Reaction to "Under the Banner of Heaven" (about Mormons)

This is a 2003 book by Jon Krakauer about the Mormon Church, focusing in the present on the breakaway fundamentalist sects that consider polygamy a key part of the religion, but it also described the early history of the church, which I found to be the most interesting part.

Joseph Smith was a sort of con artist before he became a prophet. It's impressive that he could make up the entire Book of Mormon while staring into a hat with a special stone at the bottom (someone else writing down his thoughts). He must have had a fabulous imagination.

Joseph received direct revelation from God, and told those who followed him that they too would directly experience God's presence -- a popular aspect of the religion. The problem was that if God could give revelations to Joseph, it could give them to anyone else too. So within a couple years Smith had a revelation that God only gave revelations to him, not the other folks, but it was too late. And it set in motion the Mormon history of splintering into factions, because pretty often some man listening to the voice of God will hear that they are destined to be the leader "mighty and strong" who will reveal God's plan on earth, which is mostly incompatible with a faction where someone else has already claimed that role.

The history of polygamy fascinated me. As best I can tell, it arose from the fact that Joseph Smith was surrounded by lots of very attractive women, many of whom idolized him. It couldn't really be that he was not intended to enjoy them sexually, could it? You can imagine some prophets might just figure they could sleep with them but not marry them, but not Smith. Thus he had a revelation that plural marriage was a great thing. As such, he didn't just enjoy them sexually, he got to own them. The next fascinating part is that he floated a trial balloon to his followers about plural marriage, and the reaction was swift and very negative. So he had another private revelation that while plural marriage was great, the time was not right to reveal it publicly. He did take several wives during this period, but apparently it was known only to an inner circle. It caused some consternation. It was only after Smith's death, as the Mormons were on their way to Utah that the doctrine of plural marriage was revealed to the entire community.

Mormonism is historically a very hierarchical religion, to say the least. Only in 1978 did the head of the LDS church have the revelation that black men might be full human beings and thus be eligible for the priesthood. Women are never allowed into the priesthood -- they are spiritually inferior beings. If church elders tell someone what to do, they are expected to obey unquestioningly (at least traditionally).

Much of the book that is set in the present describes a pair of gruesome murders carried out by Ron and Dan Lafferty. That didn't interest me all that much, since there are wackos all over and I don't like to focus on some particular heinous crime unless it's a symbol of a bigger pattern. The Mormon traditions of violence and direct revelation may have made that crime more likely, but it did not strike me as a dramatic effect

But also in the present Krakauer maps out the sizable fundamentalist sects that continue to believe in plural marriage as a key component of the faith. It's not unreasonable, since only with the prospect of the LDS religion being forcibly dissolved by the US government did the leaders finally receive the revelation in 1890 that polygamy was wrong -- and they continued to carry on plural marriages secretly for many years afterwards. In the fundamentalist sects today, girls are told who they will marry, often at age 14. They are also told that if they refuse or disobey their husbands in any way, they are going straight to hell. Some seem content with this reality but naturally some do not. I find little to admire in the LDS, and find this form of the religion even more repugnant.

What did surprise me about the book is that there was not a single mention of how the other men feel who never get to have any wives at all. That is the inescapable result of the leaders taking multiple wives, but somehow it is never addressed at all. I would be interested in some statistics on just how many of the women end up in plural marriages, how many in monogamous marriages, and what percentage of men ever marry.

I have heard it suggested that worldwide, polygamous societies are associated with greater violence. An oversimplified view is that the large numbers of unmarried men lack the stabilizing influence of a wife and family.

The joys of virtual tourism

I didn't mind traveling as a child or young adult, but as I've gotten on into middle age, I have found traveling more and more tiresome. I don't like waiting in lines, I don't like fitting my 6'2" frame into airline seats, I don't like sleeping in strange beds, and I don't like eating strange food, which often gives me mild indigestion. I don't like getting carsick on buses, I don't like having to decide how much to tip, I don't like being jet-lagged or short on sleep, and I really dislike modern airport security.

