"The Imaginary Epidemic of Envy in America"

The Imaginary Epidemic of Envy in America

By Jonathan Chait at New York Magazine

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/03/imaginary-epidemic-of-envy-in-america.html

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Conservatives used to say all the time that envy doesn’t work in American politics, that Americans admire the rich rather than begrudge them their fortune. They rarely say that anymore. Instead they warn that Americans resent the rich too much, that our noxious resentment carries all sorts of dangerous side effects. American Enterprise Institute president Arthur Brooks wrote a column in the Sunday New York Times earlier this month warning, “a national shift toward envy would be toxic for American culture,” and then asserted such a shift is already under way. Another Times column a week later, by Harvard economist Sendhil Mullainathan, who is not even a conservative, likewise frets that rampant envy "has made us less pragmatic and more dogmatic."

Neither column supplies any evidence, even anecdotal, to support the claim that envy is rising, or even that it has ever motivated public policy. Mullainathan expresses deep fears that American policy is being driven by “a misguided belief that the economy is a zero-sum game and that reducing the position of the top one percent automatically improves everyone else’s.” But neither column quotes a politician at any level expressing any such belief. (At least the Times’ dubious monocle trend story identified actual human beings who possess monocles.) It’s not even clear why they imagine such a thing would be possible — in a system that requires candidates for any major office to spend hour after hour courting wealthy donors, and which virtually guarantees they themselves will join the one percent immediately upon leaving office, who would ever want to personally impugn the rich?

The closest we have come was a brief upsurge in populist anger for a short period of 2009, following news reports of bonuses handed out to employees at bailout recipient AIG. The House of Representatives (by a vote of 328 to 93) passed a 90-percent tax on those bonuses. But the Obama administration opposed the bill, the Senate forgot about it, and the moment passed. It’s notable that even this small, ultimately ineffectual moment did not rise from any generalized spate of envy but specific resentment against the use of tax dollars to reward failure.


It is true that the Obama administration has called attention to income inequality (which, unlike envy, can be proven to be on the rise). To define inequality as a problem implies, theoretically, that lowering the living standard of the rich makes others better off. One could devise policies that reduce inequality — nuking Martha’s Vineyard, or covertly scattering poisoned truffles at The Four Seasons — by harming the rich without making life any better for the rest of us. No such policies have made it onto the national agenda.



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