are getting richer, but the poor aren’t becoming worse off. They’re becoming parents. Life expectancy tells the same story. In the early 1950s, people in rich countries lived, on average, 66.5 years. By the early 1990s they were living 74.2 years. In the poorest countries, average lifespans increased from 35.5 years to 49.7 years (which, somewhat unnervingly, was my exact age when I wrote that sentence, and I was glad I didn’t live in Tanzania and had to die that night). Anyway, the difference in life expectancy between the world’s rich and poor has decreased by 6.5 years. The rich are getting richer. The poor are getting richer. And we’re all getting older.¶¶¶¶¶ So if wealth is not a worldwide round-robin of purse snatching, and if the thing that makes you rich doesn’t make me poor, why should we care about fairness at all? We shouldn’t. Fairness is a good thing in marriage and at the day-care center. It’s a nice little domestic virtue. But a liking for fairness is not that noble a sentiment. Fairness doesn’t rank with charity, love, duty, or self-sacrifice. And there’s always a tinge of self-seeking in making sure that things are fair. Don’t you go trying to get one up on me. As a foundation for a political system, fairness may be no virtue at all. The Old Testament is clear on this point. The Bible might seem an odd place to be doing economic research, especially by someone who goes to church about once a year, and only then because that’s when my wife says the Easter Bunny comes. However, I have been thinking—in socioeconomic terms—about the Tenth Commandment. The first nine Commandments concern theological principles and social law: Thou shalt not make graven images, steal, kill, etc. Fair enough. But then there’s the Tenth Commandment: “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything that is thy neighbor’s.” Here are God’s basic rules about how we should live, a very brief list of sacred obligations and solemn moral precepts, and right at the end of it is, “Don’t envy your buddy’s cow.” What is that doing in there? Why would God, with just ten things to tell Moses, choose, as one of them, jealousy about the livestock next door? And yet,
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