A notable development of the past 20-odd years is the increasing availability of still pictures and videos of just about any place in the world, easily accessible by search engines. You can see any tourist destination in perfect lighting, including shots from places tourists are not allowed to go. There are no crowds. You can also find videos posted by ordinary people giving some indication of how they live and how they talk. You can see their food and their daily routines. Here's a 2-hour <walkdown the streets of Kolkata> . Care to see Machu Picchu or Mount Everest? High-quality video awaits, including aerial video.

I suppose there are a few things you don't get from images. Smells, and the taste of genuine local food. Perhaps an overall geographic gestalt of a place. You don't get to see how the locals react to you as an individual. But given my tastes, I will happily forgo those opportunities.

One easy way to reduce your carbon footprint is to take fewer tourist trips. It surely is a way to save money.

Part of our mindset in recent decades has been that travel is good. "I've always wanted to go to place X" is a common thought. But I wonder if the thought might be outdated. If you think about why you wanted to go to X, you might find that looking at video will serve most of the same function. You could spend the time you would be in transit reading a book on the history of the place, and you will understand it better than by visiting.

Obviously people's reaction to the annoyances of travel varies on a continuum all the way from my strong dislike through indifference to actually enjoying the challenges and minor inconveniences. Perhaps my position on the continuum fits me to have this revelation earlier than some others. Maybe the best form of tourism, more often than not, involves staying home.

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Addendum, 7/10/2019:

I forgot to add the large role in virtual tourism played by Google Maps and street view. I wrote of an in-person visit as a better way to get an overall geographic gestalt, but Google Maps probably allows an even better experience of this. You can zoom to street view in any particular location to see what things look like there. You can get a self-guided tour of the Palace of Versailles.

There is no patriarchy in the US

Feminism has been a very good thing, historically. US women have gained rights they deserved and were long denied. But at the center of what is called "movement feminism" today (as opposed from the simpler "equity feminism") is dismantling the patriarchy. In the US today, there is no patriarchy. There are some ways that women are treated badly that I would very much like to remedy, but they are not central defining aspects of our culture, and "patriarchy" is not a helpful concept. Nor do I take the opposite position that men are oppressed. It's a complicated picture, with each sex having advantages in some respects and disadvantages in others.

Past societies and many non-Western nations today had (and have) sufficiently rigid gender roles and discrimination against women that "patriarchy" seems an appropriate term. The Saudi Arabian women who need a male guardian at every stage of life and are unable to legally drive are living in a society with institutionalized male power. The requirement in many Islamic societies that women cover up seems profoundly unfair, as it puts on women the responsibility for helping men to control their own sexuality. In some places women who sleep with men who their brothers or fathers do not approve of are killed, and this is thought to be just. I find those aspects of these other societies appalling.

Compared to other times and places, there's no doubt that in the US today women are in a very good position. But that of course doesn't mean that there is not remaining injustice.

I argued in <this post> that the greater male tendency to violence is unfortunate but cannot be considered part of a system that oppresses women.

I'm about to list some ways that women have it better than men. I'm reluctant to do that, because it divides the world into "us" and "them". But "patriarchy" rests on the assumption that we are divided into "us" and "them" on account of gender and/or sex, so debunking it requires addressing it on its own terms.

Women are the majority of the electorate. No one harasses women or prevents them from voting on account of their sex. In a very important sense, they already have dominant political power. It is no accident that there are no longer any laws that discriminate against women, while it is only young men who must register for the draft.

All occupations are open to qualifying women. While the US Marines traditionally have stringent standards for strength and physical fitness that few women could meet, lower standards have been devised specifically for women.

Men who want jobs working with young children face serious discrimination. They get little sympathy, and even less in recent years as they are all assumed to be potential child molesters.

