[CTRL] A Test of the Power-Elite Hypothesis

[Taylor, John (JH)]

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>    CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY Volume 40, Number 5, December 1999
>    © 1999 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All
>    rights reserved 0011-3204/99/4005-0002$3.50
>      _________________________________________________________________
>
>    Socioeconomic Growth, Culture Scale, and Household Well-Being
>    A Test of the Power-Elite Hypothesis1
>
>    by John H. Bodley
>
>    Socioeconomic growth is an elite-directed process that concentrates
>    social power in direct proportion to increases in culture scale. Power
>    elites have controlled social power to their own advantage in at least
>    three different ways: domestically, by means of kinship, politically,
>    by means of rulers, and commercially, by means of the market. Each
>    method produces its own growth trajectory and scale of culture and a
>    distinctive distribution of elite power and household living
>    standards. Ethnographic data on urban property ownership in 27
>    municipalities in the Palouse region of eastern Washington suggest
>    that when power is commercially organized and villages become towns
>    and cities, there is a dramatic increase not only in the number of
>    prosperous households but even more in the number of poor and
>    maintenance-level households. Elite property owners, who most benefit
>    from growth, assume a larger role in municipal government, where they
>    can encourage further growth through municipal annexations and zoning
>    changes. Thus, as elite power becomes increasingly concentrated, the
>    growth process itself tends to become self-perpetuating. In the
>    Palouse example, small, no-growth municipalities appear to be
>    politically more democratic than larger-scale, growing municipalities
>    and household well-being in them more equitably distributed.
>
>    JOHN H. BODLEY is Professor of Anthropology at Washington State
>    University (Pullman, Wash. 99164-4910, U.S.A. [[EMAIL PROTECTED]]). Born
>    in 1942, he was educated at the University of Oregon (B.A., 1965;
>    M.A., 1967; Ph.D., 1970) and has been a visiting researcher at the
>    International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs and done fieldwork in
>    cultural ecology in eastern Peru. His publications include Victims of
>    Progress (Palo Alto: Mayfield, 1999 [1975]), Anthropology and
>    Contemporary Human Problems (Palo Alto: Mayfield, 1996 [1976]), and "A
>    Cultural Scale Perspective on Human Ecology and Development" (Advances
>    in Human Ecology 3).
>
>         1 This project was supported in 1996 - 97 and 1998 - 99 by grants
>    from the Edward R. Meyer Fund at Washington State University. Data
>    specialists Kevin Norris in Spokane County and James Martin and Jim
>    Hawkes in Whitman County provided data bases and supporting
>    information. At Washington State University I was assisted with the
>    SAS language and mainframe computer aspects of this project by Darrell
>    Davenport, William G. Hendrix, Timothy A. Kohler, Gilbert A. Pierson,
>    and Zoltan Porga. Other colleagues and students at Washington State
>    University who provided additional material and helpful comment
>    included William Andrefsky Jr., Tom Bartuska, William H. Funk,
>    Christopher A. Harris, Barry S. Hewlett, Barry C. Hicks, Gary
>    Huckleberry, Chuck Huffine, William D. Lipe, Samuel H. Smith, and
>    William Willard. My wife, Kathleen M. Bodley, read and offered
>    valuable criticism on several drafts. During two summer field schools
>    in 1992 and 1997 my students in the Department of Anthropology at
>    Washington State University explored many of these issues and were a
>    continual source of inspiration.
>
>    The present paper was submitted 7 I 99 and accepted 26 II 99; the
>    final version reached the Editor's office 22 IV 99.
>      _________________________________________________________________
>
>         This paper examines how elites use socioeconomic growth to shift
>    the distribution of social power and household well-being in their
>    favor. The hypothesis to be tested is that growth is an elite-directed
>    process that concentrates social power in direct proportion to
>    increases in scale. The assumption is that larger-scale cultural
>    systems will have more concentrated social power. Combining C. Wright
>    Mills's (1956) original insights on American society with current
>    anthropological theory, this hypothesis suggests that elite
>    power-seeking is a prime mover at all levels of cultural development
>    and that certain growth processes disproportionately impoverish and
>    disempower some households. After reviewing existing theoretical
>    arguments and empirical evidence for this hypothesis, I extend the
>    debate by proposing that elite-directed cultural evolution has
>    produced distinct domestic-, political-, and commercial-scale
>    cultures. I then show that cultural systems can be sorted by
>    order-of-magnitude differences on various socioeconomic dimensions to
>    reflect these three broad scales of culture. This approach places
>    foragers, tribals, chiefdoms, agrarian civilizations, and globally
>    integrated commercial cultures within a single explanatory framework.
