by the Jews of the civilization that preceded Christ that it was forbidden, by

phrase after phrase, in the laws of Moses. You were even warned by the Prophet

not to covet your neighbor’s donkey.

 

And envy/jealousy is also extreme in modern life. For instance, university

communities often go bananas when some university employee in money management,

or some professor in surgery, gets annual compensation in multiples of the

standard professorial salary. And in modern investment banks, law firms, etc.,

the envy/jealousy effects are usually more extreme than they are in university

faculties. Many big law firms, fearing disorder from envy/jealousy, have long

treated all senior partners alike in compensation, no matter how different their

contributions to firm welfare. As I have shared the observation of life with

Warren Buffett over decades, I have heard him wisely say on several occasions:

“It is not greed that drives the world, but envy.”

 

And, because this is roughly right, one would expect a vast coverage of

envy/jealousy in psychology textbooks. But no such vast coverage existed when I

read my three textbooks. Indeed, the very words “envy” and “jealousy” were often

absent from indexes.

 

Nondiscussion of envy/jealousy is not a phenomenon confined to psychology texts.

When did any of you last engage in any large group discus- sion of some issue

wherein adult envy/jealousy was identified as the cause of someone’s argument?

There seems to be a general taboo against any such claim. If so, what accounts

for the taboo?