My response to a truly execrable NY Times Op-Ed by Arthur Brooks . . . [View all]

[markpkessinger]

. . . head of the American Enterprise Institute.

Here is the text of my comment:

Mark Kessinger [font color="gray"]New York, NY 2 hours ago[/font]

The suggestion that most middle- and working-class folks are 'envious' of the very wealthy is an outrageous insult. Nobody is begrudging anybody's success, nor do they covet what the very wealthy have. But many of the very wealthy seem to have lost sight of the fact that nobody succeeds alone. What people want is the ability to make a decent living for themselves and their families. They want a real chance to get ahead. They want job security. And when the businesses who employ them enjoy large increases in profitability, they want their contribution to that increased profitability to be fairly reflected in their wages or salaries.

In any case, the prevailing emotion is not 'envy,' but rather bitter resentment. People resent that this tiny percentage of folks who have succeeded so spectacularly have used the fruits of that success to undermine the formerly robust commons this country once enjoyed. They resent that they use that money to lobby legislators to tear away at the social safety net and to block a long-overdue and very modest rise in the minimum wage.

An economic system must work for everyone. A system that enables a relative handful to hoard ever larger sums of wealth while everybody else is left to divvy up an ever declining remainder is unsustainable.

Finally, if anything is feeding this resentment, it is the smug, self-satisfied pronouncements of the 1% about what is "healthy" for society as a whole!

And here is an excerpt of Brooks' Op-Ed:

[font size=4]The Downside of Inciting Envy[/font]

[font size=3]Arthur C. Brooks[/font]

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Unsurprisingly, psychologists have found that envy pushes down life satisfaction and depresses well-being. Envy is positively correlated with depression and neuroticism, and the hostility it breeds may actually make us sick. Recent work suggests that envy can help explain our complicated relationship with social media: it often leads to destructive “social comparison,” which decreases happiness. To understand this, just picture yourself scrolling through your ex’s wedding photos.

My own data analysis confirms a strong link between economic envy and unhappiness. In 2008, Gallup asked a large sample of Americans whether they were “angry that others have more than they deserve.” People who strongly disagreed with that statement — who were not envious, in other words — were almost five times more likely to say they were “very happy” about their lives than people who strongly agreed. Even after I controlled for income, education, age, family status, religion and politics, this pattern persisted.

It’s safe to conclude that a national shift toward envy would be toxic for American culture.

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. . . [W]e must recognize that fomenting bitterness over income differences may be powerful politics, but it injures our nation. We need aspirational leaders willing to do the hard work of uniting Americans around an optimistic vision in which anyone can earn his or her success. This will never happen when we vilify the rich or give up on the poor.

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