>    In a case study of a particular commercially organized regional
>    culture, social power is operationalized as the ability of household
>    heads to use economic assets to maintain or improve their material
>    level as measured by the total assessed value of their real property
>    holdings. I then use property-ownership data from 27 municipalities in
>    the Palouse region of eastern Washington to explore how elite-directed
>    growth in the scale of urban places is related to specific changes in
>    the distribution of social power and household well-being.
>
>    Growth, Scale, and Elite Power: Theoretical Foundations
>
>         There is abundant theoretical and empirical support for the
>    hypothesis that increase in scale concentrates social power. Social
>    power refers broadly to individuals' ability to impose their will on
>    others, and it can be measured on ideological, economic, military, and
>    political dimensions (Mann 1986, 1993). This research focuses on the
>    power to maintain and reproduce households. Statistical probability
>    theory, human information-processing and systems theory, biological
>    evolution, dual-inheritance theory, and Marxist theory all provide
>    relevant theoretical perspectives.
>
>         This work defines elites as the individuals at the top of any
>    rankable social-power scale. It assumes that elites of some sort are
>    universal in human societies. Because of their power, they are in the
>    best position to direct culture change. It is expected that their
>    actual number and power will be functionally related to the absolute
>    scale of material resources and population in a given society and the
>    cultural rules regulating power and the distribution of resources
>    (Mayhew 1973, Mayhew and Schollaert 1980b). The focus here will be on
>    political and economic elites, and the hypothesis will be tested by
>    comparing the power and distribution of economic elites in communities
>    of different scale in a single region at a particular time.
>
>         In his classic study of political elites, Mosca (1939:53)
>    proposed that it was "natural" but not intuitively obvious that "the
>    larger the political community, the smaller would be the proportion of
>    the governing minority to the governed majority." This means that as
>    the scale of the society increases, proportionately fewer elites will
>    control, and consequently both their proportionate and their absolute
>    power will increase. Mayhew (1973) devised a mathematical formula to
>    test Mosca's hypothesis, defining elites as less than half of any
>    society. When he applied his formula to a hypothetical society of 100
>    people he found that political elites did in fact acquire more power
>    as scale increased. Because these predictions follow from the
>    definition of elites (as less than half of society) and are a
>    "natural" function of scale, concentration can in theory be explained
>    without reference to individual differences, details of history, or
>    cultural process.
>
>         Other theoretical predictions based on biology and biocultural
>    processes provide further reasons to expect growth to concentrate
>    power. Flannery (1972), Rappaport (1977), and Johnson (1978, 1982)
>    have pointed out that information management and decision making are
>    inherently more difficult in larger social systems. The theoretical
>    limits of individual human memory capability may be related to Mosca's
>    predictions, because memory restricts the number who can rule.
>    Linguistic evidence from folk biological taxonomies, the scale of
>    human social groups, and recall experiments suggest that in any
>    particular information domain people can work proficiently with only
>    500 distinguishable objects (or recognizable persons), although such
>    domains may be nested in hierarchies (Kosse 1990). Thus, military
>    units personally led by a single officer do not usually exceed 500
>    men. Likewise, if members of a decision-making elite must interact
>    with each other face-to-face, we would expect that it would never
>    exceed 500 people, regardless of the total size of a society, although
>    it might direct a hierarchy of lower-level elites. Political elites
>    necessarily become a smaller, more powerful proportion of any society
>    as scale increases, just as Mosca predicted.
>
>         Pursuing the significance of pure scale, Mayhew and Schollaert
>    (1980a, b) devised other mathematical models to test Pareto's (1896 -
>    97, 1907) prediction that in any complex society economic resources
>    would almost invariably be inequitably distributed such that an
>    economic elite would occupy the top of the scale. Pareto thought this
>    would happen because of innate differences in individual drives and
>    ability, but his explanation is not required. Given any quantifiable
>    economic resource, such as property, income, or wealth, the
>    probability of a Pareto economic elite's occurring in any society
>    increases with societal scale. This is because only one distribution
>    form (everyone having an equal share) does not produce a Pareto elite,
>    whereas other possible distribution forms multiply quickly as social
>    scale increases. Furthermore, Mayhew and Schollaert demonstrate that
>    the Pareto elite will almost invariably be a proportionately smaller
>    and thus more powerful minority as either the scale of the society or
>    its wealth increases.
>
>         At the end of the 19th century Pareto himself had discovered that
>    in several countries upper-level incomes displayed a regular and
>    highly predictable straight-line distribution of increasing
>    concentration when graphed on logarithmic scales. This empirical
>    finding led him to conclude that economic inequality was "natural."
