You are making the unjustified assumption that the lower-income world has the same total amount of goods and services available as the higher income world.
I think the basic study, as understood by the participants, was not with regard to number of dollars, it was with regard to the standard of living.
“Would you rather live at a 2X standard of living if everybody else lived at a 1X standard, or at a 4X standard if others lived at an 8X standard?”
The dollars are just a different way of saying X.
Wrong. His example was stated in terms of dollar income.
The example did NOT claim that universe A had 8 times less goods and services produced in aggregate than universe B.
Perhaps he misdescribed it, and in reality the example in the study was limited in that the people against whom one compared oneself was just a small circle of acquaintances, and not all “others.” That kind of a study would actually support the point Jonah was making.