Lin & Bates at the University of Edinburgh have a 2021 paper showing that malicious envy has more explanatory power for predictors of support for economic redistribution than most concepts of fairness. As with most topics I don't follow closely, it seemed they were using only unfamiliar terms at first and I wasn't going to quite get it. But if you just stick with it a few pages you will see what they are driving at. Most models predict that a belief in fairness should be a broad predictor of support for redistribution, especially coercive redistribution, and similarly that increases or decreases in that belief should be predictive of moves up and down a continuum. In fact, that had zero predictive ability. There were a few beliefs with some predictive usefulness, but the strongest was malicious envy. We want to punish those better off more than we want to help those who are less well-off.
It reminded me of Evolved Spite, and studies that show we act fairly ourselves more from fear of spiteful responses than out of compassion. Well, it least it wasn't zero this time. Also here.
The Hamilton they keep referring to is W.D.Hamilton, who looks like he was a very interesting guy and contributed key concepts to some distinct but closely-related fields.
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