-Caveat Lector- .............................................................. Forwarded from the A-albionic Research [Not Necessarily Endorsed]: http://a-albionic.com/a-albionic.htmlFrom: Taylor, John (JH) <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: A Test of the Power-Elite Hypothesis1 Date: Monday, December 06, 1999 4:55 PM http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/CA/journal/issues/v40n5/995002/995002.text. html 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 The differences between 1790 America and 1993 America highlight the significance of scale and cultural process. In 1790 America was 95% rural, with social power organized predominantly at the domestic level. Most people did not need money to survive. There were no large corporations, banking systems, or stock markets. New York, the largest city, had only 33,000 people. Households were self-sustaining, although they enjoyed few luxuries. In a sense, except for slavery and the few urban poor, who were often immigrants, poverty did not become widespread until commercialization became dominant and everyone needed a monetary income. Commercialization involved a progressive increase in the scale of business enterprise from simple sole proprietorships and single-unit mercantile partnerships in the 1790s to multiunit enterprises in the 1850s, giant vertically integrated, multinational, mass-production, mass-marketing corporations in the 1880s, and giant conglomerates in the 1960s. These organizational changes represent the managerial revolution detailed by Chandler (1977). Commercialization also increased the scale of American communities and changed the distribution of social power. At the national level business resources have become highly concentrated, paralleling trends in income distribution. This has had important implications for households because corporatization has dramatically reduced the economic power of sole-proprietorship businesses across America. This change in the scale of business enterprise has transformed commercial life in small communities, making participation in markets difficult for many small business people. Even commercial real estate ownership, which in America has long been the domain of individuals, small partnerships, and family corporations, is shifting toward powerful nationally organized real estate investment trusts, which have existed only since 1960. Corporatization is so extensive that, according to 1995 tax return data, the 50 largest U.S. corporations accounted for more business revenue than all the country's 17 million partnerships and sole proprietorships (Fortune, April 29, 1996; U.S. Internal Revenue Service 1995). A question for this research is how such national-level trends relate to the ownership and control of local property assets, where they may have a very direct impact on households. Urban Growth in the Pacific Northwest The work of urban sociologists and economists on different aspects of American urban growth has produced contradictory results. Urban growth and city size are assumed to be related to income distribution, but the issue remains complex and controversial (Chakravorty 1996, Kennedy and Nord 1984). Using census data for cities of 250,000 or more, some have argued that urban growth leads to income inequality because rising property values and population growth produce monopoly rent profits for landowners or favor certain businesses (Haworth, Long, and Rasmussen 1978, 1982; Nord 1983; Walker 1979). These results have proved difficult to replicate, and explanations are speculative. Others have challenged the monopoly hypothesis and attributed growth-related urban inequality to migration by workers with different skill levels that could produce various income distributions (Hirsch 1982). Researchers who have included cities as small as 2,500 have found a [INLINE] -shaped distribution, with cities of 10,000 - 50,000 showing the most equitable income distributions and greater inequality in smaller or larger cities (Nord 1980). Canadian researchers found no increase in inequality with growth in Canadian cities and attributed the American findings to unspecified "particularities of US cities" (Soroka 1984). The few researchers who have considered historic trends have found interpretation even more difficult (Kennedy and Nord 1984). The methodological shortcomings of much of this research are its reliance on aggregate census data, its treatment of cities as separate units, and its inability to test the significance of specific growth processes. Marxist theorists see urban growth as driven by the members of a property-owning capitalist class who seek capital accumulation by extracting profits from the working class. This view treats growth as a humanly directed process involving social power, but individual capitalists in fact compete with each other, and workers may lack class consciousness (Harvey 1985). The role of power elites in urban growth has been debated extensively, with the elitists arguing that elites direct growth, whereas the pluralists see no broad elite coalition (Harding 1996). Harvey Molotch (1976, 1979, 1988) argues that because urban elites have the most to gain from growth, they invariably form a "growth machine" coalition of prominent property owners, business people, and investors to lobby local governments for pro-growth policies. A methodological weakness of this approach has been its definition and measurement of power and the difficulty of linking individual elites to political decision making (Harding 1996). Elites have usually been identified by reputation using survey questionnaires (Hunter 1953), but this is a very subjective approach. The unit of study has also been problematic, because cities or communities are clearly not independent with respect to power. My research is designed to overcome these methodological difficulties by focusing on all urban places within a single region, examining specific growth processes, and looking ethnographically at the household level using an empirical and replicable definition of power. My version of power-elite theory assumes that the type and degree of growth in urban economic assets and the way in which economic power is allocated to different categories of owners, whether individual, public, commercial, or nonprofit, are directly shaped by zoning, annexation, and taxation decisions made by local officials (Babcock 1966). Whether urban officials are themselves power elites is an empirical question, but it is likely that their decision making will be influenced by the interests of power elites. THE PALOUSE The Palouse covers two counties in extreme eastern Washington (fig. 3). The study population consists of some 260,000 people,3 58% of the 447,500 total population of the combined counties. Spokane County's 4,566-km2 area includes the city of Spokane's compact urban center, a sprawling suburban area, and an extensive agricultural zone of dry farming and cattle ranching. The 188,000 people in the city of Spokane constitute nearly three-fourths of the study population. Spokane is the commercial center of a 209,790-km2 self-proclaimed "Inland Empire" spread across eastern Washington, northern Idaho, and western Montana, where economic activities have historically focused on agriculture, mining, and timber production. Economic development is accelerating, and construction industries are prospering. Several multimillion-dollar publicly traded corporations are headquartered in Spokane, as well as some of the largest privately owned corporations in the state. The ongoing development of gated communities with costly "executive" homes associated with private golf courses indicates that part of the population is prospering, yet wages in the county are below state and national levels in most employment categories. Underemployment and the cost of living are high, and housing costs have increased very rapidly. Poverty rates are well above state, regional, and national averages, and some of the largest concentrations of low-income households in the state occur in Spokane. [LINK] Fig. 3. The Palouse region. sB , metropolitan center (100,000+); OS , city (10,000 - 99,000); o , town (2,500 - 9,999); 0m , village (100 - 2,499). Adjacent Whitman County is larger in area that Spokane County but contains only 41,000 people, just 10% of Spokane's population. Whitman County is the center of one of the world's richest soft-wheat-producing regions, thanks to its ideal deep loess soils and suitable climate. This unique landscape of rolling, dunelike wheat-covered hills overlaps into Idaho and Spokane County and is called the Palouse after the indigenous peoples who lived in the region before European settlers invaded it in the 1870s and 1880s. Sixty percent of Whitman County's people live in the city of Pullman, and most of the economic value is produced by the service sector, although most of the land area is devoted to agriculture and grazing. For 9,000 years the Palouse was controlled by small-scale, domestically organized foraging cultures. Big game, migratory salmon, roots, and berries sustained perhaps 10,000 people at a maintenance level. The politically directed Euro-American invasion of the region began with the 1804 - 6 Lewis and Clark Expedition, followed by a trading fort in 1818, Christian missionaries in 1836, Indian treaties and reservations in 1855, and final