I don't believe it. I think it's woo. There's no reason for my health to be harmed just because someone has more than me.
I'm open to being proven wrong, but I think this is another social science fad, another victim of academia's ideological blinkers and confirmation bias avalanche.
It'll be in and out, just like how eggs and wine and chocolate are good for you on Tuesday and bad for you again by Thursday.
EDIT: Yes, I'm sure envious people can tie themselves in knots over inequality, but I don't see this as a social problem. It's a personal psychological problem for those people. And I am skeptical that it is so common as to be my problem.
One obvious example is housing. Those that have more than you can afford to live in safer neighborhoods. Those less well off but still able to afford to own a home will be forced to live in neighborhoods with higher crime, higher levels of pollution, "food deserts", or any other number of negative factors. Sure, you can opt to drive til you qualify and avoid some of those problems but now you spend an hour or more each way in your car. That too comes with negative consequences to your health.
You are not arguing the question. An unsafe, polluted, food desert neighbourhood is less healthy not because there are safe, clean, well supplied neighbourhoods. It is less healthy because the lack of safety, pollution and lack of healthy food makes people unhealthy.
If you can make the whole country polluted, food deserty and unsafe you made everyone more equal, but nobody will get healthier.
If a multi-billonaire buys a palace at the edge of a safe, clean neighbourhood that increases the inequality tremendously but won't make the people in the neighbourhood sicker.
It’s not poverty though. If you can afford a car, an iPhone, laptop, plenty of food to eat, TV, refrigerator, washer and dryer, and all sorts of other toys and time saving appliances, you’re not in poverty by any global or historical standards.
You may still be unable to afford to own a house in a clean, safe area with access to a decent school. That’s inequality, not poverty.
> You may still be unable to afford to own a house in a clean, safe area with access to a decent school. That’s inequality, not poverty.
But this sentence contains no reference to how X having more than Y caused Y to suffer. It contains a description of how Y could be better off if Y had more.
If inequality was eliminated by making it so no one had access to safe schools, it would not solve the problem at all.
If you don't want to call the problem poverty, whatever, but it's definitely not inequality.
I assume you don't know who Robert Sapolsky is in the parent comment.
"how X having more than Y caused Y to suffer" is the observation of someone who is above you in the hierarchy of A (A is whatever measure you want, usually its financial wealth or social status). This involuntary comparison allows you to derive your relative position, and this is a biologically stressful activity when you are toward the bottom of the hierarchy. This constant reflexive update is not great for people in a highly unequal society because its a constant stress inducer and has direct physical and mental health implications that bleed over into things like the political sphere.
Both "pointy" hierarchies and flattened hierarchies are bad. Flattened hierarchies are when we are all equal, and thus society stagnates. Pointy hierarchies are the traditional kings at the top, serfs at the bottom. These inevitably collapse at some point for multitudes of reasons. There is probably a happy, more stable medium. Societies that are becoming unequal have a gradient trending toward the pointy hierarchy state.
Poverty is a specific threshold of material wealth, and is related, but ultimately orthogonal to the discussion.
I don't think there's any escaping the stressors of deep hierarchies. Social status is a scarce commodity, and will continue to be scarce regardless of wealth. I think the better solution is to proscribe severe punishment/suffering for violating the peace a la Japan. Classical conditioning works on people too.
This has to do with extremely poor land use policies combined together with bad incentive in the housing market, hence "robust" housing market as if it's something to be celebrated.
I note that the San Francisco housing crisis has been ongoing for at least a few years if not longer according to the notes I have been taking.
Those land use policies come from nimbyism and a desire to “pull the ladder up behind you” that we see so often in our society. I think, and it sounds like the research supports, that inequality drives people to act more selfishly and this is the result we see.
No, the price of real estate must rise to enrich you. Can't having rising real estate price if you don't restrict housing.
It is in part an incentive problem.
If you institute a land value tax, we would reward the richest person around, because he makes the best investment, but he would also pay the greatest amount of taxes, because he bought the most productive or most desirable land.
> There's no reason for my health to be harmed just because someone has more than me.
You would think so, but I've read several articles that suggest this isn't the case. One example that comes to mind is that in some communities kids experience social stress/bullying if their SMS bubbles aren't blue (because it implies you are too poor to afford an iPhone and can only afford a "lesser" Android): https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-apples-imessage-is-winning-...
From the article:
> Apple’s iMessage plays a significant role in the lives of young smartphone users and their parents, according to data and interviews with a dozen of these people. Teens and college students said they dread the ostracism that comes with a green text. The social pressure is palpable, with some reporting being ostracized or singled out after switching away from iPhones.
Are they not interlinked? It seems to me that inequality often begets tribalism, as people defensively form bands. Which then reinforces the spiral downwards.
No, they are not. You can have virtually homogeneous group of people wearing different colored shirts or following different sport teams hostile to each other.
