Envy and amour-propre, from Port-Royal to the feed
Descartes went looking for certainty alone, in a heated room. Among other people, the thinking mind starts to compare, and comparison has a feeling of its own. Envy is zero-sum thinking you can feel, and about the thing it watches it is often right.
In November 1619 a young Frenchman serving with an army in Germany shut himself for a day in a room warmed by a stove, alone with his thoughts, and came out, he later said, with the beginnings of a method. Eighteen years later, in the Discourse on the Method, René Descartes followed it to the one thing it could not doubt, which was that he was doubting. Je pense, donc je suis. In the Latin he gave it later, cogito, ergo sum, it became philosophy’s most famous proof that a mind can stand on its own: a certainty reached alone, with no one watching.
The certainty in that room did not survive company. Blaise Pascal, no admirer of Descartes, left among his papers a note about another creature entirely. We are not content, he wrote, with the life we have in ourselves and in our own being; we want to live an imaginary life in the minds of others, and to that end we labour to appear. Rousseau, closing his Discourse on Inequality in 1755, finished the thought. The savage lives within himself. Social man, always outside himself, knows how to live only in the opinion of others, and draws the very feeling of his own existence, so to speak, from their judgment alone.
Put the thinking self among others and the first thing it thinks about is where it stands. Descartes’s sentence acquires a sequel: I think, therefore I compare, and I compare, therefore I envy. The Latin invidia comes from invidere, to look upon, and especially to look upon with ill will. Envy is the passion of the eye, and it is what zero-sum thinking feels like from the inside. Thought is not scarce; I can think without taking anything from you. Standing is a ranking. To be esteemed above someone is to have someone beneath you, and a ranking has exactly as many first places as it ever had. When a neighbour rises in it, I fall, whether or not he has taken a thing from me, and envy is the feeling that knows it first.
For two and a half centuries, economists have been correcting an arithmetic error that many people never made. The villager who suspects that his neighbour’s good fortune is his loss, the voter who hears that other people’s children are thriving and feels his own prospects shrink, the survey respondent whom psychologists diagnose with zero-sum bias: many of them are not bad at sums. They are counting the thing they care about, and it does not grow. Their mistake lies elsewhere, in the name they give it. They say wages, or schools, or jobs, which can grow, when what they mean is standing, which cannot. The moralists called the passion that keeps that second ledger amour-propre, and the feeling it produces when the ledger moves the wrong way is envy. Both were put to work building the consumer economy. The feed now keeps their score. Envy has been condemned for two thousand years as a sin and corrected for two hundred and fifty as a miscalculation. A sin it may be. A miscalculation it often is not, and for as long as we keep telling it that it cannot count, we will keep losing the argument with it.
I The Ledger
Polycrates, tyrant of Samos, had the kind of luck that frightens friends. Herodotus says that Amasis, king of Egypt, watched the run of victories from across the sea and wrote to him. It was pleasant, the letter said, to hear that a friend was faring well, “yet to me thy great good fortune is not pleasing, since I know that the Divinity is jealous.” Herodotus’s word is phthoneron: envious. Find the thing you would most grieve to lose, Amasis advised, and throw it where it can never come back. Polycrates rowed out and dropped an emerald signet into the sea in sight of his crew. Five or six days later a fisherman brought the palace a fish too fine to take to market, and the servants found the ring inside it. Amasis broke off the friendship, certain that a man who finds even what he throws away will come to a bad end. Polycrates did. A Persian governor lured him to the mainland, had him killed, and crucified his body.
The gods in this story keep a ledger, and what they enter in it is not wrongdoing but excess, as though good fortune were drawn from a common stock and Polycrates had taken more than his share. It is easy to call that superstition. But notice who does the reading. The gods write no letters; a king across the water does, after watching. The envy is human first and divine by attribution, and the Greeks knew exactly where its arithmetic holds. When Thucydides set aside the grievances the cities aired for what he thought the truest cause of the war between Athens and Sparta, he named no theft at all: “The growth of the power of Athens, and the alarm which this inspired in Lacedaemon, made war inevitable.” Athens had taken nothing from Sparta. It had grown. In a contest of position, the other side’s growth is your loss whether or not a single ship changes hands.