military conquest in the Nez Perce War of 1877. European immigrants poured in. By 1890 more than 25,000 people were living in the new rail-hub city of Spokane and eight incorporated villages. By 1910 the population had swelled to 172,684, with virtually all of the arable land platted and under cultivation. The practical limits of dry farming with human labor, animal traction, and steam tractors were soon reached, and urban growth paused after more than quadrupling within 20 years (table 2). Spokane had become a metropolitan center, 2 villages had become towns, and 12 new villages had been incorporated. [LINK] TABLE 2 Growth of Palouse Towns and Cities, 1890 - 1990 Beginning in the 1930s Palouse farmers shifted to fossil-fuel-based industrial technology to reduce their labor requirements and increase the size of their farms, their productivity, and their profits. Many villages declined as displaced farmers moved into towns and cities. By 1960 the population living in towns had almost doubled, and one town had become a city. County zoning restrictions designed to protect agricultural land meant that further urban growth required increasing urban densities and expansion of urban boundaries by incremental annexations. Between 1960 and 1996 a total of 65 km2 of land was annexed, almost entirely by the two largest urban centers, and the population of the city and towns doubled, while the villages continued to decline. Growth after 1970 was accompanied by a boom in new construction and a tripling of per capita property values. Overall growth in population and property between 1890 and 1990 was accompanied by more than a fourfold growth in per capita income in constant dollars. The present study includes all 27 officially incorporated municipalities, three unincorporated areas recognized as places by the census bureau, and two neighborhoods. In comparison with other parts of the country, these towns are relatively new; 9 have been incorporated only since 1900. 3 Population of 259,141 in the incorporated portions of 27 incorporated municipalities of Spokane and Whitman Counties as estimated for 1996 by the State of Washington, Office of Financial Management (1996), plus my projections, based on the 1990 U.S. Census, for the unincorporated census places of Colbert, Liberty Lake, and Otis Orchards in Spokane County. PROPERTY OWNERSHIP AND HOUSEHOLD LIVING STANDARDS To assess how economic benefits are distributed as growth occurs, Palouse households were ranked by the value of their real property holdings as poor ($0 - $9,999), maintenance-level ($10,000 - $74,999), and growth-level ($75,000+). These broad ranks are assumed to correspond to distinct income levels; poor households are unlikely to generate income sufficient for adequate maintenance, maintenance-level households can meet their basic material needs, whereas growth-level households can both meet current needs and invest to raise their material level. This living-standard scale is assumed to reflect household differences in level and source of income, household structure, housing, diet, and rate of saving, as well as value of economic assets. Nationally, 29% of U.S. households were in the growth-level category in 1993 (Statistical Abstract of the United States 1996, table 715). Growth-level householders are skilled wage-earners, salaried professionals, or business owners who can purchase relatively high-value houses and may derive property income from their investments. They also have the potential to own rental property. In contrast, low income is associated with low rates of home ownership, because income determines whether a first-time buyer can save for a down payment and qualify for a mortgage. Throughout the Palouse, property value was found to be positively related to community scale and population growth. This is a significant relationship for households because when growth in scale is accompanied by increased property value, people at lower income levels will be systematically cut out of the property market. The maintenance-level household category is based on the relationship between income level and consumption patterns expressed in "Engel's Law." The 19th-century statistician Ernst Engel noted that at lower household income levels a higher proportion of income is spent on food, and as household income increases progressively more is spent on durables, then on luxuries, then on savings. The economist Paul Samuelson (1964:209 - 10) calls the ability to save beyond present consumption "the greatest luxury of all." Savings can be invested in income-producing property and can produce "unearned" income directly. A 1990 Consumer Expenditure Survey published by the U.S. Department of Labor (1993) suggests that U.S. households do not save significant amounts until annual income exceeds $50,000. In this research it is assumed that households at the maintenance level are more likely to be wage earners and renters rather than salaried homeowners, and if they own property it is likely to be valued at below $75,000, a value just above the bottom 20% of houses in the western United States, which were valued at under $70,000 in 1993 (Statistical Abstract of the United States 1996, table 1195). The $0 - $9,999 property ownership rank for poor households is assumed to approximate the official U.S. 1994 poverty threshold of an income of $11,821 for a three-person household. The assumption is that on the average, households owning less than $10,000 is property assets are unlikely to have incomes above the official poverty threshold. They are more likely to be renters with significant debts and earning minimal wages that do not adequately meet basic subsistence needs. Single-parent families, newly formed households, the unemployed or underemployed, and the elderly may be in this category, along with many households that must depend on low-income jobs. Very high rents in urban areas may force property-less households to violate Engel's Law by spending less than their real needs would dictate on food, shelter, clothing, and health care, thus producing the material conditions of poverty. The ethnographic analysis that follows is based on massive computer data sets obtained from county tax assessors. "Ethnography" is here broadly understood as description of people, irrespective of the source of the data or the method of collection. Rather than relying on aggregate census data, random sampling, or interviews, this research covers all households in all municipalities in a two-county region and includes nonresident owners of property in the study area. The U.S. Census does not identify individual households, but property ownership is public information available at any county courthouse. It is also a broad indicator of household economic standing because nonfinancial assets, primarily homes and cars, constitute some 97% of the assets of the 70% of U.S. households earning less than $50,000 a year. This analysis of property ownership depends on a multistep procedure to extract, categorize, sort, and merge ownership data from the county assessor's computerized data sets. The Spokane County assessor's roll was obtained in July 1995 as a mainframe computer tape encoding 73 fields of information for all 190,051 parcels of property in the county. The Whitman County assessor's roll was obtained in digital form in May 1997, and it covered 37 information fields for all 41,529 parcels in that county. Assessed value is the basis of the property tax, which provides about 30% of state and local taxes. In Washington counties are required to assess the value of all property at 100% of "true and fair market value" and to revalue property at least every four years, considering sale price, replacement cost, and income-producing potential. However, assessed values tend to be conservative and lag behind the market. They may also be reduced by owner appeals. Furthermore, equivalent properties may have radically different market values from year to year and from one community to another. Market value is an ephemeral cultural construct that becomes real only when a particular property is sold, but assessed value is probably the best single measure of the relative value of holdings for comparisons between different owner categories within a large region. Property ownership is a measure of social power, but it cannot be equated with wealth unless debt liabilities are also considered. This research does not examine debt. The mainframe data sets were read using programs written in the SAS language4 to extract data for further sorting and analysis using standard PC-based spreadsheet and database programs. The typical procedure involved creating a file containing all the parcels from a specific location.5 A special computer program was written to compile the assessed values of all the parcels belonging to owners that the computer recognized as identical. However, the computer treated every minor variant of an owner name as a different owner, and therefore the resulting file had to be conflated by direct inspection. For example, the computer connected 2,590 parcels in a particular town with 1,364 owners, which were then manually conflated to 1,041. There was considerable room for judgment and error at this stage, and a conservative approach was adopted.6 Husbands and wives were treated as joint owners, and except with very common last names initials or common