Excellent analysis, but I think you've missed one key point, relative income effect. It isn't just a willingness to burn things down in the face of stagnating w

Excellent analysis, but I think you've missed one key point, relative income effect. It isn't just a willingness to burn things down in the face of stagnating wages in order to increase wages at the bottom, but is also latent knowledge that by burning things down that the wealthy need, the income gap may shrink, which would make lower income earners happier [0] due to relative income effect. [0]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4041613/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4041613/ "We can now answer the question posed by the article’s title: Yes, your neighbor’s income does affect your happiness, but the income of your proximate neighbor has a different effect on your happiness than the income of your more distant neighbor does. Americans tend to be happiest when they live in a high-income neighborhood in a low-income region. In other words, the effect of residential income on individual happiness reverses from positive to negative with increasing geographic scale—a phenomenon we might call the geographic scale principle of income effects (Lee et al. [2008] argue, along the same vein, that the effect of residential segregation can vary by geographic scale)." Edit: a more recent source (https://hbr.org/2016/04/when-economic-growth-doesnt-make-countries-happier https://hbr.org/2016/04/when-economic-growth-doesnt-make-cou...)