Aside from an innate male tendency towards violence, there are other natural differences between the sexes. Women live longer than men. Only women bear children. Some women find pregnancy, childbirth and nursing positive life experiences, ones that are not available to men. No woman is required to go through those things if she doesn't want to, but it is an option she can exercise. A single woman who really wants a child can almost always arrange to have one if she starts when she is young, while this option is closed to single men of modest means. Women have a decided advantage in child custody disputes -- as they should, if shared custody is impossible. But as a result a woman knows that with near certainty she will have her child in her life until he or she becomes an adult. A man is far less certain of that. It is certain that he will have a legal obligation to pay for the support of such a child.

A man who wants to find a friend to talk about his feelings with is likely to have far more trouble doing so than a woman. Male friends are unlikely to support his feelings that are traditionally more associated with women than men.

It is open season for anyone to make jokes at the expense of men and make fun of them. Similar jibes directed at women are no longer acceptable.

On the other side? When relevant adjustments are made, the pay gap is on the order of 7%. This is not fair, but not exactly evidence for major league oppression.

The main complaint is men putting women down (or keeping them down) in ways that are hard to quantify or legislate. Part of the problem is that the beliefs supporting that are also held by many women. Studies show that when asked to rate the quality of an academic paper with nothing changed but the sex of the author, men will rate the female-authored paper as less worthy -- but so will women.

Let's return to the crucial fact that women are the majority of the electorate and not in any way discouraged from voting. Why don't women vote for politicians and policies that will reduce bad behavior against them? Obviously, a great many women don't share the perspective and goals of movement feminism. It is suggested that these women are still under the sway of false beliefs and need education about how much they suffer. While I agree in most respects with that analysis for the long run, in the short run it is condescending. More white women voted for Donald Trump than Hillary Clinton. There could hardly be more persuasive evidence that a great many women at the very least do not rank gender equity issues (let alone dismantling the patriarchy) as very important if they voted in such numbers for the pussy-grabbing man over the feminist woman.

Here's how I see the situation: There are quite a few women along with quite a few men who have a vision of society that is not quite the thoroughly equal one that movement feminists envision. I doubt many would support actual pussy-grabbing, but there seems to be some tolerance for men being sexually assertive. There also may be some tolerance or even desire for men to be in positions of power. Perhaps the natural biological differences play into their thinking and account to some extent for why some differences seem acceptable. Instead of calling it "pro-patriarchy", let's call it "tolerance for some measure of inequality".

Let's frame the movement feminist position as "no tolerance for any vestige of inequality".

It seems that many men and women favor "some inequality", while many men and women favor "no inequality". Perhaps men are a bigger proportion of the first group than the second, but the differences are not dramatic enough to frame it as a men versus women issue. This is not patriarchy! Women and men who favor more equality are in the position of trying to win the hearts and minds of those women and men who accept or favor a more unequal situation.

Sometimes the notion of patriarchy is expanded to include capitalism, the theory being that if women's values dominated society, it would not include capitalism. I see no evidence of that. Women can be just as acquisitive and greedy as men, and many participate eagerly in today's capitalist system. So perhaps they are under the sway of patriarchal values? It's a big stretch with no evidence. I'm with Elizabeth Warren that capitalism is fundamentally the best economic system, and it needs to be fixed by increased regulation and progressive taxation, not replaced. Sometimes patriarchy is thought to subsume "competitiveness". There's some tendency to toss any aspect of society a feminist finds unpleasant into the "patriarchy" bin. It already had no merit when it asserted nothing but direct oppression of women, but with more added it becomes hopelessly vague and unhelpful to clear thought. It reminds me of the old Communist idea that "come the revolution, all problems will disappear".

In many respects, I'm among those who would like to convince the "some inequality" faction that they should tolerate less inequality. I would very much like to reduce male physical and sexual violence. Wolf whistles make me wince. But I would much rather address those issues directly on those terms rather than subsuming them under the fundamentally incorrect idea of "patriarchy".

