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Comment by naming_the_user | Hacker News Reader

The question I always have to ask about inequality causing “unhappiness” is why I don’t feel that way.

Celebrities having private jets doesn’t upset me at all. Seems quite cool. I’d be more upset if I had nothing, sure, but I’m easily a factor of 100 away from jet land if not 1000. Fancy cars are cool but again, you can just… decide to not care?

It just seems intuitively obvious that what actually matters is the minimum standard, not artificially limiting the maximum.

If a study says that blue is red I’m still going to believe my eyes first hand.

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While that is a type of inequality it's not really what they're studying here. The IA they're looking a is more direct and is triggered in situations where equity would be expected. Unless you're a renown celebrity that's just been categorically underpaid it's not really apples to apples because in some sense you don't perceive any actual inequality. That person is doing a job that pays them that well.

the IA here would be more like you and a friend go over to help your elderly neighbor with his yard work. You both rake up leaves and both do the same quality and amount of work. Your neighbor then gives your friend $200, and then gives you $5. Out of a sense of IA you might actually reject that money which is disadvantageous inequity aversion since technically that leaves you with nothing.

Now if your friend had cleaned the gutters and fixed the toilet and you had just swept the porch you would not feel as unequal since the tasks were different, but given a sense of equal effort you would likely not be so casual about being snubbed and come next year maybe you won't even help your neighbor, or at least not with the same friend.

and you could probably narrow that gap down if the snubbery were consistent. Maybe you help your neighbor all the time and he consistently gives your friend $10 and you $5. after the 6th or 7th time I would be surprised if you didn't begin to harbor a sense of inequality over a mere $5, and for a job you would be willing to do for free anyway.

It seems to me that democratic society runs best where the distance is minimized between individuals with maximum agency vs. individuals with minimum agency. Agency is power, the ability to move other people to get things you want done, to make purchases, to amplify certain viewpoints over others.

In this regard, I usually think of wealth as a proxy for agency. There are other (negatively correlated) proxies that can be conveniently disregarded by certain political persuasions:

* Debt - effectively going into debt is sacrificing future agency for the sake of the present. In the moment of obtaining a loan you will of course have more liquidity at your disposal but after that moment in time your freedoms are limited due to your debt obligations. It's more obscured with purely financial loans - the way it negatively impacts democracy is more obviously seen in quid pro quo arrangements.

* Welfare dependence - like any other dependency relying on welfare decreases an individual's agency. They cannot afford to live without the welfare apparatus they depend on for survival.

In a democratic system we want every voting individual to have as close to the average agency as possible so that there isn't a non-democratic force continually applied corrupting the democratic process. Conversely we know that human beings are strongly motivated by agency maximization which society also needs for progress - in other words, humans need opportunity. The job of a statesman should be to manage these competing priorities.

You don’t mind if someone doing the exact same job as you at the same quality gets a 10x larger holiday bonus?

If you go play soccer and other people’s goals are worth 3 points while yours are worth 1?

I’m doubtful.

I dunno man.

I guess it would bother me if 1+1=3. It ain’t though.

I think a better example is something like e.g. your parents give your sibling far better gifts than you, since you can’t really escape that dynamic as a child.

As an adult it’s like, alright, so my workplace is crap, let me use one of the 40+ years of my adult life to find another one.

I am British, someone working at Facebook in the US earns double or triple what I used to as a software dev for roughly the same work. Does it bother me? I guess? But my first thought isn’t to be upset or something, it’s more like “do I want to live in the US, if so, google immigration lawyers then”, if not, accept and move on.

Uhh right, we don't do the things I described because they violate people's feeling of equality.

Ah, you're British. I see. Well good to know you're not bothered by inequality living in one of the most equal societies in world history.

As mentioned below: not caring about specific instances of inequality is not the same as not caring about inequality. I also don't care about the fact some people have private jets or fancy cars. That's not really what people are talking about, though obviously they're symbolic of the bigger picture.

These are not fair analogies to wealth inequality unless you think all people who have more than you got it by cheating people. A better analogy would be the movie Moneyball, about baseball's inequality.

Effectively the problem is that wealth is an inherent feedback loop that naturally creates Pareto distributions instead of normal distributions. People don't have to be 'unfair' for this phenomenon to occur.

Neither ruleset I proposed involves cheating, and neither GP nor the article are about wealth inequality per se. GP said he doesn't take issue with inequality itself.

Agreed with your broader point. In practice no one's individual emotional response is relevant: runaway wealth inequality is bad because it yields bad outcomes for society.

Capitalism works to the extent that it does because money becomes a signal for what people want, which very obviously fails if overwhelming proportions of money controlled by very few people.

