Envy has always existed, in every culture. Sociologist Helmut Schock demonstrated this in his 1968 book “Envy: A Theory of Society.” But envy is stronger in capitalist society than in previous societies. Here, origin and birth do not determine one’s position in society, everyone is equal.
In fact, competition does not lead to equality, but to inequality. People can react differently to inequality. some want to make an effort to reduce the gap between themselves and the more affluent by improving their lot. Rich people are role models for them. You buy a biography of Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk and try to learn something from them. Others react with envy. Like the protesters who set up a guillotine in front of Jeff Bezos’ house in the USA.
Jealousy harms the whole society, eg Uganda
Envy is fueled by political movements that fuel this human emotion to make political capital out of it. There are many examples of this in history. The brutal dictator Idi Amin, who ruled Uganda in the 1970s, hated Jews and “rich” Asians.
He said. “Germany is where Hitler, as Prime Minister and Commander-in-Chief, burned more than six million Jews. This is because Hitler and all Germans knew that the Israelis were not people who would work for the benefit of the peoples of the world, and that is why they gassed the Israelis alive on German soil.” Idi Amin offered everyone to resettle the Israelis. From the Middle East to Britain.
After the Jews, his hatred was directed against the Asians, especially the Indians. In early August 1972, Idi Amin ordered the expulsion of the Asians. At that time there were about 80,000 Asians living in Uganda, mostly from India and Pakistan. Idi Amin’s predecessor, the socialist Milton Obote, had already taken action against them, thereby damaging the economy. As so often in history, the rich and successful were turned into scapegoats, and an unprecedented campaign of social envy began. the Asians were labeled as exploiters whose sole purpose was to enrich themselves at the expense of the local population.
Before the deportation, Asians owned many large businesses in Uganda
They were accused of accumulating wealth. They were accused of milking the economy. Everything that was wrong in the economy was blamed on them. Africans were poor because they were exploited by Indians. The economy did not grow because of the Indians. The action against the Asians was widely approved by the population. Before the deportation, Asians owned many large businesses in Uganda, but the “cleansing” of Asians from the Ugandan economy was virtually complete. 5655 companies, ranches, farms and long-term property, houses, cars, etc. were taken from Asians. Only six months later, in January 1973, Idi Amin decided to expropriate British-owned companies without compensation.
Because of all these socialist measures, Uganda fell into a deep crisis. The deportation of Asians worsened the country’s misery, destroying much of the city’s tax base. At the time of his deportation, 90 percent of the country’s businesses were owned by Asians, providing 90 percent of Uganda’s tax revenue.
The French are the most jealous, the Germans are second
Jealousy exists all over the world, but it varies in its intensity. I commissioned a survey from Ipsos MORI to examine attitudes towards the wealthy in different countries. We asked the same questions to respondents from 13 countries. Across all countries, we distinguished between three groups: the socially jealous, the non-jealous, and the ambivalent, somewhere in the middle. If you divide the percentage of envious people by the percentage of non-envious people, you get the coefficient of social envy. The result: Envy is more pronounced towards the rich France, followed by Germany. in Japan and Poland Therefore, jealousy is much weaker.
I presented the detailed results of the study in four articles of the British Economic Affairs magazine, summarized in the article “Popular perceptions of the rich in 13 countries”.
Average people don’t understand entrepreneurs
Chinese economist Weiying Zhang also addresses envy in his new book, Understanding Entrepreneurship. What It Is and Why It Matters’, published in May 2024 by the renowned publisher Cambridge University Press. Zhang also attributes the envy to the fact that most people don’t understand how entrepreneurs make money and believe that rich people only get rich by taking advantage of others;
“However, the common man does not understand how an entrepreneur can make money. Entrepreneurs don’t work in fields like farmers or sweat like laborers, so why are they rich? Especially the entrepreneurs who trade do not even change the material form of the product, so how can they make money? It seems they did it ex nihilo! The answer is that they buy low and sell high, deceiving both the seller and the buyer.
Like my books The Psychology of the Super-Rich and Society and Its Rich, which Zhang also cites, he argues that intellectuals in particular absolutize academic knowledge and fail to understand the importance of “tacit knowledge” to societal success. entrepreneur
Bertolt Brecht and his poem “Alfabet”.
However, the basis of envy is the zero-sum belief; “If we believe that wealth is a fixed quantity (a zero-sum game) and not a quantity that can be created (a positive-sum game), it is easy to use other people’s wealth as a reason to see our own poverty. It’s easy to turn green with envy and rush into class warfare. If we believe that work involves sweat, if we do not consider the use of entrepreneurship as a special form of work, then we will have a hard time understanding why entrepreneurs make money.”
The famous communist poet Bertolt Brecht classically formulated zero-sum faith in his poem “Alfabet”.
“Rich and poor
They stood there and looked at each other.
And the poor man said palely.
If I wasn’t poor, you wouldn’t be rich.”
The zero-sum belief is easy to disprove. the number of poor people around the world has been falling dramatically for decades, while the number of billionaires has been skyrocketing. If the rich were only rich because they took from the poor, where does the money come from, if the poor are less poor today than, say, 40 years ago, when more than 40 percent of the world’s population still lived in extreme poverty (today it is 8.5 percent).
In China At the end of the Mao era, 88 percent of people lived in extreme poverty. Then reformer Deng Xiaoping said: “Let some get rich first” introduced private property and began market economy reforms. Today, China has more billionaires than any other country in the world (except the US), and the number of extreme poor has fallen below one percent. The reason for the increase in the number of rich people and the decrease in poverty is the same: economic growth. Adam Smith already told us in his book The Wealth of Nations that the only way for nations to avoid poverty is economic growth, and economic freedom is a prerequisite for that.