SFI Professor Sam Bowles and collaborator Arjun Jayadev crunch the numbers and find that of the world's advanced industrialized nations, the U.S. has the highest ratio of workers devoted to guarding things; regionally, guard labor seems to correlate with economic disparity: the more guards, the more inequality, they show.
"What is happening in America today is both unprecedented in our history, and virtually unique among Western democratic nations," they write. "The share of our labor force devoted to guard labor has risen fivefold since 1890 — a year when, in case you were wondering, the homicide rate was much higher than today."
Read the article in the New York Times' "Great Divide" series (February 16, 2014)
Read the interview with author Zachary Karabell on PBS Newshour (April 28, 2014)
Read the article on CNN.com (March 31, 2014)
Read the article in Salon.com (February 18, 2014)