EDITOR’S
NOTE Dear Readers:
With much feeling I write these words to introduce a topic that is of great importance for our cultures from developing countries, especially Latin America: Envy. I found this interesting article, from which I publish an excerpt, and written by Lipton Matthews, deals with the issue of envy as a negative status in progress within our cultures.
Marvin Ramirez by Lipton Matthews shared from Mises Wire Economists think that culture is a fuzzy concept. However, as research shows, culture allows us to know the growth potential of a country. A cultural trait worth studying for its propensity to stunt development is envy. Envy is described as a feeling of resentment motivated by the achievements of other people.
The manifestation of this emotion can be destructive or progressive. Getting an education, starting a business, or investing are examples of constructive envy.
The desire to outperform the rival can serve as an incentive to engage in productive activities. Specifically, studies postulate that individuals work longer hours to compensate for the drop in income relative to other groups. However, many have argued that constructive envy is more pervasive in developed countries, while fear of destructive envy is ubiquitous in the developing world.
This is because countries with weak institutions — that is, institutions that do not protect private property — are less likely to get rich; therefore, the dearth of success makes achievement pretentious. Consequently, competent individuals rationally avoid entrepreneurial initiatives to thwart the plans of the envious. Unsurprisingly, envy avoidance behavior imposes a limitation on productivity, thus restricting the growth of material prosperity.
In anthropological studies, scholars postulate that the intention to prevent the effects of destructive envy has resulted in the deliberate underproduction of crops. For people in an envious environment, the benefits of performance outweigh the costs of destructive envy. In Envy and Agricultural Innovation: An Experimental Case Study from Ethiopia, Bereket Kebede and Daniel John Zizzo illustrate that destructive envy is a deterrent to the adoption of agricultural innovations.
The authors report that, in one of the study towns, a man burned down his brother’s farm when he was growing a more lucrative cereal. Destructive envy therefore carries a deadweight cost, since instead of being productive the envious are engaged in undermining the efforts of their neighbors. – (From the editor: If you follow us on www.elreporteroSF.com, we will publish the full article in about a week.)
