An interesting article in the Santa Fe Reader. From a liberal “radical” on the consequences of income disparity…
Bowles offers a key reason why this is so. “Inequality breeds conflict, and conflict breeds wasted resources,” he says.In short, in a very unequal society, the people at the top have to spend a lot of time and energy keeping the lower classes obedient and productive.
Inequality leads to an excess of what Bowles calls “guard labor.” In a 2007 paper on the subject, he and co-author Arjun Jayadev, an assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts, make an astonishing claim: Roughly 1 in 4 Americans is employed to keep fellow citizens in line and protect private wealth from would-be Robin Hoods.
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