Two thousand years later Thomas Hobbes reduced the contest to a footrace. In The Elements of Law, which circulated in manuscript in 1640, he compared the life of man to a race and added a stipulation that changes everything: “This race we must suppose to have no other goal, nor other garland, but being foremost.” A race run only to be first cannot be enlarged. Add runners and you add losers. Hobbes went on to read the whole catalogue of the passions, from glory to despair, off the runners’ places on that course, which is to say he described a creature that feels only by comparison. He did not give it a name. The French already had one.
II The Hated Self
The passion Hobbes was timing had been under indictment for twelve centuries. Augustine wrote in The City of God that two loves had made two cities, “the earthly by the love of self, even to the contempt of God; the heavenly by the love of God, even to the contempt of self.” In seventeenth-century France his sternest heirs, the Jansenists gathered around the convent of Port-Royal, gave the earthly love its sharpest name. Amour-propre is usually translated as self-love, or pride, and both halves of the gloss mislead. It is not the wish to live, and not quite the wish to be admired. It is the wish to be preferred.
Pascal put its logic in a sentence. The self, he wrote, is unjust because it makes itself the centre of everything, and a nuisance to others because it would enslave them, car chaque moi est l’ennemi et voudrait être le tyran de tous les autres: for each self is the enemy of all the others, and would be their tyrant. That is a zero-sum game stated as theology. Every self wants the one position that only one can hold. La Rochefoucauld, who shared the Jansenists’ low opinion of human motives, set near the head of his Maxims the observation that amour-propre is the greatest of all flatterers, and twenty-five maxims later found its shyest child. People will often boast, he wrote, of even their most criminal passions, but envy is a timid and shameful passion that no one ever dares to avow.
Then Pierre Nicole, the most practical of the Port-Royal moralists, noticed something that would move the subject from sin to economics. In an essay of the 1670s on charity and amour-propre, he argued that self-love, if only it were enlightened, imitated charity almost perfectly. It is, in effect, courteous because it wants to be liked, honest because it wants to be trusted, obliging because it wants to be owed. To rid the world of its grosser disorders, he concluded, one would need, failing charity, only to give everyone an amour-propre clear-sighted enough to discern its real interests. Coming from Port-Royal, that was not praise. A society could run smoothly with no love in it at all, and its members would mistake the machinery for virtue.
Bernard Mandeville, a Dutch physician practising in London who had read the French moralists closely, took the warning as a prospectus. His verse fable of a hive that thrives on vice and collapses into honest poverty grew, in 1714, into The Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits. The poem had already given envy a job: “Envy it self, and Vanity / Were Ministers of Industry.” Pride, he wrote in his commentary, is the faculty by which every mortal rates himself above what any impartial judge could allow, and “We are possess’d of no other Quality so beneficial to Society, and so necessary to render it wealthy and flourishing as this, yet it is that which is most generally detested.” In a second volume, in 1729, he split the self in two: a self-love that wants to survive, and a self-liking that, roughly, values itself above its worth and looks to others to confirm the estimate. Rousseau would draw the same line a quarter of a century later, and he had read Mandeville well enough to name him in the Discourse. The passion had been diagnosed by priests. Now a doctor had written the prescription.
III Looked At
Rousseau’s contribution was to give the passion a birthday. In the Discourse on Inequality, people who had lived scattered start to gather in front of their huts, or around a large tree, to sing and dance. Then comes the sentence: Chacun commença à regarder les autres et à vouloir être regardé soi-même, et l’estime publique eut un prix. Each began to look at the others and to want to be looked at himself, and public esteem had a price. Whoever sang or danced best, the handsomest, the strongest, the most adroit or the most eloquent, became the most regarded. That, Rousseau says, was the first step toward inequality, and at the same moment toward vice. From these first preferences, he went on, were born vanity and contempt on one side, and shame and envy on the other. Envy is not a late corruption of social life. In Rousseau’s account it is born with the audience.
In a note to the same Discourse he named the passion behind all four. Amour de soi, love of oneself, is a natural feeling that leads every animal to watch over its own preservation. Amour-propre is “only a relative feeling, artificial, and born in society,” which leads each person to make more of himself than of anyone else, inspires all the harm people do one another, and is also, he added, the true source of honour. Seven years later, in Emile, he did the arithmetic. Amour de soi, which looks only to ourselves, is content when our real needs are met. Amour-propre, which compares, is never content and never could be, because in preferring us to others it also demands that others prefer us to themselves, ce qui est impossible: which is impossible.
