Drop everything you are doing right now and read Born Poor? | Santa Fe economist Samuel Bowles says you better get used to it right now. Here's a taste of why:
“Inequality,” she says, “really holds us back.”
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.
The job descriptions of guard labor range from “imposing work discipline”—think of the corporate IT spies who keep desk jockeys from slacking off online—to enforcing laws, like the officers in the Santa Fe Police Department paddy wagon parked outside of Walmart.
The greater the inequalities in a society, the more guard labor it requires, Bowles finds.
It's moments like these, when am reading about economists doing empirical work on the fallacy of the "free market economy", that it makes want to go back in time to complete what would have been my Bachelor's Degree on Economics (yes, when I went into college, I wanted to become an economist).
What am more excited about discovering Samuel Bowles, is the fact that he considers himself a radical. Not because he theorizes about the eternal disruption of the status quo but because he has found evidence, actual material and empirical evidence, that point to the root causes of our present day economic problems.
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