Sunday, February 07, 2010

Rethinking Economics (and Education) with Samuel Bowles (of Bowles and Gintis Fame)

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.



Three more numbers, none of them lucky:




The first is how many years have passed since Bowles was inspired by King to “put his heart and his head together” and study economic inequality.

The second is the Gini measure of inequality for the US back then, a level comparable to other wealthy nations like Japan or Israel today.

The third is the most recent US Gini, as calculated by the Census Bureau. It’s at a level comparable to the Philippines, a former colony of islands where every other person lives on less than $2 a day, or Rwanda, an even poorer country in Central Africa that was home to a genocide 16 years ago—a country whose name is often synonymous with hopelessness.

Schooling in Capitalist America, Bowles and Gintis, 1976

"Schooling in Capitalist America Revisited," Bowled and Gintis, 2001

Website at Santa Fe Institute with CV etc.

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