Impossible is an accountant’s word, not a moralist’s. Everyone cannot be preferred by everyone. The first love wants bread, and bread can be multiplied. The second wants to be first, and first cannot. Rousseau had written down the difference between a pie and a prize, and his language had already done it in a single word. In French, prix is both the price and the prize.
Adam Smith read the Discourse within a year. In 1756 he wrote a long letter to a short-lived Edinburgh review and translated three passages himself. Three years later, in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, he asked what all the toil and bustle of the world is for, the pursuit of wealth and power and pre-eminence, and answered without flinching: “To be observed, to be attended to, to be taken notice of with sympathy, complacency, and approbation, are all the advantages which we can propose to derive from it. It is the vanity, not the ease, or the pleasure, which interests us.” Whether Rousseau taught him that, scholars disagree. The record shows only that Smith had read and translated the Discourse first.
Seventeen years later the same man wrote the book that founded economics, and it is about the ease.
IV The Wrong Correction
The Wealth of Nations, two hundred and fifty years old this year, was aimed at a ledger. In 1669 Jean-Baptiste Colbert, who ran the finances of Louis XIV, reckoned that the whole seaborne commerce of Europe was carried in twenty thousand ships: fifteen or sixteen thousand Dutch, three or four thousand English, five or six hundred French. The number could not grow, he reasoned, so France could add ships only by taking them from the Dutch. A year or so later he told the king the same of money: one quantity of silver circulated in Europe, so the kingdom could gain only what its neighbours lost. In a Europe whose economy barely grew from one generation to the next, that arithmetic was less absurd than it now sounds. It was Amasis’s ledger with a ministry attached.
David Hume answered in 1758, praying as a British subject, in the middle of a war with France, “for the flourishing commerce of Germany, Spain, Italy, and even France itself.” Smith made the answer a system. Under the old maxims, he wrote, each nation “has been made to look with an invidious eye upon the prosperity of all the nations with which it trades, and to consider their gain as its own loss.” Invidious is envy’s adjective, from the same invidere: the eye again. Ships could be built. Silver was not wealth. The pie could grow, and over the next two centuries it grew beyond anything Colbert could have counted.
The victory was real, and some of what still looks like zero-sum thinking is Colbert’s error in modern dress: the belief that a country has a fixed number of jobs, so that every immigrant or every import takes one. Sahil Chinoy and his colleagues find that Americans who see the world as zero-sum want more restrictive immigration, and for that belief the cure really is a lecture on growth. What is left is the residue, the part of the belief the lecture never reaches. Having proved that the pie grows, the main line of economics spent the next two and a half centuries correcting people who acted as if it didn’t, and it seldom asked whether they had been counting pie at all. The exceptions, Veblen, Hirsch and Easterlin among them, saw it; Smith had seen it in 1759.
Sara Solnick and David Hemenway put the question to a vote. Assuming the same prices, they asked 257 people at one school of public health whether they would rather earn $50,000 while others earned $25,000, or $100,000 while others earned $200,000. About half chose the smaller salary. These were not peasants with closed-village minds. They work and study in public health, and half of them would give up fifty thousand dollars a year for a better place in line. The economist Fred Hirsch had already named such things positional goods, valued for being had by fewer than want them, and the image usually attached to them is a crowd in which everyone stands on tiptoe and no one sees better.
The anthropologist George Foster found the same accounting in Tzintzuntzan, a village on Lake Pátzcuaro in Michoacán. There, and in communities like it, sudden prosperity was explained by tales of buried treasure. Wealth was not made; it was found, or it was taken. Land, friendship and even health were held to exist in fixed amounts, and Foster called this, in 1965, the image of limited good. In the papers that introduced it he also wrote a sentence that the literature descended from him rarely repeats. The peasant who sees his world this way, he said, “is usually very near the truth.” Sixty years later, economists who find the same belief in rich countries call its persistence, in Nathan Nunn’s phrase, “cultural mismatch”: a habit of mind built for a closed village, carried into an economy that is not one.
