ABSTRACT
American journalist and author John Tierney, writing in The New York Times in 2011, wondered whether envy was the most useless of the deadly sins, a torture to experience, hard to own up to, and without any long-term benefit. If envy is wanting what other people have, and malicious envy is acting viciously on that desire, then the principal expression of malicious envy in modern society has to be property crime. Property criminals net $14 billion annually but property criminals only run about one in five chance of being caught, which seems like a pretty profitable enterprise, particularly given the low capital costs of getting into the crime business in the first place. Every workplace embraces some sort of internal process of evaluation and, thus, provides endless opportunities for employees to compare themselves with their peers. Some forms of envy lack any overtones of hostility; other forms are marked by sharp hostility that turns into frustration, fear, aggression, prejudice, anger.