I have a hunch that the concept is not just incorrect but unhelpful if your goal is to change the behavior of men. There's more promise in getting men to behave better with a message that is simply (for instance), "stop being so violent because it's ultimately bad for everyone." If you add, "We live in a patriarchy, you are part of an oppressor class, and you should stop oppressing women", I predict your results will be worse.

I understand that many US women feel oppressed on account of their sex. This post does not in any way diminish those real, lived experiences. But neither does personal experience qualify a person specially to diagnose the overall structure of the society we live in. Some men also sincerely feel oppressed on account of their sex. Other people who feel oppressed include the short, the scrawny, the fat, the unintelligent, believers in atheist communities, atheists in believer communities, and just about any ethnic minority. They don't get their own "-archy" designations.

What to do about bad male behavior

There's no question that many men behave badly. Many women, in particular, experience lots of the men they come in contact with as not treating them fairly. There is sexual harassment. When women show up in work environments that are primarily male, they often encounter a lot of hostility.

So, how can we improve this situation?

A strong message I think I hear from feminists is, "This is a men's problem. Men are the oppressor class, and it's not women's job to fix this nor could they as they lack power. It's up to men to get their house in order. Men need to hold men accountable. If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem."

I like to think of myself as one of those men who treats women with respect, and any transgressions I have been guilty of since I turned 18 are quite minor (not that I did anything terrible when I was younger). I hope and expect that the women who I have related to would agree.

Yet I also feel frustrated using the feminist analysis as a starting point because I certainly do not feel like I have any power to even start to make progress on this issue.

Some men will join anti-sexism groups where they examine their assumptions and seek to become less sexist. But my sense is that these men are overwhelmingly those who consistently treat women pretty well already. There's always room for improvement, but I don't see that refinements in giving no offense or hint of offense is part of the solution to changing the men who give rise to the more serious problems. Let's call them badly behaving males or BBMs.

My hunch is that only a small subset of men are in a position to connect with BBMs to even begin the process of change. They have to be people the BBMs respect or who share key values with them. Professional athletes might be one category. Others might be those who can fit into "bro culture" if they choose but also would like to see women treated better.

Gay men, intellectuals, nerds -- we don't have standing with those men to make any difference. Members of the anti-sexism groups who have decided that it is vital to always say "women and men" instead of "men and women" because the historically oppressed group should now appear in first place don't seem like good candidates. That certainly isn't the sort of observation likely to help when trying to connect with BBMs.

It's frustrating to be a dissenting minority in a class with an objectionable position (sometimes majority) that defines the group. How do we progressives feel if foreigners say, "You Americans elected Trump. How could you?! You're guilty. Fix it!" In the apartheid era I once met a South African white man who was an anti-apartheid activist. However, the Commonwealth of Nations at that time denied entry to South African whites as part of sanctions. His life was limited because of the class he belonged to (though he also understood why the policy was needed and individual exceptions impractical). It is similarly frustrating to be a decent male in a class defined by its BBMs.

I also think women cannot get off the hook so easily. What about the majority of white women who voted for Donald Trump? He is surely a BBM, and his election enables and encourages BBMs. And what about the mothers who tell their sons not to be sissies? The women who scoff at men who shy away from confrontations with other men, and the men who are weak and lose those confrontations?

This is one example of why I think the <intersectional approach> that emphasizes class membership is not helpful. If the women's team denigrates the men's team (including non-BBMs) while downplaying any shortcomings of their Trump-voting sisters, that's not slicing the world up in the right way. If men are forced to be part of the men's team, tarred by women with the BBM brush, they are likely to feel defensive. If they have suffered at the hands of BBMs themselves, they may feel doubly frustrated.

I don't know how to convince women who are BBM enablers to stop enabling them, but surely it is part of the task at hand; perhaps relevant men and women could both have a role. We could all support that small subset of men who can both earn the respect and trust of BBMs but would like to reduce bad behavior. If we assume that women dealing with BBMs rarely get good outcomes by confronting them directly, perhaps experience would also reveal a few opportunities for challenging the thinking of the BBMs "from the side" without confronting them directly.