The diagnosis has it backwards. The village never went away. A school with a fixed number of places is Tzintzuntzan. So is an office with one corner, a list with one top line, a wedding with one bride. The economy around the village grows; the ranking inside it does not, and the ranking is where people live. What the economists call a mismatch is a match: an accurate mind applied to the one good whose arithmetic has not changed since the dancing began under Rousseau’s tree.
V Two Sentences
If the arithmetic is right, something else must be wrong, and the quickest way to find it is to watch yourself. Read these two sentences, and notice which one you find yourself agreeing with.
The easier black students find it to get into college, the harder it gets for white students.
The easier white students find it to get into college, the harder it gets for black students.
They paraphrase a matched pair of statements that the psychologists Shai Davidai and Martino Ongis put to American respondents, recruited online in samples of two or three hundred, in a paper published in Science Advances in 2019. Each respondent saw one version, never both. Agreement with the first rose with conservatism; agreement with the second rose with liberalism. Study after study in the paper found the same crossing. Conservatives saw a fixed pie when a gain challenged the existing order, and liberals saw one when a gain upheld it.
At a selective college with a fixed class, everything else equal, each sentence is arithmetic. Across American higher education as a whole, neither is. No respondent was caught contradicting himself, since nobody saw both versions: the contradiction runs between people, sorted by politics. The only person who has now read both sentences is you.
A British experiment shows where the mistake may live. In the last week of June 2024, a few days before a general election, the polling company YouGov showed some of its panellists one of two short paragraphs. Those told that ethnic minorities were outperforming White British people at school, Indians and Pakistanis especially, became more likely to say that White British people where they lived had few chances to find work or earn a decent wage: a third more likely, from a low base. Those told instead that Black Caribbean and Pakistani workers were more often unemployed, even with the same qualifications, became less likely to say that White British people lacked the chance of a good education. The sharpest movement was elsewhere. Asked to rank four men by how likely each was to be turned down for a job he was qualified for, the panellists who had read about minority success moved the White British man up the list. In this week’s Science, Imran Rasul, who ran the study with Lucinda Platt and Pratyush Tiwari, reports that about one respondent in five moved in this seesaw fashion in each direction, and that those moved by the paragraph about disadvantage were less supportive of policies for the poor.
Nobody’s wages were changed by a paragraph about other people’s schooling. One pupil’s exam results are not drawn from the same stock as a neighbour’s pay, so taken literally, the shift in the answer had no warrant. The authors call the result consistent with zero-sum thinking, not proof of it, and the plainest reading is that some panellists believe jobs are a fixed pool, the error Colbert made about ships. The hiring question is the strongest evidence for that reading: being turned down for a job is about as material as a loss gets. It is also, exactly, a question about how one’s group is ranked by the people who choose, and a ranking is zero-sum by construction. The survey cannot separate the two readings. Read the second way, what the paragraph threatened was a group’s place in the national story of who is doing well. Place really is a fixed sum, and the passion that registered the threat reached for the nearest respectable good to name it and came back with wages. That is amour-propre speaking in the vocabulary of amour de soi, a wound to standing reported as a worry about bread. On this reading the panellists counted correctly. They mislabelled the column.
That is why the belief has no fixed politics. In the United States, Chinoy’s zero-sum thinkers wanted more redistribution as well as less immigration; in Britain, prompted one way, the same belief went with less support for the poor. The belief has two empty slots, a winner and a loser, and the policy follows whomever a story places in each. And because the thing being counted is standing, the arithmetic is picked up when someone else’s gain threatens one’s place and set down when the gain is one’s own. That selectivity, not the arithmetic, is the fallacy. It is also the part a reader cannot see in himself. La Rochefoucauld called envy the passion no one dares avow; it hides first, one suspects, from the one who feels it.
VI The Penalty of Leadership
A passion that can never be satisfied is a merchant’s dream, and America was where the merchants found it wide awake. Alexis de Tocqueville saw why. Aristocracy had at least fixed the ranks; equality unfixed them and entered every citizen in Hobbes’s race. Americans, he wrote in 1840, have swept away the privileges that stood in their way, “but they have opened the door to universal competition; the barrier has changed its shape rather than its position.” Where everyone is nearly equal, he observed, the smallest difference wounds, so the desire for equality grows more insatiable the more of it there is. He found the freest and most enlightened men, placed in the happiest circumstances the world affords, forever brooding over advantages they did not possess, and he named the mood: “that strange melancholy which often haunts the inhabitants of democratic countries in the midst of their abundance.”
