Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

A more damaging consequence of the lump fallacy is the belief that if some people get richer, they must have stolen more than their share from everyone else. A famous illustration by the philosopher Robert Nozick, updated for the 21st century, shows why this is wrong.⁹ Among the world’s billionaires is J. K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter novels, which have sold more than 400 million copies and have been adapted into a series of films seen by a similar number of people.¹⁰ Suppose that a billion people have handed over $10 each for the pleasure of a Harry Potter paperback or movie ticket, with a tenth of the proceeds going to Rowling. She has become a billionaire, increasing inequality, but she has made people better off, not worse off (which is not to say that every rich person has made people better off). This doesn’t mean that Rowling’s wealth is just deserts for her effort or skill, or a reward for the literacy and happiness she added to the world; no committee ever judged that she deserved to be that rich. Her wealth arose as a by-product of the voluntary decisions of billions of book buyers and moviegoers.

To be sure, there may be reasons to worry about inequality itself, not just poverty. Perhaps most people are like Igor and their happiness is determined by how they compare with their fellow citizens rather than how well-off they are in absolute terms. When the rich get too rich, everyone else feels poor, so inequality lowers well-being even if everyone gets richer. This is an old idea in social psychology, variously called the theory of social comparison, reference groups, status anxiety, or relative deprivation.¹¹ But the idea must be kept in perspective. Imagine Seema, an illiterate woman in a poor country who is village-bound, has lost half her children to disease, and will die at fifty, as do most of the people she knows. Now imagine Sally, an educated person in a rich country who has visited several cities and national parks, has seen her children grow up, and will live to eighty, but is stuck in the lower middle class. It’s conceivable that Sally, demoralized by the conspicuous wealth she will never attain, is not particularly happy, and she might even be unhappier than Seema, who is grateful for small mercies. Yet it would be mad to suppose that Sally is not better off, and positively depraved to conclude that one may as well not try to improve Seema’s life because it might improve her neighbors’ lives even more and leave her no happier.¹²

In any case, the thought experiment is moot, because in real life Sally almost certainly is happier. Contrary to an earlier belief that people are so mindful of their richer compatriots that they keep resetting their internal happiness meter to the baseline no matter how well they are doing, we will see in chapter 18 that richer people and people in richer countries are (on average) happier than poorer people and people in poorer countries.¹³

But even if people are happier when they and their countries get richer, might they become more miserable if others around them are still richer than they are—that is, as economic inequality increases? In their well-known book The Spirit Level, the epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett claim that countries with greater income inequality also have higher rates of homicide, imprisonment, teen pregnancy, infant mortality, physical and mental illness, social distrust, obesity, and substance abuse.¹⁴ The economic inequality causes the ills, they argue: unequal societies make people feel that they are pitted in a winner-take-all competition for dominance, and the stress makes them sick and self-destructive.

The Spirit Level theory has been called “the left’s new theory of everything,” and it is as problematic as any other theory that leaps from a tangle of correlations to a single-cause explanation. For one thing, it’s not obvious that people are whipped into competitive anxiety by the existence of J. K. Rowling and Sergey Brin as opposed to their own, local rivals for professional, romantic, and social success. Worse, economically egalitarian countries like Sweden and France differ from lopsided countries like Brazil and South Africa in many ways other than their income distribution. The egalitarian countries are, among other things, richer, better educated, better governed, and more culturally homogeneous, so a raw correlation between inequality and happiness (or any other social good) may show only that there are many reasons why it’s better to live in Denmark than in Uganda. Wilkinson and Pickett’s sample was restricted to developed countries, but even within that sample the correlations are evanescent, coming and going with choices about which countries to include.¹⁵ Wealthy but unequal countries, such as Singapore and Hong Kong, are often socially healthier than poorer but more equal countries, such as those of ex-Communist Eastern Europe.