My friend from Lousiana taught me a wonderful saying for when we are faced with absurd hypotheticals:

"If my aunt had a d_ck, she'd be my uncle."

Of course, that doesn't quite land the same in 2024, our finally learning of all the travails our trans brothers and sisters face in this world filled with such mean, ignorant mofos.

The claim was they don’t care about inequality. That’s obviously untrue.

They might not care about specific instances of inequality, but the distinction is important because, for example, other people experience different instances and clearly OP’s “caringness” is highly modulated by their information. Who’s to say they just actually have no fucking clue how bad inequality can be (in either direction), then it’s no surprise at all it doesn’t bother them.

To make it more explicit: it doesn’t bother me either that people have jets or fancy cars. I cannot draw from that observation that “inequality doesn’t bother me.” And you certainly can’t draw from that the suggestion that certain forms or intensities of inequality don’t yield bad outcomes in society totally aside from GP’s personal emotional state.

Yeah, that's fair. Most people's morality is very situational, and oft varies by how they're feeling at the time. The challenge, as always, is to rise above it all, no matter what.

"If my grandmother had wheels, she'd have been a bike!" is a suitable drop-in replacement.

(Made famous in the UK by Gina D'Acampo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-RfHC91Ewc)

Rode hard and put up wet? :-O

That's a common saying in the UK as well, but with "b_lls" substituted for "d_ck".

LOL, for real. Thanks!

Those sayings really have a nice flow to them.

I don't really care about these things that much, but I care about inequitable power.

A wealthy person should not be able to decide that they don't like some small minority and then influence public policy to enact policies which make them so miserable that some of them are driven to suicide.

Technically, it's causing jealousy, not unhappiness (directly). If we choose (as you intuitively understand) to let jealousy reside in our consciousness, we will become unhappy as a result of living in our lower selves. We should, instead, be focusing on the better aspects of our lives, including living on this wonderful world, in this awesome universe.

We are each tested with either more or less than others. If we have been given more, we are to be generous; if less, we are to refuse to be jealous.

All that said, flying around in private jets is horrible for the environment, and is, therefore, a detriment to us all, so it will be they who will become unhappy for spraying jet fuel byproducts all across the Earth while they're galavanting around. Sure, they might ignore it while they're pleasure-seeking, but karma is "patient like a spider, a Zen spider" (from Gibson's Neuromancer), and we all reap what we sow, whether for our selfishness or selflessness. It is always our choice, every day.

>>Technically, it's causing jealousy, not unhappiness

It's actually causing envy, not jealousy.

"Envy is when you want what someone else has, but jealousy is when you're worried someone's trying to take what you have."

https://www.vocabulary.com/articles/commonly-confused-words/...

Yeah, thanks, I always mess that up.

We pedants can't eff anthing up, can we? Talk about unfairness!

:-)

> flying around in private jets is horrible for the environment

It would be more horrible for the environment (in total effect) if people could afford to do it to any significant extent. Instead, like many other activities, its total effect is trivial, but the idea of such carelessness is offensive.

Its total effect is far from trivial. Our atmosphere is six miles thick, with only 2-to-3 miles or so of breathable air.

And I don't call anything "offensive", because I cannot be offended by what anyone does to me or anyone else. That said, what they or anyone is doing has a moral weight to it, being, to some degree, either selfish or compassionate. That is the measure of every human activity, our every choice.

I mean, it's generally offensive, not necessarily to you or me, just to people. And I suppose we have to bear the relatively recently discovered warming effect of contrails, but in terms of carbon emissions, ourworldindata assigns aviation as a whole only a very thin slice of the emissions pie.

But you're apparently talking about, what, PAHs that might give somebody cancer? Not a big deal proportionately, I think, unless you work at an airport.

I think inequality manifests itself in two different ways. One is the one you describe, and I agree, meh.

But the other is perhaps the disconnect between median wealth growth and GDP growth. It appears in the West increase in economic prosperity is disproportionately growing just in the top decile (loosely speaking). But you still have everyone else - doctors, builders, teachers, garbage collectors - who do essential work and have to feel part of that growth to put an effort, which everyone needs. The society can't afford them "silent quitting".

It's not that it's fine to be upset that someone else has a private jet and I don't. It's the disconnect between GDP growth and stagnation or decay in standard of living for the median citizen. It's more like, why should I work harder and harder for a mythical GDP growth that seems to go to someone else's pocket, while public services are going to shit.

UK is seeing this. Economic outlook is somewhat grim, but the UK is not officially in recession. But for most of the society, their personal economic situation seems to be getting worse.

The only way I cna square these observations is that due to inequality, the top bit is growing and the bottom bit ain't. And that is IMHO unsustainable.

Very good points indeed. And it's likely to go from bad to worse here in America now that the morons have elected that lying, greedy, amoral fool.