nicknames were accepted as evidence of identity. No attempt was made to identify extended families or kin groups. Owners were sorted as individuals, corporate businesses, business partnerships, government, nonprofit organizations, and trusts by inspection. There were probably a few cases in which separately listed spouses from the same household were inadvertently counted as separate owners; thus not all individual owners represent separate households. Mistakes of this sort are likely to have been random, but they have the effect of overstating the number of owner-households and making ownership appear to be somewhat less concentrated. It was also sometimes a matter of judgment whether a given business owner was a corporation, a partnership, or a sole proprietorship (household-owned), because businesses do not always use their legally registered names. Government owners included school districts, state universities, and other city, county, state, and federal government agencies. Nonprofit organizations included private schools, churches, and associations. Trusts most often appeared to be individual estates or family trusts, but these were not treated as individual household owners. The advantage of this procedure is that it can be replicated, tested, and refined by other researchers. This research is of necessity based on synchronic data, although it draws on history in important ways. Scale of municipality is here treated as a proxy measure for growth. Larger-scale municipalities are larger because they have grown, and this growth is historically demonstrated. It would certainly be desirable to test the findings reported here with a diachronic analysis of property ownership in these same communities, perhaps sampling by decades. However, a fully diachronic study on the scale undertaken here would be costly and time-consuming because the entire database would need to be manually transcribed. The early property records are handwritten, and even after computerized records were created the county assessors merely updated a running record rather than archiving annual files in digital form. A synchronic study also simplifies the analysis, because monetary values need not be adjusted for inflation and household living-standard measures can be applied uniformly. 4 The SAS language is a proprietary software system licensed by the SAS Institute Inc., Cary, N.C. 5 Property holdings are not expected to correspond precisely with municipal boundaries in either county. Furthermore, the "owner" populations assigned to municipalities in the two counties may differ somewhat in their relationship to the municipalities because of differences in the way the two data sets were constructed. The data field "site city," which was used to connect owners with municipalities in Spokane County, may include property beyond site-city municipal boundaries, especially for the metropolitan center. Whitman County property ownership was calculated from the "tax district" field in the data set, which may produce a closer match with municipal tax boundaries. The valuation figures calculated for this study often vary from the tax valuations published by the state (Washington State, Department of Revenue, 1995) because the study includes tax-exempt properties and because these data sets were collected in the middle rather than at the end of the tax year. The basic analysis, involving ranking of elites and owners, should not be affected by these variations because for the most part it excludes the metropolitan center, where boundary incongruities would be magnified. 6 John Bateman (1883:v - xxvi) discusses similar methodological problems and solutions in his pioneer ranking of British landowners based on the "New Domesday Book" of 1873. PROPERTY OWNERSHIP IN THE PALOUSE, 1995 - 97 In 1995 - 97 the county assessors calculated the value of all the land and buildings in the combined municipalities and two suburban communities of the Palouse region at more than $16 billion. Sixty percent of the total property value was owned by individual households. More than 25% was held by business partnerships and corporations; government and nonprofit organizations held only 12%, and the balance was held in trusts. Eighty-six percent of property value was concentrated in the metropolitan center, where 73% of the population was located. Thus, community scale broadly determined how property value was distributed, with the metropolitan center having per capita values four times higher and towns nearly two times higher than villages. This difference reflects a disproportionate increase in property value as growth in the economies and populations occurred in particular places. Property ownership proved to be even more concentrated than the national distribution of income. The assessed value of all property held by all 14,384 individual owners in the city, 5 towns, and 20 villages was found to total more than $1 billion. The top 20% of these individual owners held 52% of this value and the top 5% held 25%. This is significantly more than the 46% of national income received by the top 20% of households in 1994 and the 20% received by the top 5%. Focusing on owners without regard to nonowner residents, nonresident owners, or the scale of particular places would give an incomplete picture of the distribution of property ownership in the region. Not every household owned property, and not every individual owner was a resident. However, all the resident households in a place have an interest in how local property resources are owned and used and are here treated as part of a universe of owner/renters in evaluating the distribution of ownership. The 1990 Census reported that only 56% of Palouse urban households were home owners. When the estimated 9,967 renter households7 were combined with the 14,384 owners as the total universe of households interested in local property resources, the relative proportion held by the top 20% of owner/renters jumped to 69%. Supralocal property ownership rates have not yet been calculated for all owner categories, but preliminary analysis suggests that as many as one-third of individual owners may be nonresidents. Villages showed the lowest average apparent rate of only 12% supralocal ownership. When owner/renters in Palouse villages, towns, and the city are sorted by household living standard, then 32% of households in the growth category held 87% of the property value, leaving the remaining 68% with just 13% of the property. The 12,058 households in the poor category constituted half of the owner/renter universe but held less than 1% of the property value. When owners and renters were sorted by community scale, further significant differences were found. The number of renters increased as community scale increased. Home ownership rates averaged 75% in the villages but dropped to an average of 55% in towns and cities. This reflects the higher value of property as growth occurs and the higher entry requirements for home ownership. Significantly, as ownership rates declined, property also became more concentrated at the top. Ownership was most inequitable in the city, where growth rates were the highest. The 2,965 growth-level households in the city8 constituted 26% of owner/renter households but held 89% of the property (fig. 4). The 5,477 poor households made up 65% of households but held only 0.25% of the property value. In the 5 towns, 24% of households were in the growth-level category, but their share of property dropped to 69%. In the 20 villages growth-level households constituted less than 10% and held only 37% of the property value. [LINK] Fig. 4. Percentage of owner/renter households by living standard in Palouse communities by type, 1995 - 97. Bars, left to right, poor, maintenance-level, growth-level, elite. In smaller-scale places both absolute and per household property value declined, as did household living standard. Village owner/renter households held on the average less than $29,000 in property value. In towns the owner/renter average climbed to $48,000, but this did not mean that most households were better off because ownership was more concentrated. One of the most striking differences between places of different size and growth history is the limited number of elite households, holding property valued from $250,000 to more than $1 million, in towns and their virtual absence in villages in comparison with their prominence in the city and the metropolitan center (table 3). Palouse villages had the highest average proportion of maintenance-level households at over 50%, and, most remarkably, these controlled the highest proportion of any maintenance-level households at 61% of the property value, more than five times the holdings of maintenance-level households in towns. However, because total property values were much lower in the villages, individual maintenance-level household property holdings averaged $34,739, substantially less than the $43,187 town average for maintenance-level households. In towns and cities a much smaller proportion, only a third, of the owner/renters were maintenance-level, controlling 30% of the property. [LINK] TABLE 3 Average Number of Palouse Households by Community Scale and Property Ownership, 1995 - 97 The highest rates of property ownership by the highest proportion of maintenance-level households were found in the 12 villages that had remained