>    Many researchers have since verified that income distributions can be
>    plotted as lognormal curves and are thus highly regular, such that
>    knowing total income and the proportion held by a given segment of the
>    population allows one to estimate the holdings of other income
>    segments with reasonable accuracy (Johnson 1937, Soltow 1989). The
>    same pattern has been reported for the distribution of status in
>    agrarian civilizations (Soltow 1983) and for salary scales. Elites
>    interested in increasing their power thus have a powerful "natural"
>    incentive to promote growth. This mathematical effect operates only in
>    open distribution systems where there are no cultural limitations on
>    the distribution of wealth. This is purely a function of scale, as
>    Mayhew and Schollaert (1980a:8) note: "by chance alone, an increase in
>    population size creates an increasing concentration of wealth,
>    ultimately pressing the system toward maximum possible inequality."
>
>         Biocultural evolution or coevolution and dual-inheritance theory
>    (Boyd and Richerson 1985, Durham 1991) can also be used to predict
>    socioeconomic growth and the concentration of elite power. From this
>    perspective elites will be expected to promote increase in scale
>    because it will give them more social power to improve their life
>    chances, thereby increasing their individual genetic fitness.
>    Elite-initiated growth-promoting beliefs and symbols will be
>    reproduced and transmitted rapidly and will prove culturally fit
>    through the process of indirectly biased cultural transmission (Boyd
>    and Richerson 1985:243). Nonelite individuals will model their beliefs
>    and associated behaviors on those of elites in the hope of achieving
>    similar success. This form of indirect bias is Veblen's (1994 [1899])
>    emulation. Emulation is an adaptive strategy for individuals because
>    it is a more efficient way to choose cultural traits than
>    trial-and-error. The best life strategy is simply to copy everything
>    the most successful people do, because it is difficult to know why
>    they are successful. Wealth can be an indicator trait for success. If
>    the wealthy believe in perpetual economic growth and live in larger
>    houses, these cultural traits can be expected to proliferate.
>
>         Boyd and Richerson (1985:10) point out that indirect bias in
>    cultural transmission can produce an ultimately maladaptive runaway
>    process analogous to the sexual-selection-driven genetic process that
>    promotes exaggerated growth in male peacock tail feathers. Ironically,
>    relative poverty may produce greater biological fitness, even though
>    any tendency toward economic stability or nonaccumulation is easily
>    overridden by biased cultural transmission whenever power inequality
>    emerges. The biocultural perspective suggests that when growth is an
>    elite-directed process it cannot be expected to improve the well-being
>    of society as a whole. Exponential growth and crash could enhance the
>    short-term genetic fitness of power elites even as it generated
>    insecurity, poverty, and misery for the majority. There is even a
>    strong theoretical argument that crisis, whether political or
>    Malthusian, is a crucial feature of elite-directed growth, because it
>    provides an opportunity for elites to overcome counterhegemonic
>    resistance to their agenda (Arnold 1993). Crises such as war and
>    environmental deterioration can force people to give elites even
>    greater decision-making power and to accept dangerous technologies or
>    oppressive bureaucracies as the lesser of undesirable alternatives.
>
>         Charles Spencer, who also draws on biocultural theory, explicitly
>    describes culture growth as an elite-directed process. He speaks of
>    "optimum strategies" for elites and predicts "an attempt to establish
>    a state form of administration when and if the elite find it
>    advantageous to alter their regulatory strategies in order to sustain
>    the social formation and thereby nurture their own power" (1990:5).
>
>         Also within an evolutionary framework, Richard Adams (1988)
>    attributes growth and the emergence of elites to an innate human drive
>    for domination that predisposes some people to seek ever more power
>    over submissive others. The elite become the regulators of
>    hierarchically ordered, energy-based social systems (energy forms)
>    that serve as "survival vehicles" for those who design and direct
>    them. Adams stresses that the elite direct the growth process to their
>    disproportionate advantage: "their own security requires that they
>    select those alternatives that benefit them, often at the expense of
>    the rest of society" (1988:135). Schmookler (1995) also explains
>    growth and concentration of social power as a "natural" evolutionary
>    process but assumes group selection, treating societies as the units
>    in an inevitable progression toward world government.
