> Past a fairly low threshold people seem to mostly care about relative.
It's more like, people have squishy "fairness" wetware.
Suppose there is a button where if you press it, it causes your neighbor to get $50,000 in value and doesn't cost you anything whatsoever. You'd have to be a real bastard not to press the button, right?
Now suppose there is a button where if you press it, it causes your neighbor to get $50,000 and causes you to get $10,000. This one is even more obvious, but it's also the sort of thing where you wouldn't be surprised to discover people starting a campaign to say that the button is unfair and we need to ban anyone from doing that.
And it's basically because humans evolved under conditions of inherent scarcity. If you getting 20% of what someone else does means that you still get a house and a car and free time for your family/projects etc., and they get a mansion and a Ferrari and can pay someone to do things for them so they have even more free time, is that actually a problem? Whereas if you getting 20% of what someone else does means that you can't even feed your family while they're getting fat, you're going to go to war over that.
In a high scarcity environment, things look like the second one, and that's where the human fairness wetware got its intuitions. But modern stuff mostly looks like the first one, and to the extent it looks like the second one it's usually artificial scarcity. It's not that we lack the resources to produce enough housing, it's that building more of it in a particular place is prohibited by law. And then it's not that they get a bigger house than you, it's that you don't get one at all, and the objection goes back to being reasonable. But the better way to solve that is to build more housing -- eliminate artificial scarcity -- rather than trying to fight over a limited quantity of something that doesn't actually have to be so limited.