as had been the case since time immemorial. It happened because the masses were required to pay ever larger taxes to subsidize a government that was increasingly in debt with very little to show for it, all because of the actions of those that lived in luxury. And this happened at the same time that famine was sweeping the nation magnifying the absurdity of it all. Put another way, those in power were destroying their nation and demanding the poor pay for their failures. That's not about inequality, it's about unfairness.

And I think this generalizes to the entire article. People do not generally seem to care about equality -- they care about fairness. The Waltons and Elon Musk are both billionaires, but they are perceived in vastly different ways. Imagine if we lived exactly as we do today, yet the vast majority of wealthy obtained their wealth and behaved in a fashion similar to the Waltons. The stability of this nation would be quite different.