Sixty years later Thorstein Veblen supplied the economics. Once property becomes the basis of esteem, he argued in The Theory of the Leisure Class, accumulation is “substantially a race for reputability on the basis of an invidious comparison”: Hobbes’s race and Smith’s invidious eye in a single clause. And therefore, he went on, no general increase in a community’s wealth, however fairly shared, could come near satisfying it. Veblen had written out Mandeville’s wager with the bill attached. Amour-propre will grow the pie without limit. It will never be fed by it.
What followed was an industry built on the wager. In 1913 the cartoonist Arthur “Pop” Momand, who said that he and his wife had lived far beyond their means in Cedarhurst, Long Island, trying to keep pace with the well-to-do, began a newspaper strip called Keeping Up with the Joneses. For twenty-five years the McGinis family strained to match the neighbours, and in all that time the Joneses were never shown. They did not need to be. Pascal had already said where they lived: in the imaginary life we lead in the minds of others.
On January 2, 1915, Cadillac took a page in The Saturday Evening Post for an advertisement that never described the car. Under the headline “The Penalty of Leadership,” the copywriter Theodore MacManus explained that whoever is first in any field lives in a merciless public glare, and that “whether the leadership be vested in a man or in a manufactured product, emulation and envy are ever at work.” The masterpiece draws slander; the commonplace is left alone. It is Amasis’s letter rewritten as a boast. The envy that Polycrates paid a ring to escape had become the proof of purchase.
A decade later Listerine introduced the nation to Edna, “often a bridesmaid but never a bride,” whose birthdays crept toward what the copy called “that tragic thirty-mark.” Her trouble was halitosis, an obscure medical term the company had found and made famous, and the horror of it was that no one would tell her. Nothing in the advertisement is about hygiene. It sells the fear of being looked at and found wanting, and a remedy for a ranking. There is one bride at a wedding, and the bottle promised it could be you.
The pie did grow. In 1974 Richard Easterlin reported that from 1946 to 1970, as American incomes rose, Americans did not grow systematically happier by their own account, and he suggested relative status as the reason; economists with more data have argued since about how flat that line really is, which is at bottom a dispute about how much of income is rank. By the 1990s, Juliet Schor found, Americans had stopped measuring themselves against their neighbours and begun measuring themselves against richer strangers, the people on television among them. The Joneses had moved into the living room.
Smith had described the engine in 1759, in the same book as the vanity. The pleasures of wealth and greatness, he wrote, strike the imagination as something grand and beautiful, worth all the toil and anxiety we bestow on them, and it is well that nature imposes on us in this way: “It is this deception which rouses and keeps in continual motion the industry of mankind.” Mandeville’s verse, which had made envy a minister of industry, also supplied the motto: “Content, the Bane of Industry.” Rousseau’s amour de soi is the love that can be content. Commerce needed the other one. The genius of the century that followed was to sell a prize in the packaging of a pie: to offer things that can be made without limit as the cure for a want that only someone else’s loss can satisfy. Every Cadillac sold made the next one a little less like leadership. The machine ran on its own failure, and it ran beautifully.
VII The Scoreboard
Television gave amour-propre a larger village. The feed gave it a scoreboard. In 1971 Herbert Simon observed that the more information there is, the scarcer the attention it consumes. Colbert was wrong that his twenty thousand ships could not multiply, but every day has 1,440 minutes, and no invention will add a 1,441st. Attention is the one ledger Colbert would recognize, and Rousseau’s tree is its native ground. Whoever sings best is most regarded; the difference now is that the regard is counted, displayed beneath the song, and ranked. Envy no longer has to guess.
In 2019 Instagram began hiding like counts from some users, starting in Canada, to see whether it would ease the pressure of posting. Two years later it made hiding optional. Some people, the company said, had found the change a relief; others still wanted the numbers, to keep track of what was popular. The score stayed. Nothing in the history of amour-propre would have predicted otherwise.
