"Why would people pay to hurt others without any benefit to themselves? Is it not the height of irrationality for a person to harm himself just so he can harm another more? Zizzo and Oswald believe the desire to burn other people’s cash "appears to be strong evidence for the existence of some kind of envy or concern for fairness."

Now, in their capitalist society, supply and demand, free market, it's more important to have more money than your "opponent" in a proportion than it is to have just more in quantity.

If your opponent has $5 million, and you have $6 million you are worse off than if your "opponent" has $2.5 million and you have $5 million.
That puts you in a much better competitive position.

And, it takes only so much to live. Not much, really. After that it's all excess, ego gratification.

There's more ego gratification in having twice what your opponent has than in have a bit more, but less relatively.

Remember college? Everyone was poor, and everyone was happy. Or some third-world countries? Everyone is in the same boat, because no one had anything. Villages, tribes, people in the same communities can get along very well, happily, because there isn't much of a difference between what each of them has, relatively.

Then egos come along. What is important is having more than the next guy relatively, not absolutely. Having twice as much rather than 25% more is the issue.

What's fascinating is that the author passed this up, and chose to attribute the behavior to envy.

Envy is a big deal to the young. Read biographies. Every one, every single one I've read written by an older person says that what was important was the relationships, friendships, people.

I think people tend to grow out of the envy thing. It's a function of materialism, of excess, of wanting rather than needing. And, being that competitive, that worried about the other guy gets old, tiring, unproductive.

Arf