You don’t have to be a Marxist to take a little pleasure in the recent humbling of many of Wall Street’s most swaggering Masters of the Universe. And you don’t need to be a neocon to suspect that a sentiment as old-fashioned as envy might have had something to do with the reluctance of some pundits and policymakers to offer remedies to a financial disease that, at the start, seemed like it might afflict only plutocrats.

The inescapable fact is that money and who has it ineluctably influences our views about a lot of what happens in the world. If this fact has ever made you squeamish, then you may have taken comfort from the Easterlin Paradox.