Feeds are ranked by what holds attention, and the record shows what holds it. In 2021 Steve Rathje, Jay Van Bavel and Sander van der Linden examined some 2.7 million posts from American news outlets and members of Congress on Facebook and Twitter. Posts about the political other side were shared about twice as often as posts about one’s own, and each additional word referring to that other side raised the odds of a share by about two-thirds, on the left and the right alike. The data are correlational, and the authors say so. When academics working with Meta moved tens of thousands of consenting users to a plain chronological feed for three months of the 2020 American campaign, their time on the platforms fell and their politics did not measurably change. A later critique questioned the study’s timing, and the authors replied. The feed may not plant the passion. It waters the one already growing.
What has changed since is who writes the sentences. In a preregistered experiment published in Nature Human Behaviour in 2025, Francesco Salvi and his colleagues had people debate either another person or GPT-4. Given a few facts about its opponent, the model was the more persuasive debater in about two-thirds of the matched comparisons. The British experiment needed one short paragraph to move a fifth of its panel. Paragraphs like it can now be written afresh for each reader, in that reader’s terms, at no cost, with the two empty slots filled by whatever names the moment requires. Whether that makes zero-sum stories more potent is the obvious experiment, and it does not appear to have been run.
VIII Loved and Lovely
Is everything the self wants a fixed sum, then? Is love? It depends on which love.
To be loved, in amour-propre’s sense, is to be preferred, and preference is a ranking. Anyone who has asked whether he is loved more than someone else has done the arithmetic, and Rousseau’s verdict on the demand still stands: made by everyone of everyone, it is impossible. That love is zero-sum, and no amount of it has ever been enough. Love as attention is bounded too. A parent has the same 1,440 minutes as everyone else, and the child who says you always pick her is counting something real. But love as care, wishing someone well and attending to their good rather than to one’s place in their eyes, is the one good in the whole ledger that grows by being spent. A second child does not halve it. The parent who says I love you both the same and the child who says you always pick her are both telling the truth, about two different goods. Nicole thought enlightened self-love could imitate charity almost perfectly. Paul had already supplied the test that tells them apart: charity, in the King James wording, envieth not.
Smith, in the same book that confessed the vanity, saw the difference too. “Man naturally desires,” he wrote, “not only to be loved, but to be lovely; or to be that thing which is the natural and proper object of love.” To want to be loved is to want a prize. To want to be lovely is to want to be a certain kind of person whether or not anyone is keeping score, and that want takes nothing from anyone. It is as close as the moral tradition comes to an exit from the race: not to stop running, but to change what one runs for.
The other exit is to change the ladder. Anca Balietti and Diego Marino Fages primed some British adults to see life as zero-sum and found that they gave less to an international anti-poverty charity. Then they told some of them where they stood in the world’s income distribution, where a British income sits high, and the drop in giving was offset. By the authors’ account, the prime moved stated opinions only modestly; it was the giving that moved. Nothing about the world had changed, only the comparison. Foster’s villagers knew the trick. Two kinds of good fortune drew no suspicion in Tzintzuntzan: a lottery win, because luck takes from no one, and the dollars men earned as braceros in American fields, because that money came from beyond the edge of the village and subtracted from no one in sight. Amour-propre cannot be argued out of its arithmetic, because the arithmetic is correct. It can be shown a larger room.
The people we accuse of zero-sum thinking are, much of the time, doing correct sums on the thing they care about, which is their place. Telling them the pie is growing is true and, for that part of the belief, beside the point; it has been true for two hundred and fifty years and has persuaded almost no one, because almost no one was counting pie. Their errors are the name they give the good and the convenience with which they reach for its arithmetic only when someone else gains. An economy that sells prizes in the packaging of pies, and a feed that keeps the score, both profit from those errors. Balietti and Marino Fages blunted one of them without a lecture on growth. They changed the comparison, and the money moved. Pascal’s imaginary life in the minds of others was not abolished by that; it was given a larger room, and for the length of a survey it behaved.
Descartes went looking for his certainty alone, in a room no one else could see into. A mind can think alone; it cannot envy alone. Envy needs a window, and Polycrates lived in full view. He threw his ring into the sea on a friend’s advice, to pay the gods what his luck was said to owe them. But the gods had not written the letter; a king watching from across the water had. The account was kept in eyes, not in rings, and things cannot pay it. The fish brought it back.