On a minimally brighter side, one of our major healthcare companies has just changed its policies on ending anesthesia coverage mid-surgery, so we've got that going for us ;-)

Agreed that this certainly seems to be what is happening in the UK currently.

But it is worth noting that whilst GDP is going up (due to immigration), GDP per capita is actually declining (due to immigration).

My general feeling about this is that the objective is to make the system work. If it turns out that it works anyway then meh. Individuals can just choose not to be doctors if they don’t want to.

However I think that yes, we probably should be paying essential services more because at least in the UK we have shortages.

This assumes glutinous consumption has no consequence outside of whether or not it bothers _you_.

All of the 1st world massively overconsumes. The most wealthy are the most egregious.

This has consequences outside of jealousy.

Although for the twerk tic influenza, obviously your real life is a database entry in a corporate software platform. So, if the poles melt, or 99% of species go extinct, it doesn't really affect you right?

In fact, it's kind of cool...

Because wealth is money that could be used to help people who need it.

Also climate change obviously leads to criticizing those lifestyles.

You're going to say it's political.

Those celebrities leading happy lives don't mean they're taking happiness from other people, but money is a resource that could use others to reach a minimum amount of happiness, at a low cost to the celebrity.

Celebrities are in a totally different equivalence class from you; unfairness is fundamentally someone getting more of some resource than you , all else being equal. Or even worse, someone else being rewarded for work that you did.

> “someone else being rewarded for work that you did”

This is the main driver for reducing inequality in the West. I keep paying taxes over what I get from my work to give to people that didn’t do it, under the guise of reducing inequality.

The people receiving benefits are not being rewarded for anything. They're simply being helped in a time of need. If you don't know the difference between a helping hand in a time where you desperately need it, and a receiving a fair reward for what you've done, you should really try and think harder about the topic.

Some of these people receive handouts from my money their entire life. Some of them, are now in the 2nd generation living the same way.

They literally receive money from the taxes I pay over my work, for doing nothing their entire life.

https://www.nber.org/digest/nov13/intergenerational-transmis...

Surely you know/understand that: 1. The minimum standard, even in the West, is not high enough. 2. The resources spent on the vanity projects and luxuries of the ultra wealthy could raise that minimum standard instead.

You say, "you'd be more upset if you have nothing" but that is the actual reality for people actually living here. Our system is extremely fickle and contrary to popular belief, does not directly reward hard work with success. I know many people that work very hard jobs, that make a tiny fraction of what probably the lowest earners on this forum make.

In the UK I don’t really agree. I think that the minimum standard is fine. I think that the common standard for workers is too low, but I don’t think that this exists as a result of resource distribution as such but rather regulation, basically the Government prevents building housing which is slightly different as a problem, the rich would do it but they aren’t allowed.

If we had enough housing to go around basically every other problem would be irrelevant.

I think the luxuries could do almost nothing to improve the minimum standard, which is dictated by national productivity and the efficiency of systems.

I think you could seize the assets from every billionaire in the US and you wouldn't be able to tell the difference in day to day life. It wouldn't create more housing or more health Care because production and supply is what limits availability.

Your billionaire is not using a million times more medical services or living in a million houses or eating a million hamburgers.

That really depends on how competitive you are.

Btw, it's not "unhappiness", it's a different feeling entirely.

You're right, someone being a billionaire has no impact on me, I don't care. But not having enough money to eat or pay for shelter, or having to take any crappy job because I'm desperate... that makes me unhappy.

The question is not about that. The question is whether you feel it's unfair when you perform the same work and receive less than someone else. I suppose you have no idea what the billionaire did and hence you don't care. It would perhaps be different if you knew the billionaire from school, went to the same classes, did the same stuff, but they ended up billionaires while you did not?

Yes I agree it would feel unfair when someone gets lucky and you don't. And you can bet they would argue that it wasn't luck, that it was all hard work and "merit", even if only to convince themselves. While this argument may be true to some degree its usually not enough to warrant the disparity. So perhaps I missed the point of the OP, anyway, thanks for clearing it up if that's the case.

I think you're still missing something, it's also not about "getting lucky" (though in real life, yes, that's often important), it's about someone who has the power to reward you, knowing what you've done, intentionally rewarding you with much less than your friend who did the same things as you. That's what they are measuring. The subjects in the experiment can see that the experimenter is observing the work they are doing, and can see how the experimenter consistently rewards the other subject differently. It's much more like when people at the workplace can see how much money their colleagues are making, while having visibility of what each other is doing, and noticing that some are getting much more money at the end of the month (which is one reason employers try as hard as possible to hide their employees' salaries).

ok I get that argument, if you spell it out like that :) yes its unfair. unless compensation is being rewarded based on some other factor?

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