Zakaria on envy and aspiration

Fareed Zakaria says the Obama re-election campaign has the wrong message: instead of emphasizing 'the Buffett rule' and reducing inequality, the President, according to Zakaria, should stress his proposals to increase spending on infrastructure, R&D, and education, and Obama should contrast those proposals with the Republican focus on budget-cutting.

Zakaria believes, apparently, that the Obama campaign can't walk and chew gum at the same time: either it must focus on reducing inequality or focus on investment in infrastructure, etc. But why not emphasize both? Here's where, if I may switch from one bad metaphor to another, the rubber hits the road: Zakaria doesn't like all this talk about inequality. Why not? Because it runs counter to his shopworn view of Americans' moral psychology: Americans, he writes, are "aspirational" not "envious," therefore focusing on inequality is bad politics in the long run.

This is, to be blunt, a load of crap. The U.S. now has a more unequal distribution of income than Kenya (and several other developing countries). The notion that you must be "envious" if you want a multi-millionaire or billionaire to shoulder a slightly larger share of the tax burden is nonsense.

Americans aren't envious, they are "aspirational": how many thousands of times have you heard this bromide repeated by one pundit or another? Americans don't envy the rich, God forbid; they want to become rich themselves. What if the real situation is that Americans want a less unequal distribution of wealth and income because huge inequalities are offensive to a basic sense of justice?

Zakaria, who earned a Harvard Ph.D. with a political science dissertation on the U.S.'s growth and emergence as a world power at the turn of the twentieth century, is slated to be the main speaker at Harvard's commencement this spring. If he trundles out this platitudinous b.s. about envy and aspiration in his speech on that occasion, I hope he gets booed off the podium.

Minute of envy

"Pride, Envy, and Avarice are the three sparks that have set these hearts on fire."
-- Dante, Inferno, canto VI, line 74
(with a hat tip to the 1968 edition of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, ed. Emily Morison Beck)

We think of envy as an ugly emotion, but is it always? Envy often comes jumbled up with other emotions that we see as more benign (I don't mean pride and avarice, obviously). Because there are so many different kinds of people in the world, there are a multitude of reasons for envy, both good and bad. I'm not sure I'd want to be someone who didn't feel envy at least occasionally; it shows you're alive. (I think I'll probably take a pass, however, on visiting whichever circle of hell Dante's describing.)

Does the Mole speak Spanish?

Would someone (can someone) explain to me the appeal of reality TV shows? "The Mole" (ABC) involves a group of mostly youngish Americans, of varying though generally considerable degrees of obnoxiousness, who have been plopped down in Chile and are being made to go through a series of seemingly pointless, mildly sadistic exercises at the end of which presumably someone will be exposed as saboteur of the whole project (hence the title) and/or someone else will walk away with a lot of money. One of the contestants in the part of the show I happened to see a couple of hours ago was using his ability to speak Spanish to advantage, an ability resented by the other competitors, though the line between envy and resentment was blurry.

A game theorist might have some fun with these sorts of shows, if she or he had the patience to sit through them. Not being a game theorist, I just find "The Mole" rather boring, even if, at the particular moment in question, it was marginally less awful than everything else being broadcast.