Also, demonizing BBMs by calling them despicable sexist pigs is unlikely to help. They are mostly not evil people, but products of their circumstances and subculture, who have their own fears and complicated lives.

I'm afraid that this is not a recipe for instant or even rapid progress. But more simplistic approaches motivated by anger and frustration are even less likely to be helpful.

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Addendum, 7/7/2019

Addendum:

Psychologists speak of "figure" and "ground" -- what are you attending to in reality as opposed to what is just taken for granted. As I read again the post above, I see it might give the impression that BBMs themselves have no responsibility to change and it's up to everyone else. The "ground" in the post above is the reality that feminists of all stripes and their allies have been shouting at BBMs for a long time to behave better, and it has little effect. Part of the problem is that part of the BBM notion of masculinity is a strong resistance to letting women or lesser males tell you what to do. BBMs have a clear moral obligation* to treat women better. But a moral obligation is not a recipe for actual change. So the post focused on other actors. I'm less interested in moral righteousness than finding practical ways to actually improve society.

*No, it's not an <objective moral obligation> , but it fits my personal sense of right and wrong and I expect most of my readers will share it.

Put a date on everything -- or else!

I have a pet peeve: people putting out content online without a date on it.

It seems more and more articles show up on the web without a date. I think I understand why those who post choose to omit it. If something is old, people will tend to skip over it in search of something newer. With no date, something old will get more eyeballs, and they will stay around longer. Its shelf life improves.

But a great deal of the time, a date is highly relevant to understanding how relevant a result is. If I'm looking for an answer as to why my Android phone app is behaving bizarrely (which I am), it matters a great deal if an answer was offered two years ago or last week.To some extent, you can customize this with a search engine's date filter, but you shouldn't have to.

Consider <this article>, which I found in service of possible upcoming blog posts. It certainly looks like a journal article. Journal articles always have a year and a date on them. Where did they go here?

If you start reading this paper, you find rather quickly that the data was collected in 1992, but you don't know if it was published later that year or five years later. In any case, you shouldn't have to start reading a paper to find out when it was published. If I had to infer a date on an academic paper, I might scan the references and find the most recent year, and have a strong hunch it was published with a year or two of that.

As with anything involving a competitive marketplace, you can't expect anyone to unilaterally give up a competitive advantage. Therefore government action is required.

Anyone who posts without a date should be shot.

OK, not really.

There are problems with enforcing this. Assuming that something that is being revised and updated can list its latest revision date, you create an incentive for people to frequently make minor changes (perhaps under the control of an automatic script) to justify a more recent date. If we require a creation date, you create an incentive for people to paste the contents from an old document into a new document and then make a few minor revisions to that (perhaps using another script), and it's hard to prove it's not a new document.

So perhaps the only weapon we really have is shame for those who violate the spirit of the would-be law: Put a date on it!

Sex differences in physical aggression

One fairly influential school of thought today holds that there are no interesting innate psychological differences between men and women. This view is mistaken.

We're talking average differences here -- two bell curves overlapping to various degrees. Here are some curves for <the physical attribute of height>. You see the bell curves overlap quite a bit, but we feel that "men are generally taller than women" is a valid observation.

Human males are on average more physically aggressive and violent than females. I know of no convincing evidence of any other society in history where that was not true. It is a biological difference. It is not an excuse for bad male behavior, but it suggests a baseline against which to gauge progress and expectations.

In today's world, there are few places where such tendencies are adaptive. In the military or police, they serve to guard against those same aggressive tendencies in other men. They are also valued in sports competitions -- and it is worthy of a footnote that a fair number of women enjoy watching football, where male physical aggression is highly prized. But on the whole, aggressive and violent tendencies in men and boys have negative effects and society -- coastal liberal society, especially -- would like to reduce violent behavior by men.