stable or declined in population since 1950. These "no-growth" villages showed 55% of owner/renter households at the maintenance level controlling 72% of the property. There were proportionately fewer poor households in villages, and they held more property than poor households in towns or cities. Poor households in the remote villages9 held twice as much property value on the average as poor households in towns. From the perspective of individual households below the elite levels it is difficult to see why growth would be desirable, because the relatively small gain in value of their average holdings is overshadowed by the vast increase in the value of elite holdings. Furthermore, growth produces an enormous increase in the absolute number of poor households in the towns and the city, and on the average the property value held by them steadily declines. These findings dramatically confirm the popular wisdom that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer as the economy grows, but they also show that the poor become more numerous. Differential migration of poor households from villages to the city is no doubt part of this growth process, but the inability of poor households to acquire property means that growth does not adequately serve their basic needs. The inability to buy a home reflects inadequate household income in combination with soaring property values. Poverty and wealth are related. Low wages and high rents help maintain high investment income for property elites. These processes seem to parallel the high levels of poverty produced by growth at global and national levels as wealth has become increasingly concentrated. Thus, it appears that as growth increases community scale, fewer people come to control a larger share in the upper ranges of property value, and the absolute number of poor households increases dramatically as their property share declines. Towns and cities may have 10 to 60 or more times as many poor households as villages. Moreover, in the Palouse as in 1790s America, the quality of life is probably better in communities of smaller scale. Recent ethnographic research on a "no-growth" Palouse village (Allen 1989, Allen and Dillman 1994) describes a face-to-face community in which villagers have a strong sense of local identity and provide mutual support in ways that soften the commercialization process. Households need less money to live well in small, more self-sufficient communities. Houses in the villages are often smaller and older than in the towns and cities, but they are of adequate quality, and ample yards often support home gardens. 7 Non-home-owner households are assumed to be renters. The number of homeowners in 1996 is estimated by applying the 1990 Census homeownership rates for each place to the 1996 population estimates provided by the Washington State Office of Financial Management (1996). 8 The city is a university town where two-thirds (16,737 out of 24,600) of the population were students, many of whom were temporary residents and thus unlikely to own property. The figures used here partially correct for this factor by using the census estimate of households, which excludes students living in group quarters, rather than simply dividing population by average household size for the county. Many of the approximately 10,000 students living outside of group quarters rent housing in the community and are treated as part of the universe of owner/renter households. 9 Remote villages were at least 15 air miles from towns and cities and 30 miles from the metropolitan center. Commuting time was not calculated, but these distances appeared to place a subclass of five remote villages beyond the direct influence of the real estate markets in the towns and cities. THE PALOUSE PROPERTY ELITES In the fastest-growing towns and cities of the Palouse a tiny minority of individual owners own property at a scale that dwarfs the holdings of everyone in smaller communities. The $154.4 million in property held by the three largest owners in the region is substantially more than the $134.4 million owned by all the individual owners in the 20 Palouse villages with a combined population of 10,200. The top individual owner held $90.7 million in property. This magnitude of inequality disappears in national statistics, but it is significant for the daily lives of thousands of people in the Palouse because it is produced by steadily rising property values and rents. Many potential homeowners must rent, making it even harder for them to prosper economically. Property inequality of this scale can only be produced and sustained by high rates of growth in population, property transactions, and new construction, all of which generate public costs that must be shared by all taxpayers. The increase in the number of property elites in the Palouse parallels the increase in the number of high-income households that was seen in 200 years of growth in America. The rise of property elites is critically important because it represents a qualitative increase in the scale of the social power that can give a relative few the ability to shape the fortunes of entire communities and regions. The relative ranks of elites in particular communities reflect the difference in social power that may be readily perceived by local residents in particular communities, but relative elites from communities of different scales are not comparable. The average holdings of the top five individual property owners in each community scaled in step with the scale of the community (fig. 5).10 The top five elites in no-growth villages averaged only $85,000, while the top five elites in the remaining villages held $134,000 each. In the towns the top five elites held $1 million, in the city $5 million, and in the metropolitan center $35 million. Among the top five elites, the top individual often held significantly more than the other four. On the average the holdings of top individuals scaled $200,000, $1.8 million, $7 million, and $90 million for village, town, city, and metropolitan center respectively. [LINK] Fig. 5. Dimensions of property elite power in the Palouse by community scale, 1995 - 97. Elites had large holdings in single-unit residential property, but in larger-scale communities they were able to increase their holdings by diversifying into multifamily residences and commercial properties. There were virtually no apartments in the villages. For example, in Whitman County villages approximately 90% of the holdings of top five elites were in single-unit residences, while that proportion dropped to 28% and 17% in towns and the city respectively. The move into ownership of multifamily residences such as duplexes and apartments is important because owning many single-family rental properties can become relatively inefficient. The financial return is also much higher from high-value, high-density property, but higher-value properties may require partnerships or corporatization, zoning changes, and/or annexations. Thus, it is likely that urban property elites will encourage growth policies that will permit higher density and increased urban scale as an important means to increase their power. In the metropolitan center there were 2,858 elite owners of property worth $250,000 or more, including the 301 elites owning a $1 million or more, for a total of more than $1.7 billion in property, representing roughly 10% of all the individually owned property in the Palouse. It is not yet possible to say what percentage of owners these elites represent, because there is not yet an accurate count of all individual owners in the metropolitan center. Millionaire elites were uncommon outside of the metropolitan center, although there were 17 in the city and 16 in the five towns. The count of millionaire elites contains some overlaps because at least 4 held more than $1 million in property in more than one Palouse community. One owner held over $1 million each in the metropolitan center, the city, and one town. At least 20 of the millionaire elites also held $250,000 or more in other Palouse communities. Such elites are among the most important supralocal owners in the region. Not unexpectedly, the residences of millionaire elites tended to be separated from those of nonelites, and their very high-value properties were often concentrated in newly developed gated communities. At least 30 millionaire owners had holdings in one 4-square-mile area of a new suburb on the outskirts of the metropolitan center. The concentration of individual property value in such "luxury suburbs" reached the per capita level of $258,000, more than 3 times the $76,000 per capita rate in the metropolitan center and 12 times the $19,000 per capita value in villages. These high-value properties are both out of sight and out of reach of most residents of the Palouse. Elites were prominent owners of the central business districts of the metropolitan center and the city, but there were important differences related to scale and growth. The 40 blocks of the central business district in the metropolitan center consisted of multistoried commercial buildings and parking lots valued at $303.8 million. Most of this valuable commercial property was clearly beyond the reach of all but a relative handful of mostly elite individual owners, including 11 millionaire elites. In striking contrast, 50% of the $11.3 million in the 