Guest Post by Ed Stephan.
Carpetbagger asked me to expand on my post about the Italian economist/sociologist Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923). There I talked about the cycle Pareto said most governments went through: obtaining power through actual or promised problem-solving, followed by increasing concern about merely staying in power. Since problems aren’t getting solved, governments turn first to lying, then more lying, and when the lies are no longer believed, relying solely on force. At some point the problems mount up, opening the way for those not in power to claim the ability to solve them … and the cycle begins anew. Pareto saw the “circulation of elites” through democratic elections as a way of softening the extremes of this cycle.
The notion of “elites” tends to make most liberals’ hair stand on end. All of us, I think, would agree that there are elites within specific fields. There are very few world-class violinists, a much more sizeable group of players of professional quality, still more of amateur skill, and a virtual army of us who can’t play violin at all. The same is true with most other skills: ability to play football, write literature, rob banks, getting people to vote for us or read our blogs.
Pareto argued that “ability to make money” was just like those other abilities. The very rich are very few, the well-off are more numerous but still rare, most people are well down the income scale. He pictured these types of distribution as in Fig. A (he also developed a famous formula for a continous line of this shape called the “Pareto curve” – there are many later subtle variations, but this is good enough for our purpose).
This fact of unequal distribution, of wealth particularly, has always been disturbing to liberals who see such a curve as reflecting some kind of conspiracy to keep the poor in their place. In contrast, we have been taught to think more in terms of Fig. B, roughly modeling what is called the “normal distribution” or the “bell-shaped curve.”
That curve has an interesting history all on its own, much too long to do more than sketch here. It was developed to describe errors of observation in astronomy. I say the star is here, you say it’s there, someone else picks another spot and so on. Where is it? God only knows. What we have are a bunch of all-too-human estimates, i.e., errors of varying degree. The medieval view was for someone (preferably infallible) to pick “the best” guess. The Belgian statistician Quetelet suggested taking them all into account and averaging them, the more extreme errors canceling each other out. He came to believe that all of nature was distributed this way (lengths of ears of corn, heights of people, etc.), extreme circumstances producing highs and lows around some middle value. The “curve of normal error” came to be called the “normal curve”.
Political Implications. The normal curve happened to fit the style of political thought which was emerging in Europe. Rather than the aristocatic elites (Fig A) with “lower levels” looking to “their betters” for guidance, in a democracy there would a distribution of opinion, with some few leaning left, a similar few leaning right, with most of us in the middle (Fig B). Quetelet even envisioned a time when social scientists would be able to measure such distributions, a procedure we now take for granted in the form of measuring “public opinion”, in order to know what the French revolutionaries called the “national will”, what Quetelet called the will of the “average man”.
When I was an undergraduate there was a popular sociology textbook which showed the two distributions, Fig B representing the distribution of intelligence (I.Q. scores) and Fig A showing the distribution of income in the U.S. The title under the display was “Is This Fair?” implying that since our “native abilities” were normally distributed, our incomes ought to be, too … unless some conspiracy was at work to skew the “normal” distribution in this “abnormal” way.
I.Q. Tests. As it happened, when I first saw that display I had just been reading about the history of the I.Q. test. Intelligence, generally, is distributed like any other ability (Fig A) — extremely rare Einsteins, fairly rare bright/pedant/nerds, a much more numerous rest of us. In fact, it took fifty years of development (bowing to Quetelet’s faith in the universality of his curve) to generate a system which would produce I.Q. scores of having a “normal” distribution. And that, in addition to fitting our democratic sensibilities, got enshrined in our school systems: “special” and “gifted” programs for the extremes, with most of us “normals” taking the standard fare.
Pareto argued that Fig A describes what happens “naturally”, i.e., without governmental interference. Countering the Marxists of his day, he said: Suppose you equalized incomes for every household, a little random variation producing something like Fig B. If you went away for a year, leaving things to take their own course, when you came back the incomes would look like Fig A. That is because some people would be very good at making the most of their opportunites and would move up; most, lacking such talent or interest, would drift down the scale. You’d be right back where you were before you equalized the incomes.
Conservatives have used precisely this model to argue that widespread poverty is normal, that markets should be free of governmental interference. It seems to me that liberals need to take this model into account, too. Not as a “natural” condition but as part of the nature of the markets we create and can modify … with political effort. Such expenditures include knowledge about what’s going on in the market (as opposed to Cheney’s secret meetings with Enron), regulation of markets to make sure that there isn’t unfair manipulation of them by entrenched elites, “safety nets” for those who (the model predicts) will fall below some standard of living.
Social “Facts”. Proving (or positing) that something is “natural” doesn’t mean it has to be so in all its effects. If I want to grow a garden on the side of hill, it may be depressing to learn that water “naturally” runs downhill. I could, of course, pray that it were otherwise and ask the gods to make it so. I could accept my lot and bemoan the wealth of those who live down by the stream. Or I could learn something more about the “natural” world – including how to make a pump, e.g., to get the water where I want it. I think something like that needs to be done on the left. Our markets and their consequences are not simply “natural” — they can be studied and politically adapted to meet the needs we specify. We need not, to quote Bryan, be “crucified on a cross of gold” (or any other economic “fact”).
Almost no important social or economic variable is “distributed normally”, like a bell-shaped curve. All them are more or less skewed. Einsteins and Namaths and Ronald Reagans and JFKs are rare — as a matter of policy, you shouldn’t count on them to show up. This raises serious and fundamental questions about how we “frame” poitical issues. It also raises important questions about how to study the elusive, and possibly illusory, notion of “public opinion”.
If Pareto’s model is a better mirror of reality, the whole notion of measuring public opinion, either through large scale national random samples or a simple show of hands in a focus group, comes into question. Are we looking at an apparent number of independent votes, or are those rather dependent on, and reflective of, very few “opinion leaders”, what Pareto called the statistical “elite”? By the logic of the “normal” distribution, it is unlikely that a random sample or a focus group will contain such “ab-normal” opinion leaders. If they don’t, what use are such procedures? what are they really measuring?
Pareto has often been ignored by those on the left, or condemned as an enemy of the (Marxist) left. He was, in fact, offered a seat in the Italian Senate by the fascist Mussolini. I’m pleased to say that he declined the honor and moved, along with his mistress and 40 angora cats, into retirement near Lake Geneva.