The makers of this summer's Hollywood blockbuster Elysium got one thing right, according to a column in the Washington Examiner that cites a 2005 research by SFI Professor Sam Bowles: The abundance of 'guard labor' depicted in the movie -- in the movie's case case robot police and sleeper agents -- is an expected feature of a society with a high degree of economic inequality.
The 2005 paper, co-authored by Bowles and Arjun Jayadev and published as an SFI working paper, connects inequality with a larger proportion of a population engaged in enforcing the property rights and protecting the assets of the elite. Roughly a quarter of the U.S. labor force was dedicated to guard labor in 2002, they wrote.
"If Bowles and Jayadev are correct," writes the Examiner's Joseph Lawler, “Elysium gets one thing right: if inequality rises so steeply that the richest humans are literally on a different planet from everyone else, there would be an explosion in guard labor – the perfect premise for an action flick."
Read the article in the Washington Examiner (August 9, 2013)
Read the article in The Daily Beast (August 23, 2013)
Read the SFI working paper (July 2005)