How much this is a problem doubtless depends on one’s ideas of morality and the “good life”. It seems to me that there’s a decent moral case to be made that if one has the essentials of a “good life” (good food, clothing, and shelter, access to basic medical care, leisure time and the tools for pleasurable leisure) that it really shouldn’t matter at all whether other people are richer or not.

However it’s certainly an accurate observation of human nature that even if we ourselves our comfortable, we eventually become upset at others having more if we do not see our way open to achieving a similar status at some point in the future. The question is: does this represent some sort of natural right and ordered desire (as Krugman seems to implicitly assume) or is it a universal human tendency towards envy?

-Mike

Some parts of Africa have higher Gini coefficients than the U.S. much of it does not. In any event, when I spoke of immigrants choosing a lower relative position in the U.S. than in their home country, I had in mind not so much immigrants from Latin America as from places like Canada, Europe, the sub-continent, and various other parts of Asia. These countries have less inequality than the U.S. and immigrants from those countries do not generally come from the most impoverished or ill-educated classes. Yet the immigration flows between those countries and the U.S. is decidedly one-sided.