Sam Bowles

Corey Pein on Sam Bowles. Excerpt:
"Among other projects, Community Action lobbies the New Mexico Public Regulation Commission on behalf of low-income residents, opposing rate increases by the Public Services Company of New Mexico. “Constantly,” Porter says, “it’s our voice against the suits.”

Her on-the-ground experience supports a message Bowles has pushed all these years in academia.

“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."
Link via Profile of Sam Bowlesin MR which has more links and comments. There is also discussion in Crooked Timber.
SFI webpage of Sam Bowles
Webpage of his longtime collaborator Herbert Gintis