20-block central business district of the city was owned by individuals. There was only 1 millionaire elite among the 54 individual owners. This relatively low level of elite control in the city's downtown area is probably a result of its stability over many years. There are no buildings higher than two stories. Much of the new commercial growth has been in the expanding suburbs of the city, where it has been encouraged by zoning decisions. In contrast, both the central business district of the metropolitan center and its commercial suburbs have grown substantially in recent years, providing many opportunities for property elites to expand the value of their holdings. Millionaire elites resident outside the Palouse owned $88 million in the Palouse, more than the $82 million in total individually owned property in 16 villages. Property valued at more than $18 million in the metropolitan center was owned by individual residents of the eastern United States, one-third of it by individuals living in New York. This demonstrates the importance of supralocal ownership but also shows its limits. Supralocal owners are investors, and they are attracted to high-growth areas where rising values and the promise of increased transactions will bring profits. No-growth villages are unattractive places for such remote investors. With $20 million in smaller holdings outside of the metropolitan center, millionaire elites focused their investments in the rapidly growing suburbs ($9 million), the towns ($8 million), the city ($1.4 million), and the few growing villages ($1.4 million). Significantly, only $280,000 was invested in two of the three largest no-growth villages. This is strong evidence that a small number of often remote property elites are important beneficiaries of growth. It is not immediately obvious how supralocal owners could promote local pro-growth urban policy other than through their political contributions. Perhaps the strongest link between property elites and pro-growth political decision making is seen in the disproportionate representation of property owners in general and of top-20% elites in particular on city councils as community scale increases. The 27 incorporated urban places in the Palouse averaged 6 elected officials, for a total of 179 officials in 1994 - 95. One hundred eighteen, 65%, of these officials held a total of $9 million in individually owned property value. Property elites who were in the top 20% of owners for each locality accounted for 64% of the property-owner interest on the city councils. The average property holding by municipal officials of $76,000 put their households within the growth category. This is an incomplete measure of economic elites in local governments, because many officials are also likely to be business elites as well as property elites and some may be business and not property elites. Predictably, the total amount of property represented in city government increased with the scale of community, from an average of $208,000 in villages to $320,000, $956,000, and $1 million for towns, cities, and the metropolitan center respectively. The political influence of power elites is magnified because as urban scale increases, a single individual's vote is necessarily devalued and only the most highly motivated are likely to be politically engaged. If democratic ideals were realized and property ownership were not an important motivating factor for office-seekers, we would expect to see less, not more, property value represented in government as community scale increased. This is because average holdings decline and the absolute number of property-less people increases as population increases. The poor and property-less become the most numerous households in the towns and cities, and democratically they should have the largest voice in public affairs, but the "growth machine" seems to be a controlling power in the Palouse's larger communities just as Molotch (1976) would predict. A study of campaign donations by the local newspaper shows that property elites take an active role in influencing growth-shaping local political decision making. The newspaper (Spokesman Review, September 14, 1997) reported that donors located in recognized elite residential areas of the metropolitan center were the most prominent contributors to candidates in the metropolitan center 1997 municipal elections, accounting for one-fourth of total contributions. Only one-fourth of registered voters actually voted in the primary, giving elite donor participation even greater importance. 10 The values offered here are an incomplete measure of elite power because they count only individually owned property held in the Palouse. Top elites are likely to have additional holdings outside of the Palouse. Many top elites also have major holdings in partnerships and business corporations which are treated separately but greatly expand their actual power. This reflects the importance of corporatization and supralocal ownership as processes for continuing to concentrate power beyond the practical limits of individual property ownership. The ranking of $250,000 elites in the metropolitan center is provisional and will eventually be expanded, because it was based on only the top 10,000 unconflated owners ranked by property value, including all owner categories, out of 118,438 owners of 161,197 parcels. Future research will be needed to conflate, sort, and rerank all metropolitan-center owners. Conclusions This study demonstrates the degree to which, in one region of the western United States, pro-growth government policies, together with the effects of differences in community scale and the emerging processes of corporatization and supralocal ownership, have worked to increase the social power of property elites while reducing living standards for many households. This process seems to be a continuation of a broad cultural evolutionary trend in which elite social power increases whenever power elites can devise cultural processes that will overcome growth thresholds and increase culture scale. Growth also leads to national and global wealth inequality, threatening the viability of domestic-scale cultures and communities even in the most remote locations (Bodley 1999). Growth may further impoverish poor people everywhere by making it difficult for them to retain or acquire property. The growth patterns found in the Palouse can provide a baseline for comparison with growth in other settings that may have developed more balanced commercially organized cultures. Continued growth in scale and power in the present commercial-scale world has been sustained by the widespread but apparently misleading perception that growth generally improves human well-being and opportunity. This sense of increasing prosperity is perhaps endorsed most strongly by the top 5% of the global population, who in 1997 enjoyed per capita incomes of more than $12,500 and received some 40% of global income.11 In a world where economic planners treat capital and labor as part of a single global pool and where the labor and resources of even the poorest contribute to overall growth, it seems reasonable to apply a single monetary measure of absolute prosperity to everyone, even though cross-cultural definitions of living standard may vary dramatically. Many individuals in what could be called the global middle class, the 25% of the world's population who thanks to economic growth now enjoy incomes of between $2,500 and $12,499 and receive perhaps 40% of global income, can realistically expect continued growth to help them maintain a comfortable living standard in a commercially organized culture. However, perhaps 4 billion people, or 70% of the world population, are still living below the maintenance level enjoyed by the middle and upper classes in commercially prosperous countries. The commercial prosperity that growth promises has little practical relevance for most of these global poor, who receive only 20% of the world's income and are being increasingly marginalized and excluded by global-scale commercialization. For example, most Sub-Saharan Africans and many Latin Americans and Asians have been almost totally bypassed by the benefits of recent economic growth (Castells 1998:70 - 165). Furthermore, even in the wealthiest countries, where the income floor has risen for many, relative income inequality is still associated with lowered absolute life chances as measured by higher mortality rates, increased stress, and reduced social cohesion for those at lower income levels (Gregorio, Walsh, and Paturzo 1997; Wilkinson 1996, 1997). The human problem is that commercial growth seems to shift social power to the top at an unprecedented scale. As a result, the absolute number of poor appears to be increasing faster than the number of truly wealthy. This suggests that growth has exceeded Pareto's theoretical optimum, the ideal condition where growth would stop because no one could get richer without making someone else poorer. Worldwide, there are now some 6 million high-net-worth, hypersuccessful individuals, each with investable assets of over $1 million. These wealthy few are a mere 0.1% of the global population, yet their great wealth gives them enormous power to shape everyone's future and a vested interest in accelerated growth. The world's high-net-worth individuals are disproportionately concentrated