>
>         Drawing on both archaeological and ethnographic case material,
>    Spencer (1990, 1993a, b), Arnold (1993), and many other theorists (see
>    Earle 1987, 1991) attribute political growth to specific
>    power-enhancing elite decisions to mobilize and expand the domestic
>    labor force, promote new technology, expand trade, and wage war. All
>    of these processes increase socioeconomic scale, and they may reduce
>    the life chances of others. These growth mechanisms are fundamental
>    issues for Marxist theory. Some argue that everyone benefits from
>    growth (Service 1975) and unless benefits outweigh costs people will
>    not support elite-directed growth agendas. However, this view
>    deemphasizes the seductive power of emulation and the extent to which
>    elite decision making can force people to choose between bad and worse
>    alternatives. Growth produces circumscription, which reduces options
>    for most people (Carneiro 1970, 1988; Brown and Price 1985;
>    Aldenderfer 1993). Growth has also clearly brought widespread
>    benefits, for example, in life expectancy, but this and other benefits
>    have been very unevenly distributed. Growth benefits are also likely
>    to be experienced as short-lived and cyclical.
>
>    Scalar Stress, Growth Cycles, and Thresholds
>
>         The theoretical perspectives reviewed above suggest that
>    elite-directed growth will be observed as cycles of growth and
>    collapse, followed by culture change to overcome growth limits,
>    leading to further growth and scale change. When ecological,
>    technological, or organizational limits are approached, scalar stress
>    will be expected (Johnson 1978, 1982). Archaeological and ethnographic
>    evidence for this process can be drawn from many areas. The crucial
>    empirical problem is to identify specific limits to growth and the
>    specific processes that elites employ to overcome these scale
>    thresholds in order to increase their power. This section will
>    consider the size of human social groups, polities, global population,
>    and economies.
>
>         Johnson and Earle (1987) distinguish three broad levels of
>    socioeconomic integration that they label the family-level group, the
>    local group, and the regional polity. This sequence shows scale
>    increases for settlements and areal networks corresponding to levels
>    of subsistence intensification and the emergence of a political
>    economy. Kosse (1990) identifies several specific growth thresholds in
>    this sequence, each threshold requiring organizational changes in
>    decision-making processes for scale gains and increases in elite power
>    to be obtained. A scale threshold at a group size of 2,500 can
>    apparently not be crossed when social power is organized only by
>    kinship and participatory democracy. Kosse cites ethnographic evidence
>    that in family-level groups, where local settlements are unlikely to
>    exceed 150 people, all adults can participate in decision making. In
>    order for settlements to reach a population of 500, only the adult men
>    are likely to be involved in public decision making, and they draw on
>    ritual support and descent groups. A consensual "village headman" or
>    "big man" can informally coordinate up to 500 five-person households
>    within a local group of 2,500 people. A formal political elite and a
>    regional polity necessarily emerge when settlements are larger than
>    2,500. When this threshold has been crossed, a hereditary elite may
>    consolidate its interests within an elite establishment of 500 people
>    for effective elite endogamy.
>
>         A variety of factors limit the scale of regional polities and the
>    power of political elites. Spencer (1990:7) finds empirical support
>    for his prediction that a single ruler can only personally direct
>    people living in territory accessible by half a day's travel. Thus,
>    given foot travel, the order-of-magnitude transition from a minimal
>    chiefdom of 2,500 people with a territory of perhaps 2,500 km2 to a
>    small state of perhaps 50,000 people with a territory of 50,000 km2 is
>    likely to be observed in the archaeological record as a rapid,
>    punctuated-equilibrium organizational transformation to install a
>    bureaucracy, perhaps accompanied by dramatic technological innovation
>    to raise productivity or improve logistics. An aspiring chiefdom-level
>    leader who delegated authority only in small increments would risk
>    having his authority usurped by a more ambitious one.
>
>         Carneiro (1978) and Taagepera (1978a, b, 1997) find a steady
>    decline in the number of historical polities and an increase in their
>    size as global population has increased over the past 5,000 or more
>    years, suggesting that political elites have in fact successively
>    overcome scalar constraints to both political control and population
>    growth. Carneiro (1978) assumed that continuous population growth and
>    conflict between circumscribed groups would steadily produce a world
>    with fewer and larger polities through the bioevolutionary process of
>    competitive exclusion and group selection. Thus, increased scale of
>    world population corresponds with more concentrated political power,
>    just as Mayhew's mathematical models predict. Taagepera also shows
>    that there are dramatic increases in the land area of the populations
>    contained within the largest political empires, thus producing ever
>    greater political power for empire-directing elites. Vast
>    bureaucracies can support a very small elite even in very large
>    polities. Kosse (1990) cites ethnographic and historical evidence that
>    the top political elite did not exceed 500 in a wide sample of large
>    polities from ancient Rome to modern Venezuela.
>
>         Several authors have used trend analysis to project when a single
>    political elite would in effect rule the world,2 but diminishing
>    marginal returns to increases in scale probably do limit
>    elite-directed growth. Centralized polities may be self-limited
>    systems (Wallerstein 1974). They can become too large to be
>    efficiently sustained by coercive force or nationalist ideology,
>    especially against competing counterhegemonies, but it is difficult to
>    identify the specific constraints. Naroll (1967) finds cross-cultural
>    evidence that empires were limited by military logistics.