Fuck apple for this. Their walled garden is nice if you can afford it / deal with all the other shortcomings of modern iOS vs modern Android. Goes both ways in some respects, but the iMessage thing is way past time to have nice interop. Comes down to greed, I guess
It's not that they have more. It's that you know they have more, that it's not fair they have more because they are not better than you, and the path to get more is blocked / unfairly policed. And that eats you up inside. And that eating up is constantly firing stress hormones and heardening your heart.
In short, anger leads to hate, hate leads to the dark side.
The problem is that, no matter what the actual causes are, self interest bias generally makes it so that nobody can accept that another person worked harder or used better strategy or whatever.
For example, in games, it's always lag/bad teammates/etc. that keep them in "Elo hell" and they want to 1v1 you despite it being a team game and they ignore game winning objectives to score meaningless kills or whatever. Never mind everyone starts with exactly the same resources every time. Yes, yes, bad lag can have an effect on the margins, but some of the best players I knew were playing from another continent with terrible ping and bad lag doesn't have any effect on bad tactics.
I've been in, and climbed out of that Elo in plenty of games, and I know just how sharply the mindsets change as you climb.
> Never mind everyone starts with exactly the same resources every time.
In a game sure, but does this seem to reflect lived reality?
Edit: in fact, I don't know what game you're refering to, but imagine a game where your opponent was given an order of magnitude more HP or an hour to level up/prepare before you entered the game. Is this a game you would want to play?
I don't want it to be about one specific game because it happens in lots of games. There's always someone who will make horribly bad tactical decisions to ignore game winning objectives and blame that on "lag" or something ridiculous.
And the ones I have in mind are such that people do start with the same resources every time.
Though if you want to discuss P2W games, those where actual skill is involved not infrequently have no-skill whales lose to skilled players. In those it depends on the scale of the P2W and how much skill plays into the actual contest, though.
Finally, to your edit, yes, many people play MMOs and even join ones where other players have already maxed everything before they created their first character. Not everyone feels the need to be #1 or even cares if someone has more than they do, because obsessing about that stuff is a sure way to hurt your own mental health.
Then the research is inaccurately described. They should talk about perceived injustice, not merely inequality.
Even the Chinese Communist Party came to realize that people must be allowed to reap unequal rewards (based on their talent and labor) to escape desperate poverty. Their agricultural productivity tripled when they let people sell some of their produce rather than turning it all over to the state [1].
This is how Deng Xiaoping began his rise to power in a country gripped by the madness of Maoism. By accepting inequality even though the Communists have always demonized its socioeconomic manifestations.
Ironically, I think you're letting your view of academia distort your own thinking here.
The mechanism isn't that complex. Anywhere resources are limited can lead to outcomes where an unequal society is worse off than an equal one. If I have a finite supply of doctors, for example, then the wealthy will be the ones who receive care while the poor go without.
The wealthy also tend to set up systematic barriers to ensure that the resources they fund serve them alone [1]. In the US, this is probably best exemplified by public education: schools are funded by property taxes, so rich districts have better schools, which in turn further increases home values (a process exacerbated by policies that prevent construction of cheaper, higher-density housing---policies supported by, naturally, the wealthy). Schools in poorer districts are therefore worse off than they would be if wealth weren't as concentrated.
Even if you take the perspective that, net, an equal amount of dollars is going toward education (or healthcare, etc.), it's fairly obvious the marginal benefits are different. A second violin teacher isn't as meaningful as adding a calculus class; elective cosmetic surgery isn't equivalent to treating diabetes.
This is just your speculation. A bunch of other people in this comment tree say it's not about outcomes in an unequal society being worse than outcomes in a (hypothetical, possibly unachievable) equal society with the same resources. Instead it's about a hardwired biological stress response that people lower in the social hierarchy have when they observe people higher up.
So before we go lecturing about how it "isn't that complex" let's make sure we understand what this thing is that's supposedly not that complex.
Where's the speculation? I shared a concrete example. Places without that method of funding have more equitable education systems.
I'm not really concerned what others are saying. You made the claim that "There's no reason for my health to be harmed just because someone has more than me." I just gave an intuitive explanation of how this could happen. And you can see this happening on a global scale: wealthy countries attract more higher-skilled workers, like doctors. These are educated, capable people not contributing those skills to their home countries (to be clear, I wholeheartedly support open immigration policies, but that doesn't mean "brain drain" isn't real).
EDIT: ah, I was not reading carefully, and realize you are saying "I see no reason for my health to be harmed by the sole fact of being poorer than someone else." I am not familiar with Sapolsky's research and can't speculate. In principle, I do see why you'd think it's hard to disentangle the material impacts of inequality from the psychological.
Many studies show chemical markers of these things, it's not just psychological behavioral studies (which are often quite dubious) but easily measurable outcomes. If you're thinking quite narrowly, your point seems reasonable, it's probably below significance to say your neighbor with the bigger house and nicer car is "healthier", but this is a lot different than them vs the family that sometimes skips meals because they can't afford to put food on the table with the knowledge that a lost job will mean homelessness.