in Europe and North America. Together they hold assets worth a staggering $17.4 trillion (Gemini Consulting 1997, 1998). These assets are expected to grow at 10% a year and thus represent more than 8% of global income. If the world were a single corporation, these investors would collectively be among its prime beneficiaries and most significant controlling owners. It is possible that they have the most influence over global decision making and have most benefited from the new economic policies that elevate the interests of commerce above those of governments, communities, and households. Conspicuous wealth sets a standard that is realistically unattainable for most of humanity, but the emulation effect encourages the less privileged to support pro-growth policies that promise even the remote possibility of success. It should be stressed that commercialization as a means of organizing social power may not in itself be particularly problematic. The Basque cooperative system in the Mondragón region of Spain demonstrates that commercialization can operate at a domestic scale under democratic control (Morrison 1991). In Mondragón, by cultural consensus, workers are also business owners and managers, corporations are normally not larger than 500 owner/workers, wage scales remain equitable, and profits support local communities. The problem elsewhere is that culturally unregulated commercialization produces an increasingly unbalanced distribution of social power. Domestic-scale cultures and small-scale local communities seem better able to distribute social power in ways that serve the interests of most households, and they can more easily limit the expansion of social power. Social power may be best regulated when elites are local residents who can be recognized on a face-to-face basis and when direct political democracy can be used to balance the inequities of power. All of this argues for replacing monetary measures of development with a revised living-standard concept that emphasizes specific social-power issues such as access to a living wage, education, health care, and public life generally, including politics and the arts, and a reasonable minimum standard of physical comforts for food and housing. This recalls the United Nations 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which states: "Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care." Development becomes a human rights issue and an access and distribution problem rather than simply one of economic growth. This kind of development is almost certainly best implemented within empowered small-scale societies in which the nuances of local culture can be expressed. 11 These figures are based on the World Bank's (1995:table 30) percentage rates for income distribution by population quintile, which variously cover the years 1978 - 92 for individual countries. These rates were applied as per capita income averages by quintile using United Nations estimates for population and national income figures for all countries for 1965 and 1997. Sorting income figures by quintiles within each country reflects the extremes of wealth and poverty more accurately than a single national per capita income figure. The World Bank (1995:table 1) defines high-income countries as those with per capita incomes of $12,600, whereas low-income countries have incomes of $660 or below. The poverty line of $2,500 used in this paper is substantially higher but more realistically approximates the living-standard levels prevailing in the developed nations. Comments RICHARD N. ADAMS P.O. Box 74, Panajachel, Sololá, Guatemala. ([EMAIL PROTECTED]). 28 V 99 Bodley's model of social evolution is ambitious. My 800 words will deal only with concepts, because I have no experience with his "ethnographic" data and there is not enough space for theory (e.g., information, energy, dynamics, etc.). While I am not familiar with many of his sources, some elements are interesting, and if he is their inventor I commend him. The idea of three levels of concentric areas of social scale - the domestic, the political, and the commercial - is very useful. It allows a comfortable sorting out of various things that arise when one thinks of large- vs. small-scaled societies, the simple vs. the complex, the archaic vs. the modern, etc. - whatever dichotomies or trichotomies and social evolutionary processes one prefers. Now to concepts: What does Bodley mean by "power," "elite," and "scale"? He relates the three summarily: "This work defines elites as the individuals at the top of any rankable social-power scale." Let us examine these separately. "Power" is classically Weberian: "Social power refers broadly to individuals' ability to impose their will on others." If one hangs onto this definition in the rest of the essay, one is rapidly lost in a fairy landscape. Is the billionaire whose will is to make money exercising his will over the 70% of the population living below the poverty line? Exercising one's will over another presupposes relationships, and in this case the billionaire neither knows nor wants to know the others, nor they him. Moreover, when a dozen millionaires act in concert, are they acting as individuals, or merely as machine parts? Weber's definition works in small situations, within Bodley's domestic realm, or with the relationships that exist among the 500 elites who more or less direct the global commercial world, but even there one has to wrestle with what one may want to mean by "will." How many decisions do we make that influence and/or affect others but are against our own will? "Elites" for Bodley are specifically the "power elites," but he adds, "The focus here will be on political and economic elites." He cites Mosca as referring to a "governing minority," an interacting group. He also cites Pareto's economic elite as that inevitable sector to which will accrue the greatest portion of the wealth, a class of people unrelated to any "individual drives and ability." Indeed, as we continue reading, we never do come upon a definition of "elite." Turning to the works of others, among the most prominent treatments of elites is the work of Lowell Field and John Higley, encapsulated in their 1980 book but illustrated and explored at length in many other studies. For these political scientists elites "are the persons who occupy strategic positions in public and private bureaucratic organizations. Where the interest is in national elites ... these organizations are those that are large or otherwise powerful enough to enable the persons who command them to influence the outcomes of national policies individually, regularly and seriously." The authors also specify that their "paradigm does not cover simple, non-bureaucratized societies" (Field and Higley 1980:21). This concept is effective in that it can be applied to any complex society and the relative power and position of every section of the society's interests can be located. Bodley offers us nothing comparable to this. It appears that if "power" and "elite" are undefined, "power elite" joins them in a comfortable tautology. If by "elite" we mean the people at the top of the social-power scale, then we will know them when we see them because they exercise the power. And how do we know that it is they who exercise the power? Because they are at the top of the social-power scale. Finally, if "power" and "elite" are unanchored, there is no attempt whatsoever to define "scale." It seems to refer easily to differences in magnitude (as between the domestic, political, and commercial realms), to both quantity and quality of cultural goods and values. Is it a measure? Or it is something one can get "on top of"? Why is all this defining important? Because, as the essay stands, Bodley is unable to distinguish the Weberian individual exercising will over another individual from the several corporate boards of the Seven Sisters working in harmony to control world oil prices. And I do think that they are very different and that theoretically the differences are profound. However, Bodley's essay is much too short to handle all that he is implying and that it appears he really wants to address. If he is running too fast for me, at least he is running. So I vote for more power to him - may his scale (whatever that is) increase! ELIZABETH DEMARRAIS Department of Archaeology, University of Cambridge, Downing Street, Cambridge CB2 3DZ, U.K. ([EMAIL PROTECTED]). 