Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
Jealousy is one of the most powerful human emotions. Surely you've experienced it personally.
Unlike another of our Stone Age instincts, revenge, which is almost invariably a selfish, evil, irrational destructive force, jealously can be a positive force. If a person looks around and sees that those around him have more than he does, he may be motivated to work harder, get more education, or something like that, so that he can contribute more to civilization and receive a greater reward in return. Since civilization is built upon surplus production, this would be a very slight advantage to all of us, and if everybody did it, in aggregate we'd all be more prosperous.
However, no economic system has ever worked perfectly and some people always end up with more wealth than they have earned by their labor, while others end up with less. Modern Western democratic capitalism does a better job than any other system of managing the capital (another word for "surplus wealth") of a large heterogeneous society. The poverty rate in our larger countries is the lowest the world has ever seen, and even our definition of "poverty" (in America it includes a sturdy home, plumbing, electricity, heating, a refrigerator, a TV, a cell phone, a computer with internet access, a car, free schooling, basic medical care and adequate nutrition--for all but the people at the very bottom of the system, most of whom are there because they're too crazy to get a job but too smart to be captured by the authorities and remanded to institutional assistance--the ones who think they've beaten the system by hiding out at the very bottom of it) is greater prosperity than 99% of the earth's population could dream of before the Industrial Revolution.
Still people look around and see astonishing disparity in wealth and resent the success of those who have significantly more than they do. Even more, they resent the passing of that wealth to those people's children, who, in their estimation, have not earned it.
What they--and we--all need to understand is that the people who created that outstanding surplus wealth needed to be motivated to work that hard and take those risks. A large motivator is the ability to be able to pass it on to one's children. The parental instinct is just as strong as jealousy or revenge, but unlike those it is a uniformly positive emotion. People who enrich their country's economy by building railroads and factories, or by inventing new technologies, or by touching our hearts with their art, or by stirring our competitive feelings with their athletic prowess, have earned their income. If we think they're overpaid, well duh, when's the last time any of us thought someone much richer than us was underpaid? That's just the jealousy kicking in. Why don't I get paid as much for my songs as Lady Gaga gets for hers: it's not fair!
If you start making it impossible for people to pass their surplus wealth on to their children, what reason will they have to create it? Civilization will suffer without their productivity. Or worse, they'll find even better ways to cheat, and their role-modeling will cascade down to all of us and we'll all become just a little more dishonest.
That's a stereotype. In order to be jealous we have to assume that these kids don't deserve the money. Children often take over the family business when their parent retires, and do a perfectly fine job of it. If we don't see quite so much of that happening today, it's because of the Paradigm Shift out of the Industrial Era into the Information Age. The corporation as we know it is an obsolete artifact and most of them have ceased being producers and instead are scavengers, salvaging the little value left in each other's rotting corpses before they too collapse.
Indeed. In the days of the aristocracy the children of the wealthy had to undergo some dreadfully serious parenting, and the children of the common folk could laugh at them and insist that they were better off with less money and more freedom. Today the children of the wealthy are often wastrels, but again, that's because their parents' businesses are going bankrupt and there's nothing to prepare them for.
Civilization wouldn't last two weeks if we all didn't have a basic sense of fairness in our hearts. Every day we stifle urges which would cause grief to others, because we know they're doing the same for us and in aggregate we're all better off than we were in the Stone Age, when every extended family unit distrusted all the others. These kids have the same sense of fairness we do, and they feel guilty for not paying their way. It's that simple.
I worked for a government agency for many, many years, and geeze there is nobody in America who contributes less to the economy than the civil "service" sector. We all worked hard, but we couldn't get anything accomplished. We were paid well and we had nearly unbreakable job security, so we were grateful for that, but deep down inside we felt that we were cheating, that we were being unfair to the taxpayers who were paying our salaries. Everyone had a different way of dealing with that feeling: alcohol, drugs, putting in 20 hours a week at a charity clinic, tutoring, or just getting all intellectual on us and insisting that it wasn't as bad as it looked.
My way was to leave. Sometimes the children of the rich do that too, it's just harder because the trust fund follows them around.