Since you're asserting that you don't believe the results of this research because it's "woo" -- can you explain what type of evidence, or what degree of impact, or how deep or impeccable the link must be established for you to accept it?
Is it even possible that you are, as you say, open to being proven wrong? (I ask this in good faith, because I've been arguing on the internet for 25+ years, and whenever someone says this, I end up asking them what would persuade them and the answer is usually "nothing," which, ... okay ..., but I am an eternal optimist and I strive to take people at their written word.)
I'm sure that envious people can impose suffering on themselves by obsessing over those who have more than them. But I don't see another causal pathway. I'd like to see the causal pathway. Otherwise it's on a scientific level with ESP.
You either believe in science or you don’t. A lot of scientific findings don’t make intuitive sense (like relativity). So we rely on the scientific methods to guide us to the truth rather than our primitive ape minds.
Skepticism is part of the scientific method; but just saying “hmm it doesn’t feel right to me” isn’t really useful.
Just the opposite - consider the replication crisis. Our a priori belief should be that any published paper in the social sciences is junk without extremely compelling evidence to the contrary. This is an evidenced based position!
Or, let’s completely disregard the studies themselves and look at the fruits of their labors. Is eg education noticeably better now than it was a generation ago? Is our mental health better now than then, etc etc.
> Skepticism is part of the scientific method; but just saying “hmm it doesn’t feel right to me” isn’t really useful.
Have you ever been a scientist? Scientists react this way to published research all the time, especially in fields like psychology where epistemic and empirical methods are weak.
I don’t think it’s reasonable to assume a study is correct just because a contradictory study or replication failure has not yet been published.
This particular study seems to be a case of extraordinary claims requiring extraordinary evidence. If true, the implications are enormous: medical justification for a wealth cap! Something which has never been attempted anywhere in the world in all of history.
Well, but is it possible that this is a very fundamental part of human psychology and thus not very easily overcome, especially on a societal level? Maybe we’re as hardwired to be stressed and anxious when we see someone else with more resources as we are to start looking for food when we’re hungry.
And people should definitely stop raping and murdering each other, do you have a realistic plan for making that happen in the foreseeable future? You’re being very flippant about something which is extremely challenging, changing human behavior at scale. If you want to be pragmatic you can’t just sit and pout that people aren’t behaving as well as they could - unfortunately that’s something you most likely will just have to live with.
Yeah, don't be envious, man, just always take the little of what is offered, trying to negotiate better conditions for yourself is bad for your health.
Do you know ultimatum game? There might be a good reason why envy exists.
Feel free to try and negotiate better whatever for yourself. But if stress about someone else having more is your driver, I think you're suffering needlessly.
My point was, what is envy, then, other than the motivational force behind trying to negotiate better for yourself? Most people have some form of it.
The claim that "people should just learn not to be envious" is a classist BS, because without some form of envy, nobody would be motivated to ask for better remuneration.
Drivers can negotiate too, through collective action. Of course they worry about billionaires, because billionaires worry about them in the first place - the billionaires invented Amazon or Uber, which employ these drivers and are the primary cause of their working conditions.
If envy is just some motivating force then why should I care about it? The conversation was originally about unhealthy stress and damage to health due to others having more than you.
Being motivated by the success of others or wanting to negotiate your comp is fine. But when people feel bad merely because others have more, they should not expect anyone else to feel bad for them or solve that for them. It's their own problem.
Stress that you won't be able to pay bills or debts is NOT envy. You can have it even in a society where everybody is poor. That's why, in rich societies, envy is not the cause of it, but rather how society distributes its wealth is. And so it becomes a collective, not an individual, problem.
The problem in this discourse is that certain people like to call everything "inequality" whether they're talking about "some people can't pay bills" or "some people make more money than others".
We might want to tolerate the latter but reduce the former. But if we call them all the same thing, we can't think clearly or formulate such nuanced policy, as Orwell noted.
That's a false dichotomy, because there is literally no country on Earth where inequality would only mean the latter. Inequal system, if free enough, always devolves into something which drowns at least someone.
By that standard, no nation is equal "enough", and we should go back to being hunter gatherer tribes where the guy who killed the mammoth gets murdered if he gets too big for his britches.
(And FWIW, that isn't what "false dichotomy" means.)
I'm open to being proven wrong, but I think this is another social science fad, another victim of academia's ideological blinkers and confirmation bias avalanche.
It'll be in and out, just like how eggs and wine and chocolate are good for you on Tuesday and bad for you again by Thursday.
EDIT: Yes, I'm sure envious people can tie themselves in knots over inequality, but I don't see this as a social problem. It's a personal psychological problem for those people. And I am skeptical that it is so common as to be my problem.