1 V 99 Bodley illustrates the critical effects of culture scale on the strategies, opportunities, and constraints encountered by power elites. I welcome his willingness to consider agency and scale in such broad theoretical terms. While agency is integral to human social interactions, anthropologists need to think more explicitly about how culture scale and also change in scale influence the social contexts within which agents think, act, and respond to one another. According to recent models, social actors make and implement strategic decisions, work (with varying consequences) to influence others, and use symbolic and material resources in pursuit of their goals (Johnson 1989, Saitta 1994, Bourdieu 1977, Giddens 1984). These theories focus attention on power relations (Mann 1986) and conflicts of interest; they often accord agents and their activities central roles in explanations of social change. Yet once we have located agents in our analyses, we must ask how satisfactorily our models account for the observed patterns of change or stability. What historical conditions, structural relationships, or power configurations enable social actors to achieve their goals? What are the most significant constraints on the pursuit of power? Can we draw conclusions with general relevance from studies of agents acting under the specific circumstances set by history and cultural background? A promising direction for answers to these questions is found in Bodley's analysis of agency with respect to culture scale. Significantly, increase in culture scale affects both the opportunities for economic control and the degree to which cultural factors facilitate or restrain the exercise of power gained through that agency. At the same time, in smaller-scale societies, limitations on elite power mitigate the effects of increasing economic inequality. In domestic-scale cultures, for example, leadership often rests upon strategic acts of persuasion, bestowing of rewards, and feasting. Competitive generosity, the giving away of wealth, is one frequent route to prestige and social power (Clark and Blake 1994, Hayden 1996). At the same time, this strategic channelling of surplus confers benefits, albeit unequally, on both aggrandizers and their followers. In political-scale societies, agency is expressed through more elaborate (and exploitative) negotiations over rights to surplus. Power elites assert their rights to extract, allocate, and distribute surplus labor and its products (Saitta 1994). Claims to leadership require greater investment in legitimation (DeMarrais, Castillo and Earle 1996) and status competition (Dietler 1996), as well as investments in coercive force in case these other strategies should fail (Earle 1997). Yet even as political economies become more extractive in nature, a decline in living standards for lower-status households may not be inevitable. In some cases the emergence of permanent leaders may provide tangible benefits, such as greater security from attack, improved productive facilities or transport, or access to stored goods in times of shortage (Johnson and Earle 1987). In contrast, the most striking feature of commercial-scale cultures lies in the degree to which economic activity is disconnected from the regulatory mechanisms that place limits on social power. "Detachment" and "separation" of economic activities from the institutions that linked them to social and political spheres of activity are the dominant processes at the commercial scale. Similarly, the processes of supralocalization, corporatization, and elitization, among others, also serve to distance elites from communities and from political engagement. The second dramatic change is the decline in overall household well-being, measured by the large numbers of households whose incomes lie below the threshold for home ownership. Although it concerns me to see that debt has been left out of the analysis (because debt is so prevalent in property transactions), the results from the Palouse do suggest consistent, rational choices underlying the strategies pursued by elites. The relatively uniform distribution of elite property holdings at each level of the settlement hierarchy indicates purposeful efforts designed to maximize economic returns. At the commercial scale, then, Bodley's findings suggest that the strategies of power elites influence the well-being of lower-income households in direct and adverse ways. Yet there is more work to be done to understand how strongly power-elite strategies actually influence the direction of the global economy. For example, it is not obvious how property elites translate economic influence into political power. While elites hold disproportionate numbers of seats in local councils, supralocalization, corporatization, and elitization jointly work to remove elites from communities. Such changes clearly work against the consensus building that promotes pro-growth policies. Political contributions might offset this distancing effect, but we must encourage ethnographic work that might suggest how power elites exert political influence. Such work would enrich our understanding of the complex and varied impacts of power elites on modern commercial-scale societies. In sum, these are promising steps toward a model linking culture scale and power-elite strategies to understand the dynamics of the modern global economy. ROBERT DIRKS Department of Anthropology, Illinois State University, Normal, Ill. 61790, U.S.A. ([EMAIL PROTECTED]). 7 VI 99 A week rarely goes by in my town without public discussion about one or another growth-related issue. Tax incentives to industry, shortage of classroom space, increasing property taxes, zoning battles, airport expansion, the need for additional traffic lanes, etc. - the particulars are legion, and the story appears much the same in many parts of the country. Bodley ingeniously connects these contemporary American concerns to the hoary topic of sociocultural evolution. It occurs to him that the economic growth and increasing concentration of wealth and power going on today in his own backyard, eastern Washington, can be viewed as an extension of what has been going on worldwide ever since the earliest emergence of political culture. What explains this apparent continuity? Bodley suggests that an answer can be found in the dynamics of sociocultural evolution. A straightforward selectionist approach presents a stumbling block, however. The problem, as Bodley recognizes, is that elites have ultimately strengthened their hands in many and diverse environments. This makes it hard to specify the exogenous conditions favoring their success. Speculation about a runaway culture bias attempts to work around this difficulty. Endogenist theories avoid the problem of heterogeneous environments by modeling evolution as a matter of self-organization. New structures emerge in response to elementary motives such as population increase. C. R. Hallpike (1988), who has written the most complete theory of emergent sociocultural evolution to date, argues that change develops from ancient practices and belief and follows paths of least resistance. These are etched in part by psychological universals - in other words, human nature. Bodley rejects the idea that the increasing proportion of poor and powerless in society is natural and invokes directed evolution. Elite-directed sociocultural evolution, as he imagines it, involves the promotion of values and policies favoring growth, which in the long run serve no one but the elites themselves. Is this a falsifiable theory? Bodley characterizes his research as a hypothesis test, but does it not reveal merely another instance of scaling law - the tendency for the quantity of something to be inversely proportional to its rank among like things? We know that the distributions of wealth and income conform to this pattern. George Zipf, who originally discovered scaling, thought it applied only to human behavior and artifacts. Subsequently researchers have found many examples in physics and biology (Gell-Mann 1994:92 - 97). Scaling is an empirical phenomenon. Nobody at this point can explain it generally, let alone identify its implications for the study of elites and their influence on society. The problem is one of systems within systems, making it difficult to say where change originates. The often-heard assertion that change begins with the individual is too facile. A way of life must provide the individual with a motive to change, alternative visions, and the wherewithal to experiment. In the United States there has been a counterculture dedicated to down-sizing for many years. Relegated mainly to art and a few isolated corners of science, it has seldom been taken seriously. Even as recently as ten years ago, almost nobody where I live questioned locating a large automobile factory on the edge of town. The incentives offered to the company to build there were regarded as investments destined to pay big dividends. The community looked forward to growing. Today the politicians speak much more cautiously about growth, and antidevelopment voices have become every bit as loud as those favoring more business and industry. Is this the result of disappointments with the results of growth and development? Is it because elite developers have lost their monopoly over planning as the area has become increasingly metropolitan? Is it because a fair measure of prosperity in recent years has taken away the incentive for growth? The situation is complicated at the local level. At a higher level, one would expect simpler rules. Nevertheless, social scientists always have to be skeptical of the too-simple, the single-factor explanation, and that weighs heavily against Bodley's theory of elite-directed evolution. DAVID HYNDMAN Department of Anthropology and Sociology, University of Queensland, Brisbane 4072, Queensland, Australia ([EMAIL PROTECTED]). 