Typically, if a bowler manages to play 100 T20 matches, he can expect to earn at least Rs 1 crore for bowling just 400 overs. Yes, that's all, just 400 overs. Nor is there any requirement that he should take any wickets. All he has to do in his quota of 24 balls per match is to bowl 10 or 11 balls off which no runs are scored.
Thus, the bowler earns merely by being in the team. Nothing else is needed. He just needs to keep it tight by bowling stump-to-stump.
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And even there, conceding 28 runs in four overs, without taking a wicket, is regarded as a good performance. Now that is productivity for you, whichever way you want to measure it.
So if you are clever, you will opt to be a bowler, not a batsman because, in contrast, batsmen have to score runs at the rate of at least two per ball over half a dozen matches if they want to remain in the team. This is the only thing that matters.
Naturally, as a group they earn more than the bowlers. But remember the bar is held very high for them.
Viewers go to see runs scored while no one really cares if a bowler gets bashed without taking wickets. Nor does anyone remember a good ball or a great bowling spell. After all, how great can it be in 24 balls?
Other sports
The contrast is sharp not just within cricket but also with other sports. Nowhere else are the expectations as low as they are from a bowler.
Arguably, goalkeepers in football and hockey can be compared to the bowlers. Theoretically, it is possible in both games for them to do nothing but just stand there. The other 10 players could ensure that the ball goes nowhere near the D.
But unlike in the case of a bowler, who shares the bowling with a maximum of nine others, and at least four others, the goalie has no one but himself to blame if and when things go wrong. Yet, his rewards are nowhere near those of a bowler although the near-monopoly over preventing defeat should fetch him high rewards.
Even in basketball, where there are just five players on each side, it might just be possible, at least in theory, for one player on each side to do nothing but run up and down and not touch the ball even once. But that is not what is expected of them. They would be dumped soon.
In tennis, it is possible, again in theory, for a match to be over in 72 points. This would happen if there are 36 aces and 36 un-returnable returns of service. But the effort level required there would be so great as to make the reward come close to infinity.
No T20 bowler comes anywhere close in terms of effort but gets pretty close to it in terms of reward.
Silence of the economists
How would economists explain this anomaly where the reward bears no or almost no relationship to performance? The answer is they can't.
I have scoured the literature and there is no theory that explains high rewards for low performance. When you look at it, a T20 bowler's returns are almost infinite in relation to his productivity.
In economic literature performance and reward are positively correlated, not negatively. In economic theory wages equal the amount of output a worker produces, not what she does not produce. But this is not true of bowlers.
The closest explanation, according to me, would be the perfect or near-perfect substitutability of labour, or in this case, T20 bowlers. Given how little is expected of them, practically any bowler can do the job.
What this gives, I suspect, is fixed rewards - say, Rs 10 lakh per match regardless of who the bowler is - because so little is expected of them. This is quite emphatically not the case with batsmen.
The only other profession that resembles that of T20 bowlers is the Indian bureaucracy - low performance expectations and very high rewards.
And we have perfect substitutability there also, as can be seen from the posting policies.