University of Chicago Professor Saul Levmore on Thomas Piketty

Saul Levmore has posted on SSRN his review of Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-first Century. In it, he raises a question that others have raised: is there a problem with inequality, per se? We exchanged emails, and I raised this point: severe enough inequality creates a sitution in which the poor have a comparative advantage in violence. Even if the rich are able, with their resources, able to buy enough security to obtain a sizable absolute advantage in violence, the poor may have such low opportunity costs of violence that they may freely engage in it. Professor Levmore replied that if we are afraid of violent revolution, then we are in a pretty dark place and we are not quite there yet. Agreed. But we may not need to be at a point of violent revolution in order for the threat of inequality-induced violence to impose costs. Is our American gun fetishism part of that? If so, that is pretty costly. Everybody talks about Ferguson as if it were about race, only. Is it? Maybe. But is some of it a fear of the other, that other being quite possibly poor enough to entertain rational thoughts of violence? I dunno. But possibly.