Suppose we set out to transform society to cleanse men of their aggressive tendencies and establish new cultural norms so male aggression would not arise again. It would fail. In each generation we have to train boys and men to suppress and civilize those innate aggressive tendencies. Our society is set up with some such programs already, as in prohibitions on fighting in school, and instruction on how to deal with feelings of anger without violence.

We can do more, but I do not think we could ever reach a society where as many women as men are interested in becoming soldiers or police. Nor do I think we would ever reach a society where as many men as women were interested in becoming child care providers.

Some claim the US is a patriarchy (the subject of an upcoming blog post). One observation related to this is that some men control women by violence or the threat of violence against them -- something I and most right-thinking people strenuously oppose. But it is not evidence for a patriarchy.

If men banded together to inflict violence on women while never being violent with each other, that would be some evidence of a patriarchal social structure But in fact men are even more likely to be perpetrate violence against other men than against women. Male physical violence against women is a sort of side effect of men being more violent towards all people in comparison to women being less violent towards all people.

As such aggressive tendencies are innate, it does not support an "-archy" designation for our society. It would make no more sense than calling the US a "female-pregnancy" society, as that is part of our biology, not our society. Society does have some influence on how much male aggression is controlled, and modern US society has it better controlled than just about any other society in history. What's more, men beating women is a crime and prosecuted as such. There may be arguments about evidence, but if a video clearly showed a man seriously beating a woman, I don't know of any US jurisdiction where it would be dismissed under some version of male prerogative.

One quote I've seen recently is, "Men are afraid women will laugh at them. Women are afraid men will kill them." It's snarky and annoying, but worth considering further. We could add, "Men are afraid that other men will kill them", and "Women are afraid that other women will laugh at them." So we could more accurately distill the situation as, "The danger posed by men towards anyone includes a possibility of killing them. The danger posed by women towards anyone has killing so low in probability that emotional abuse is the more salient danger."

Steven Pinker, in "Better Angels of Our Nature", shows how societies have become much less violent over time. What that really means is that men in society have become much less violent over time, because men were doing almost all the violence -- and still are. No one ever said that there would be equality in how hard a person has to work to be civilized and behave well. On average, men have to work harder at it. We always will.

Could a claim of an innate male tendency to greater physical aggression be misused by those who want to justify bad male behavior? It could. They would be mistaken and we should set them straight by argument. But lying -- in this case denying the innate difference in aggression -- in support of any particular social goal eventually backfires.

There is one class of women who have perhaps more compassion for male misbehavior than others: mothers of boys. They know their boys were not indoctrinated in any obvious way to behave badly towards others. And yet, all too often, they do, much more than girls. Despite all their best efforts, such mothers often have to adjust their expectations of male children and they do so, instead of disowning them.

My observations have been about ordinary "cis" men and women, the overwhelming majority of the population. Trans, intersex, and non-binary people are valuable and important, but I do not know how to accurately place them in what I've written above.

Absolute versus relative well-being

Let's consider a key dimension that people differ on: wealth.

At any given level of wealth, people can compare themselves to richer people and feel dissatisfaction, or to poorer people and feel thankful.

People compare themselves to those who live nearby in the present much more than those who live far away or who lived long ago. Do American middle class people today appreciate that they are better off than the ordinary folks in the Third World? I doubt it's salient to them. The classic line for children of my generation encouraging them to clean their plates was, "Think of the starving children in India." But I do not believe it was notably successful at getting children to clean their plates or to feel fortunate, and it has been mentioned since then mainly as a joke. Americans mostly compare themselves to other Americans. I speculate that the relatively well off of the Third World are more thankful comparing themselves to those around them than dissatisfied that they are not so well off as those in the American middle class.

I suspect most people attend more to those richer than them rather than poorer. The advertising industry feeds off this and also reinforces it. Advertising is trying to get us to buy things, people who are richer buy more things, so buying more things will give us the appearance of being richer. Earning more money to buy those things would be making us in fact richer.

