Some years ago, in Quito, Ecuador, I noticed that in every
wealthy section of town, each house seemed to have at least one armed guard
standing at the front door. A few had two armed guards. My driver’s little jest
was that the homes with two guards were the homes of the superrich.
I speculated that there would come a time when the superrich
would feel threatened by even bigger thugs than they are today.
All that was covered here, in a reminiscence that, in retrospect, I find harrowing. Now, it turns out, I wasn’t merely speculating. In fact, I
might have been pretty close to the mark.
In a piece posted by The New York Times on its blog pages
today, two university professors, Samuel Bowles and Arjun Jayadev have revealed
their own, statistics-based take on the same dire social consequence of
concentrating too much wealth into too few hands. It nearly comes down to equation: the greater the income inequality, the greater the number of people working as security guards or the equivalent. By implication, mutual mistrust among fellow citizens increases, too.
I urge you to read their piece, and then to look into
Bowles’ recently-published book on the subject, The New Economics of Inequality and Distribution.
Some of the points Bowles touched on in the blog piece:
• “We now employ as many private security guards as high
school teachers — over one million of them, or nearly double their number in
1980.”
•“What is happening in America today is both unprecedented
in our history, and virtually unique among Western democratic nations. The share
of our labor force devoted to guard labor has risen fivefold since 1890…”
• “…however one totes up guard labor in the United States,
there is a lot of it, and it seems to go along with economic inequality. States
with high levels of income inequality — New York and Louisiana — employ twice
as many security workers (as a fraction of their labor force) as less unequal
states like Idaho and New Hampshire.”
• “There is a simple economic lesson here: A nation whose
policies result in substantial inequalities may end up spending more on guns
and getting less butter as a result.”
So sleep well, one percenter robber barons. That
brief cry you heard below your window just now probably was not one of your
security guards having his throat slit by a group of thugs who are about to
batter down your door, kidnap you and ship your digits one by one to your
negotiators until someone in your retinue comes up with the ransom.