>    Administrative costs climb rapidly as organizations grow (Parkinson
>    1957). A scale threshold for far-flung political empires was probably
>    reached by the British empire in 1920, when it controlled one-fourth
>    of the world's people and land area. This vast empire proved too
>    costly to maintain by military force even with industrial technology.
>    Contemporary China may be approaching a similar threshold with 1
>    billion people. Taagepera (1997:490) finds that most empires last no
>    more than 130 years and very few exceed 300 years, even as polities
>    become larger. Growth may produce only limited fitness gains for
>    political elites, because particular dynasties tend to be even more
>    short-lived than polities.
>
>         McEvedy and Jones (1978) describe cycles of world population
>    growth that correspond with global episodes of elite-directed
>    political expansion and technological innovation. They suggest that
>    each growth cycle ended when Malthusian limits to a given cultural
>    system were exceeded and that unfavorable climatic shifts may have
>    been a factor. Their primary cycle (10,000 B.C. - A.D. 500), which
>    they attribute to the development of agriculture, may have been
>    initiated, as Hayden (1990) has argued, by aspiring hunter-gatherer
>    elites who promoted domestication to support power-enhancing
>    competitive accumulation. The primary cycle encompasses the rise of
>    agrarian empires to a peak global population of 200 million by A.D.
>    200, followed by collapse in both Europe and Asia. The medieval cycle
>    (A.D. 500 - 1400) saw global population peak at 360 million in 1200,
>    followed by a decline attributed to invasion and plague. The
>    modernization cycle, which began in 1400, produced exponential growth
>    to a global population of 1 billion by 1825, 2 billion by 1925, and
>    nearly 4 billion by 1975. McEvedy and Jones suggest that this cycle
>    may peak at 8 billion by 2100, but in modernized industrial polities
>    where military power is based on fossil-fuel-driven machines, nuclear
>    energy, and computers, further exponential population growth will not
>    enhance elite political power and will bring only marginal returns to
>    elite personal wealth.
>
>         Elites have achieved further concentration of their power by
>    moving beyond the constraints of nationally based political economies
>    and creating transnational commercial empires based on capitalist
>    market exchanges (Braudel 1977, Polanyi 1957, Wallerstein 1974, Wolf
>    1982). This shift to transnational commercial empires, which has
>    enormous significance for humanity, has received remarkably little
>    attention from anthropologists. Commercially organized, globally
>    integrated cultures are important because they are reducing cultural
>    diversity on an unprecedented scale (Bodley 1999) and because they may
>    be ultimately limited by the integrity of the biosphere itself or by
>    the human ability to tolerate mass impoverishment. The existence of
>    K-waves, 54-year cycles of commercial growth and decline, is now
>    widely recognized (Kondratieff 1928, Goldstein 1988, Stoken 1993), and
>    other economic cycles have been identified, but it is not yet clear
>    what they will mean for globally integrated cultures given their short
>    history.
>
>         2 Carneiro (1978) projected the emergence of world government by
>    2300, Naroll (1967) by 2400, Taagepera (1997) by 4000, and Marano
>    (1973) by 4850.
>
>    Culture Scale, Culture Process, and the Organization of Social Power
>
>         Previous views of culture growth as scale difference (Naroll
>    1956, Carneiro 1967, Carneiro and Tobias 1963, Johnson and Earle 1987)
>    have been criticized for being too typological or for conflating
>    hierarchy and complexity (Crumley 1995). Hierarchy and various forms
>    of inequality can exist in smaller-scale cultures even in the absence
>    of social class and government (Flanagan 1989, Paynter 1989, Bookchin
>    1992, Keswani 1996). Many anthropologists have been skeptical about
>    the conceptual utility of scale difference (Barth 1978; Berreman
>    1978a, b). However, Berreman found many contrasts between small-scale
>    and large-scale societies, observing that increase in scale "makes
>    people vulnerable to forces beyond their control" (1978b:236) - which
>    is precisely my point.
>
>         During the course of cultural evolution, power-seeking elites
>    sequentially developed three increasingly productive cultural means
>    for organizing the distribution of social power in their favor:
>    domestic (by means of kinship), political (by means of a ruler), and
>    commercial (by economic elites and market exchanges) (Wolf 1982;
>    Bodley 1997:10, 16 - 21). These methods of organizing power are
>    associated with successive increases in scale and thus concentrate
>    elite power. Because each level is characterized by distinctive
>    sources of social power and different social structures, ideological
>    justifications, types of cultural transmission, and production and
>    distribution systems, it is useful to speak of differences in culture
>    scale.
