The evidence here is thinner than the confident commentary suggests, and the honest position is a shrug with a direction of travel. The point is not that people are foolish. The point is that envy is expensive, and we economise on it like everything else. The lesson is modest. Build for the person who exists, not the one in the model. Economists have spent decades modelling envy as a quantity. It behaves more like a weather system.
What follows
Understanding people turns out to be a more urgent task than changing them, and a great deal harder. A pattern this consistent is not a character flaw. It is a design feature, and design features can be worked with. The textbook treats envy as a preference to be revealed. In practice it is a story we tell ourselves after the fact. Every one of us runs the same shortcut, and every one of us believes we are the exception.
