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Frankfurt writes, “From the point of view of morality, it is not important everyone should have the same. What is morally important is that each should have enough.”6
The confusion of inequality with poverty comes straight out of the lump fallacy—the mindset in which wealth is a finite resource, like an antelope carcass, which has to be divvied up in zero-sum fashion, so that if some people end up with more, others must have less.
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
“All of us who prize greater economic equality would do well to remember that with the rarest of exceptions it was only ever brought forth in sorrow. Be careful what you wish for.”28
The great virtue of science is that a true hypothesis will, in the long run, withstand attempts to falsify it. Anthropogenic climate change is the most vigorously challenged scientific hypothesis in history.
