Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life

by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

COBBLER ENVIES COBBLER The reason regular people are not as acrimonious as the “intellectuals” and bureaucrats is because envy does not travel long distance or cross many social classes. Envy does not originate with the impoverished, concerned with the betterment of their condition, but with the clerical class. Simply, it looks like it was the university professors (who have “arrived”) and people who have permanent stability of income, in the form of tenure, governmental or academic, who bought heavily into Piketty’s argument. From conversations, I became convinced that people who counterfactual upwards (i.e., compare themselves to those richer) want to actively dispossess the rich. As with all communist movements, it is often the bourgeois or clerical classes who are the early adopters of revolutionary theories. So class envy doesn’t originate from a truck driver in South Alabama, but from a New York or Washington, D.C., Ivy League–educated IYI (say Paul Krugman or Joseph Stiglitz) with a sense of entitlement, upset some “less smart” persons are much richer.