Evaluation relative to others living nearby is in line with what evolution might predict. We are geared to aspire to plausibly attainable improvement and to avoid dangers that have hurt people like us. If the band next door is catching more game than you are, it's well worth your while to study how they do it and try to duplicate it. They have less interest in studying you, unless you did something different that did not turn out well. Sacrifices to the gods that are too lavish might in fact leave your people hungry. In the environment we evolved in, there would have been limited awareness of those living long ago or far away, and limited relevance if they lived in a very different natural or social environment.

But if we step back and think things through, is relative comparison really a good idea? Is it perhaps more important to focus on what you have in absolute terms rather than how you compare to others?

One way of looking at our relative perspective is as the result of <cognitive biases>. The "framing effect" and "anchoring effect" come to mind. The basic idea is that people will evaluate a situation relative to the frame they perceive it in. A retailer sets a high list price for something, and then announces it is on sale. If the buyer accepts the retailer's list price as the frame, he will think he's getting a good deal compared to a retailer who simply sets the first one's sale price as their list price and doesn't have a sale. A discount for paying a bill in cash is acceptable, while a surcharge for paying by credit card is unpopular. Psychologists can confirm this in experiments by setting different frames for different people and comparing the results. People will feel better about paying a higher price if framed appropriately. Applying this to wealth, if due to some change in policies you get 10% richer but your neighbor gets 30% richer and you feel worse, we could call that the result of an irrational cognitive bias.

One simple way to get happier is to adopt as your frame of reference people who lived 200 years ago. You live longer, infant mortality is more like 1% than 40%, you have much better health, you have hot water and flush toilets, plenty of food and a wide variety year-round, clean streets and air, and a world of information and entertainment at your fingertips. By those absolute measures, today's working poor have it better than the nobility of two hundred years ago. But from a comparative viewpoint, the nobility of times gone by were content and today's working poor are not.

The absolute perspective can be used appropriately as a defense of capitalism -- even if the system creates vast wealth inequality, it is justified as the poor are so much better off too in absolute terms. Taken over the sweep of 200 years, I think this is accurate. Even Karl Marx recognized that capitalism created wealth and was an improvement on what came before. Still today, the prospect of getting very rich motivates people to create wealth. Without such incentives those creative people would not bother to work extremely hard and take the risks and create the wealth. However, it is also entirely compatible with 70% marginal income tax rates, 50% inheritance taxes, and 1% wealth taxes. Motivation of entrepreneurs doesn't require the prospect of keeping everything they earn, just a large portion of it. That (combined with consistent regulation to control externalities) is the best economic system we know of.

An absolute perspective suggests that there is no inherent benefit to making the rich poorer. Instead, it should emphasize what benefits we can get for ordinary people. Such benefits may require money. The only people with the money are the rich. But we should sympathize with them, as none of us likes to pay taxes -- the only justification is that we need the money to help out ordinary people.

Studies suggest that people's happiness depends on how they compare to others around them. It is unlikely we are going to change that in any major way. But I suggest it is due to cognitive biases, and a sensible and even preferable alternative when considering two futures is to prefer the one with better well-being in absolute rather than relative terms.

People might disagree. Even with cognitive biases controlled for, they might feel that relative wealth is what's important. You could ask them whether they would prefer the status quo to a future in which ordinary folks are 5% richer and the rich are 100% richer. Or one in which they are 5% poorer and the rich are 50% poorer. The answer would probably depend on exactly how the question is framed, requiring refinement over multiple experiments.

I am not at all suggesting that those choices (+5/+100 or -5/-50) are the actual alternatives available. I believe we can and should reduce wealth inequality and income inequality substantially, and the obvious mechanism is redistributive taxation and spending. Redistribution does not require a relative perspective. If you ask ordinary folks if they favor being 2% richer and the (far less numerous) rich being 20% poorer, they might well agree with that. The large majority of people are getting richer in absolute terms.

We might find that relative well-being is simply what we inherently value more than absolute well-being, not just the result of cognitive biases. Or we might find that different people have different values. Some people might find they prefer to adopt the absolute perspective.