"...while the rich get richer."

Many of you may recognize that title as part of a liberal catch-phrase. While bemoaning poor people getting poorer may be a legitimate gripe (at least if it's true), it's always disturbed me that many liberals feel the need to also point out that rich people are getting richer. Often, if there is any thought that goes into it at all, it is the mistaken notion of economics as a zero-sum game: that one person can only prosper at the expense of another. Getting a bigger piece of the pie necessitates someone else getting a smaller piece.

Those with more than an elementary-school level of understanding of capitalism (this excludes, sadly, probably at least half of all Democrats and a considerable number of Repubs as well) know that capitalism is an economic system of wealth creation, meaning it is not a zero-sum game.

(Side note: Many anti-evolutionists make the same mistake with regards to thermodynamics, when they argue that increasing complexity over time isn't possible due to entropy. They assume Earth is a closed energy system, which it certainly is not.)

I had previously assumed that bemoaning "the rich getting richer" was caused by a malicious form of envy. This article, however, paints a different picture. The gist of it is that most people apparently would rather be better off relative to their peers than better off in absolute terms. The example given is that most people would prefer a job making $100K/year in a company where most others only make $90K/year, rather than a job where they make $110K/year whilst their coworkers pulled in $200K/year. This is more than merely envy or a case of "keeping up with the Joneses" though. Earning or having less than your peers in relative terms is a signal that you are not as valued among them. Earning less could mean less job security (since presumably your job is not valued as much), while having less could potentially lead to social exclusion. And on a deeper evolutionary level, at least for men, those who tend to earn and have more also tend to be more successful at attracting mates and passing on their genes.

That said, I'm not quite prepared yet to give up on the notion of plain ol' class envy to explain the hatred of the rich among liberals and many poor. And it's certainly no basis for enacting liberal or socialistic economic policies which try to level the playing field, not by raising the poor, but by lowering the rich. Still, this is a good additional insight into such thinking.