>
>         Figures 1 and 2 show that order-of-magnitude differences in
>    power-related socioeconomic variables can be used to sort cultures
>    into distinct domestic-, political-, and commercial-scale groups.
>    Figure 1 sorts cultures of different scale by the estimated size of
>    their largest productive enterprises, autonomous polities, and
>    exchange networks. In domestic-scale cultures the largest private
>    productive enterprise is represented by an extended family of 25
>    people; the polity (the largest autonomous political unit) is a
>    village of 500 people, and the largest exchange network involves 2,500
>    people. In political-scale cultures the largest private productive
>    enterprise is represented by an agricultural villa in the Roman empire
>    with 500 slaves; the polity is the Roman empire of 50 million people
>    (during the reign of Augustus (27 B.C. - A.D. 14), which is also the
>    maximum exchange network (Duncan-Jones 1974:11 - 12). In the
>    commercial-scale culture the largest private productive enterprise is
>    represented by the 800,000 employees of General Motors in 1968, the
>    largest polity is China in 1990, and the maximum exchange network of 5
>    billion people includes most of the world population in 1998. These
>    social groupings could be directed by power elites and would offer
>    these elites strikingly different levels of power. The scale
>    differences are so great that they can only be graphed
>    logarithmically. Figure 2 uses grain-equivalent 1998 dollars (based on
>    the average 1997 - 98 market price of $3.62 for a bushel [24.8 kg] of
>    soft white wheat in Washington) as a common currency to compare the
>    largest potential elite economic power produced by the wealthiest
>    households, polities, and productive enterprises in cultures of
>    different scale. Grain quantities are derived from the ancient Roman
>    grain ration of 39 bushels per person per year (Duncan-Jones 1974:11 -
>    12). Wealth calculations for domestic-scale cultures assume that all
>    households are maintenance-level. The wealthiest commercial-scale
>    household is based on the known wealth of the richest private person.
>    The maximum political-scale income is represented by the U.S.
>    government's 1996 federal receipts of $1.4 trillion. The maximum
>    commercial-scale enterprise income is represented by General Motors's
>    1997 revenue of $178 billion. These graphs demonstrate the advantages
>    to power elites of shifting from politically to commercially dominated
>    cultural systems. In political-scale cultures the largest exchange
>    networks are normally not larger than the largest empires, whereas in
>    commercial-scale cultures the exchange network can encompass the
>    entire globe. In political-scale cultures the incomes of the largest
>    nonstate productive enterprises are dwarfed by the income of the
>    largest government, whereas in commercial-scale cultures the income of
>    the largest enterprise equals or exceeds the income of many large
>    governments. Elite households reap phenomenal gains from scale
>    increases. The wealthiest household in the global culture may be 50
>    million times richer than the wealthiest household in domestic-scale
>    cultures and 345 times wealthier than the richest private citizen in
>    the political-scale Roman empire.
>
>    [LINK]
>
>    Fig. 1.   Social dimensions of culture scale. Bars, left to right,
>    enterprise, polity, exchange network.
>
>    [LINK]
>
>    Fig. 2.   Economic dimensions of culture scale. Bars, left to right,
>    maximum household wealth, maximum enterprise income, maximum political
>    income.
>
>         Elites use specific cultural processes to produce and maintain
>    cultures of particular scales. Cultural processes are a series of
>    culturally shaped human actions that produce particular cultural
>    outcomes and are commonly invoked by theorists to explain cultural
>    evolution.
>
>         For the domestic-scale culture, the characteristic cultural
>    process is sapienization, the biocultural production and maintenance
>    of human beings, human societies, and cultures, including
>    conceptualization (producing abstract concepts and symbols that shape
>    behavior), materialization (giving physical form to concepts),
>    verbalization (producing human speech), socialization (producing
>    permanent human societies), cultural transmission (reproducing
>    culture), subsistence intensification (producing more food/km2), and
>    sedentization (village life).
>
>         For the political-scale culture, the characteristic cultural
>    process is politicization, the concentration of social power by power
>    elites who co-opt sapienization processes and add new processes to
>    produce and maintain political power, including taxation (extracting
>    surplus production to support government), specialization (government
>    employment), militarization (use of military force to expand state
>    power), and urbanization.
>
>         For the commercial-scale culture, the characteristic cultural
>    process is commercialization, the concentration of social power by
>    power elites who co-opt politicization processes and add new processes
>    to produce and maintain business enterprise, including
>    industrialization (mass production of goods and services),
>    commodification (markets for land, labor, money), capitalization
>    (ownership and control of capital separated from labor),
>    externalization (production costs socialized, benefits privatized),
>    corporatization (business enterprise becomes suprahuman), elitization
>    (detachment of elites from community), supralocalization (ownership is
>    detached from community), and financialization (investment detached
>    from production).