⁂
Sources: René Descartes, Discours de la méthode (1637), parts II and IV, and Principia philosophiae (1644), I.7; Blaise Pascal, Pensées, Brunschvicg 147 and 455; Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes (1755), including its note on amour-propre and its closing pages, and Émile (1762), book IV; the English of Pascal and Rousseau ours. Herodotus, Histories III.39–43 and 125, translated by G. C. Macaulay (1890), at Sacred Texts; Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 1.23, translated by Richard Crawley (1874); Thomas Hobbes, The Elements of Law (1640), I.9.21, printed as Human Nature IX.21 in Molesworth’s English Works, vol. IV. Augustine, The City of God XIV.28, translated by Marcus Dods (1871); François de La Rochefoucauld, Maximes (1678), nos. 2 and 27; Pierre Nicole, “De la charité et de l’amour-propre,” Essais de morale, vol. III (1675); Bernard Mandeville, “The Grumbling Hive” (1705) and The Fable of the Bees (1714), Remark M, and The Fable of the Bees, Part II (1729), in F. B. Kaye’s edition (1924); on Mandeville and Nicole, Mikko Tolonen, Self-love and Self-liking in the Moral and Political Philosophy of Bernard Mandeville and David Hume, doctoral dissertation, University of Helsinki (2010). 1 Corinthians 13:4, King James Version (1611). Adam Smith, his letter to the authors of the Edinburgh Review (1756), in Essays on Philosophical Subjects, 250–54, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), I.iii.2.1, III.2.1 and IV.1.10, and The Wealth of Nations (1776), IV.iii.c.9. Colbert’s count of Europe’s ships as given by Ernest Lavisse, Histoire de France, vol. VII, at Méditerranée antique, and his memorandum to the king of about 1670, in Pierre Clément’s edition of his letters and memoranda, vol. VII; David Hume, “Of the Jealousy of Trade” (1758 edition). Fred Hirsch, Social Limits to Growth (1976); Sara Solnick and David Hemenway’s survey as reported in Harvard Magazine, May–June 1996, and published in the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization (1998); George M. Foster, “Treasure Tales, and the Image of the Static Economy in a Mexican Peasant Community,” Journal of American Folklore (1964), and “Peasant Society and the Image of Limited Good,” American Anthropologist 67 (1965), 297, 306–9. Shai Davidai and Martino Ongis, Science Advances (2019), whose items the two sentences in Section V paraphrase; Lucinda Platt, Imran Rasul and Pratyush Tiwari, “Majority Perceptions of Minority Groups: Economic Inequalities, Their Causes, and Policy Solutions,” CEPR Discussion Paper 20106 (2025), on a YouGov survey of June 2024, UCL copy, and their October 2026 working paper, “Revealing Zero-sum Thinking in the United Kingdom”; Imran Rasul, “Zero-sum mindsets and economic policy preferences,” Science, November 5, 2026; Sahil Chinoy, Nathan Nunn, Sandra Sequeira and Stefanie Stantcheva, “Zero-Sum Thinking and the Roots of US Political Differences,” American Economic Review 116, no. 3 (2026), which takes the phrase “cultural mismatch” from Nunn (2021). Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. II (1840), part II, chapter 13, translated by Henry Reeve, at Indiana University; Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), chapter 2; on Momand and the Joneses, Barry Popik, citing the New York Times, February 15, 1998; “The Penalty of Leadership,” The Saturday Evening Post, January 2, 1915, as recounted by the Post (2021); Listerine’s 1925 advertisement as reproduced by Cecil Munsey, Bottles and Extras, May–June 2007; Richard Easterlin, “Does Economic Growth Improve the Human Lot? Some Empirical Evidence” (1974); Juliet Schor, The Overspent American (1998). Herbert Simon, “Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World”, in Computers, Communications, and the Public Interest (1971); on Instagram’s like counts, TechCrunch, April 14, 2021; Steve Rathje, Jay Van Bavel and Sander van der Linden, PNAS (2021); Andrew Guess and colleagues, Science (2023), with the eLetter by Chhandak Bagchi and colleagues in Science (2024; preprint) and the authors’ reply; Francesco Salvi and colleagues, Nature Human Behaviour (2025); Anca Balietti and Diego Marino Fages, “Zero-Sum Views Reduce Support for Redistribution Across Borders,” University of Heidelberg working paper 767 (2025). Drafted with Claude Opus 5.5; literary and copy editing by Claude Sonnet 5.5; cold read by Claude Fable 5.1, as outside literary editor. All images generated by Gemini Argon.