>
>         It is significant that only the sapienization process is
>    specifically focused on household well-being, and then only when it is
>    domestically directed. The power-elite hypothesis suggests that elites
>    will invent and promote new cultural processes to increase their
>    social power and also appropriate earlier processes. For example, the
>    elite-directed politicization process may be supported by the
>    sapienization subprocesses of ideological conceptualization and
>    materialization and may require subsistence intensification to support
>    specialization. Furthermore, the commercialization process now
>    overpowers parental cultural transmission with mass market
>    advertising, and commercial elites routinely appropriate political
>    power and use it to commercial advantage.
>
>         The model proposed here is extremely broad, and it is impossible
>    to refer to more than a few of the many different processes and
>    subprocesses that elites can use to concentrate power. The broadest
>    cross-cultural differences are only schematically summarized in the
>    very simple sapienization/politicization/commercialization framework.
>    What makes this approach interesting is that the focus on power elites
>    and scale raises many important questions that can only be answered by
>    further research. The power and scale effects of specific subprocesses
>    in particular cultures can be expected to vary in important ways that
>    will require close attention to the details of culture, history, and
>    environment. The wealth-concentrating effects of a few
>    commercialization subprocesses will be briefly examined in the case
>    study below, but even here, with such a rich data base there is
>    considerable opportunity for more detailed treatment as well as future
>    research.
>
>    Growth and Elite Power in Commercial-Scale Cultures
>
>         Commercial-scale cultures were produced by new cultural
>    subprocesses that promoted capitalist economic systems and removed
>    both cultural and natural limits to growth. Industrial technology and
>    new energy sources were used to increase the rate and scale of
>    commercial transactions and to generate higher levels of social power
>    through economic growth. Modern economists conceptualized economic
>    growth under capitalism as a radical break from "traditional"
>    politically organized civilizations, yet they initially believed that
>    growth nevertheless required powerful governments, and they argued
>    that particular government policies were crucial for national economic
>    growth to achieve "take-off" momentum (Galbraith 1985, Rostow 1962).
>    When national economic growth slowed, power elites promoted "New
>    Growth Theory," favoring a globally integrated economy based on small,
>    weak governments, minimal regulation of commerce, and removal of all
>    trade barriers (Johnson, Holmes, and Kirkpatrick 1998:4; Beach and
>    Davis 1998). The emerging global-scale, commercially organized
>    cultural system was designed after 1945 and accelerated after 1975
>    when the computer and communication revolution produced what Castells
>    (1998) calls the information age. The global economy may be directed
>    by a loose network of no more than 500 elites who occupy key positions
>    in newly created international economic institutions, such as the
>    International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade
>    Organization, and the boards of the world's largest corporations and
>    financial institutions. The promotion of economic growth is the single
>    objective of this new power elite.
>
>         The commodification of property was a key first step in the
>    concentration of social power under capitalization, because, as Adam
>    Smith (1776) observed, the majority who could not own property were
>    compelled to become renters and wage earners while the minority became
>    owner-managers of productive capital. Commercial elites accumulate
>    social power measured as money, because as a cultural symbol money has
>    infinite growth potential. Corporatization and supralocalization are
>    two other crucial growth processes. Corporatization, the formation of
>    business corporations, allows financial capital to accumulate beyond
>    the life span of individuals and makes elite power anonymous and thus
>    more difficult to control or limit. When property ownership becomes
>    supralocal, elites can invest in property in many different
>    communities.
>
>         An ideology of growth has been a prominent feature of the
>    global-scale commercial culture at least since Adam Smith advocated
>    continual economic progress as the only way to ensure that poor people
>    would feel hopeful in the face of rising inequality. In the late 20th
>    century such prominent measures of growth as the gross domestic
>    product and the Dow Jones average are materializations of growth
>    ideology that sustain social power in the same way as the statuary and
>    monumental constructions of ancient civilizations (DeMarrais,
>    Castillo, and Earle 1996). Because power-elite theory introduces human
>    agency to the growth process, it challenges the commercial
>    establishment's ideology that growth is a natural and thus inevitable
>    process. In his critique of Mills's (1956) argument that a power elite
>    directed the course of America's development, Parsons (1960:207)
>    contended that more powerful elites and more concentrated corporations
>    were simply a "normal outcome" of the scale increase that accompanied
>    "the process of growth and differentiation of the economy." He
>    correctly connected increased scale with increased power but was too
>    willing to treat growth itself as natural. Advancing a similar
>    argument, the economist Lester Thurow (1996) has used the geological
>    principles of plate tectonics to explain economic globalization,
>    suggesting that economic growth is an irresistible force. In contrast,
>    Mills states: "The course of events in our time depends more on a
>    series of human decisions than on any inevitable fate" (1956:21).
>    Power-elite theory assumes that economic growth is a humanly directed
>    cultural, not a natural, process, although if unchecked, power
>    concentration emerges "naturally" from the scale increases produced by
>    growth.
>
>         Growth processes that increase the scale of communities and local
>    economies may make it difficult for many households to retain control
>    over crucial economic resources such as homes, property, and small
>    businesses. Growth may cause increases in property value and in
>    supralocal and corporate ownership, property income may become more
>    important, and wage earners may shift from well-paid manufacturing
>    jobs toward low-paid service employment while ever-higher incomes go
>    to a smaller proportion who are professionals, executives, and
>    investors. Growth may encourage large corporations, real estate
>    investment trusts, and local elites to outbid middle- and lower-income
>    households for control of the economic assets in small towns and
>    cities that keep local households out of poverty. Households that lose
>    in this unequal market competition may face a declining standard of
>    living and may slip into poverty. Surprisingly little is known in
>    detail about how growth is related to the household-level distribution
>    of economic resources in specific communities within a region. The
>    extent to which remote investors and local economic elites may direct
>    and differentially benefit from the growth process is also unclear.
>    Detailed ethnographic research is needed on these issues.
>
>    Growth in America
>
>         The changes in scale and elite power produced by the
>    commercialization process and unlimited growth can be explored with a
>    simple model of growth in American income and population since 1790.
>    This growth was a result of public policy that promoted commercial
>    enterprise, expanded territorial boundaries by military conquest, and
>    overcame natural limits to growth by the development of massive
>    politically funded irrigation and transportation projects. In 1790
>    there were only 4 million people in the newly independent nation, with
>    an average household income that can be estimated at $8,000 in 1990
>    dollars. Analysis of colonial-era probate inventories by the historian
>    Alice Hanson Jones (1977, 1980) suggests that the distribution of
>    monetary income in 1790 may have broadly approximated the 1994
>    pattern, in which the top 5% of households receive 20% of income and
>    the top, middle, and bottom 20% of households respectively receive
>    46%, 15%, and 4% of income (Statistical Abstract of the United States
>    1996, table 719). Soltow's (1989) study of wealth distribution
>    suggests a similar pattern. His analysis of property ownership
>    recorded in the U.S. Census for 1798, 1850, 1860, and 1870 shows that
>    the first 100 years of economic growth did not significantly improve
>    the distribution of wealth.
>
>         Other historians have used tax assessment data for 19th-century
>    New York City to document a pattern of increased wealth concentration
>    alongside of persistent poverty (Jaher 1972, 1982; Pessen 1971, 1973).
>    Pessen found that in 1845 the top 4% had accumulated 81% of all
>    property wealth, even as per capita wealth quadrupled. Kinship data
>    showed conclusively that entrance to the top was determined primarily
>    by inherited wealth and social status. Only 2% of the 100 wealthiest
>    New York families in 1898 had started out poor.
>
>         This historical picture is very different from Tocqueville's
>    (1945 [1835 - 40]) vision of America as a land of equality and
>    opportunity. However, America did offer European immigrants more
>    upward mobility than their homelands. Many low-income 19th-century
>    American households did move up by gradual accumulation of small
>    savings during the domestic cycle (Soltow 1975, Wallace 1978). Soltow
>    (1975:53) estimates that by 1870 perhaps 52% of Americans held at
>    least $100 in property, but this was at a time when $60,000 in
>    accumulated wealth was needed to provide the luxury lifestyle that
>    only the top 545 Americans had attained.
>
>         If the distribution of household income in America in 1994,
>    including estimates for the richest Americans (Forbes, October 18,
>    1993, and October 17, 1994), is projected onto estimates of national
>    income and population for 1790, 1890, and 1993, the impact on the
>    distribution of social power of 200 years of growth in scale can be
>    broadly approximated (table 1). During this period population
>    increased by 65 times and national income by more than 1,000 times.
>    Because of the change in scale and given the distribution pattern, the
>    model suggests that the incomes of the highest elite households
>    increased exponentially, by up to 5,800 times, whereas median income
>    increased only linearly, by less than 6 times. Such rapid growth in
>    elite income must have been a powerful incentive for elites to promote
>    even more growth.
>
>    [LINK] TABLE 1   Scale and Elite Power in America, 1790 - 1993
>
>  etc....

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