28 IV 99 Bodley's culture-scale approach, which places foragers, tribals, chiefdoms, agrarian civilizations, and globally integrated commercial cultures within a single explanatory framework, contributes significantly to anthropological analysis. I agree with him that it is appropriate to speak in terms of difference in cultural scale when referring to domestic, political, and commercial means of organizing the distribution of social power. I likewise think that commoditization of property was a key first step in the concentration of social power under the capitalist mode of production and that economic growth should be viewed as a humanly directed "cultural," not a "natural," process. The extensive theoretical review of the relationships among culture, power, and scale tends, however, to privilege coevolutionary and biocultural perspectives over political economy and mode-of-production viewpoints. Bodley acknowledges that Marxist theorists similarly treat growth as a humanly directed process involving social power. Capitalists competing with one another and workers lacking class-consciousness are inappropriately dismissed as a Marxist methodological shortcoming, because they are equally applicable to cultural scale and power-elite theory. Wolf's (1982) kinship, tributary, and capitalist mode-of-production analysis receives relatively little discussion. Moreover, the cultural-economies perspective is overlooked; Halperin (1994), for example, shows that the "Kentucky Way" of householding articulates reciprocity, redistribution, and market exchange. The discussion of polities' becoming too large to be efficiently sustained against competing counterhegemonies could have acknowledged relevant globalization and localization theory on production of identity (e.g., Friedman 1994) and Fourth World theory on the role of nations in state breakup and breakdown (e.g., Nietschmann 1994). Bodley makes a compelling argument that the shift to transnational commercial empires has had enormous significance for humanity but has received remarkably little attention from anthropologists. His ethnographic case study provides welcome new research on the household- and local-community-level impact of increase in scale in the Palouse region. His research moves beyond the contradictory findings of sociology and economics, embracing the repatriation of anthropology as cultural critique (see Marcus and Fischer 1986). Scale of place is identified as an important dimension of the research. The Palouse is acknowledged as one of the world's richest soft-wheat-producing regions. The American invasion of the domestically organized foraging cultures started in the 19th century and ended in 1910 with virtually all the arable land under cultivation. It is interesting that urban places rather than the rural places of dunelike wheat-covered hills are chosen as the appropriate unit for the study of social power in this affluent agricultural region. I wonder if the urban elites enjoy more social power in the region than the farmers. I am reminded of The Northern Plainsmen (Bennett 1969) in the nearby Montana border region, where ranchers enjoyed greater social power than farmers and the Hutterite and Cree communities. While a postgraduate student at the University of Idaho in the early 1970s I was a resident of one of the no-growth Palouse villages seen as an unattractive place for investment by the remote urban property elites. I become enveloped in community mutual support networks, and villagers regularly acknowledged that they were more self-sufficient and needed less money to live well in the village than elsewhere in America. My short-term insider perspective coincides with Bodley's observation that the poor households of the remote Palouse villages did seem to have twice as much property on average as the poor households in the larger urban places. Urban growth in the Palouse region appears to improve living standards significantly for relatively few poor households. Bodley's ethnography reinforces the conclusion that development is a human rights issue and an access and distribution problem. The paper importantly contributes to our understanding of the worsening biocultural diversity crisis as an insidious outcome of contemporary commercially organized, globally integrated cultures (e.g., Hyndman 1994). JAMES H. MCDONALD Division of Behavioral and Cultural Sciences, University of Texas at San Antonio, San Antonio, Tex. 78249-0652, U.S.A. 8 VI 99 Bodley has written a theoretically ambitious, methodologically detailed, and data-driven paper on social complexity, power, and elite formation. His rigorous analysis of economic growth accompanying increases in social scale and how these processes lead to the increasing concentration of power and wealth in the hands of an ever-smaller number of elite players is a very useful contribution to a more nuanced theoretical understanding of social evolutionary processes. His overall conclusion may sound intuitive to many of us, and, in fact, many scholars make these claims, but what he effectively demonstrates through his Palouse case is how this actually operates. And while he is cautious about generalizing his case outside of eastern Washington (appropriately recognizing the importance of historical contingency and human agency so often missing in the more macro-oriented approaches taken, for example, by economists), having lived in the deindustrializing Midwest and in South Texas I found much to relate to in this article. Indeed, the study of places such as Laredo and San Antonio would make for a very interesting comparison. Both of these metropolitan areas are booming, yet one cannot help but be struck by the increasing poverty in the company of marked concentration of wealth in the hands of the local power elite. (This process is even more striking in Laredo, which lacks a robust middle class that might otherwise veil the process.) My reading of this paper came at an opportune time. I had recently entered the field to conduct research on globalization and small-scale commercial agriculture in Mexico under conditions of rapid change and found that Bodley's analytical framework engaged a number of processes that are emerging in the rural sector, most notably in the form of elites' attempting to promote and control economic growth. Mexico provides an interesting addendum to Bodley's primarily U.S. contextualization of the processes of the concentration and centralization of wealth and power in that it underscores that this process (1) is anything but linear and (2) subsumes the complex relationships of power elites at regional, national, and transnational levels. The global economy arrived with particular ferocity in Mexico. The aggressive implementation of neoliberal reforms by the administration of Carlos Salinas (1988 - 94) dismantled the state-centered economic system with incredible speed, culminating with the implementation of NAFTA in January 1994. In the wake of these major changes, the magic of the free market has failed so remarkably that even once prosperous commercial agricultural sectors face collapse. In the new market-centered model of development, the Mexican state shifted its social welfare burden onto individual farmers and effectively got out of the agriculture business. What ensued was widespread economic failure in the agricultural economy across diverse sectors and regions. Five years after the implementation of NAFTA, what seems to be emerging is an interesting variant of what Bodley describes as the weak state dominated by powerful private corporate interests in a country where the division between civil and political society is often murky at best. The state is getting back into the agriculture business, and what appears to be emerging is a curious alliance between the state and the rural elite. In the Mexican case, however, the state is not simply creating policies that advantage the rural elite. It also wants its share of the profits generated by the agricultural sector. At the same time, the state seems to be favoring policies that selectively break up certain domains of the old rural power elite (especially in the form of independent producers' unions) while favoring other rural elites (mostly of a newer variety) who are more disposed to new forms of development. The state's mantra is that farmers need to organize and produce with efficiency and quality in order to compete in the global marketplace. Toward those ends, state development resources are being channeled to large producers and regional strongmen with the goal of creating competitive producer-shareholder organizations (Stanford 1999). (In the case of the Mexican dairy industry, which is the focus of my current research, over the past two years the state has attempted to replace powerful independent dairymen's unions with a new form of rural producer organization under the direct control of the state, and it is channeling resources to producer-shareholder organizations that pasteurize, bottle, and market milk utilizing the state's underutilized dairy processing plants and distribution network.) As Bodley notes, the emergence of business corporations allows for the concentration and mystification of capital. To this it can be added that the producer organizations emerging in Mexico also redistribute the risk that has proven difficult if not impossible for many farmers to shoulder under conditions of rapid, radical change. If these new producer-shareholder organizations succeed as a business, the major benefactors will be the large producers and local strongmen who are their major shareholders. Other smaller producers and investors may benefit to some extent, but if Bodley's thesis holds we can expect even greater inequalities as an outcome of "successful" development efforts in rural Mexico.1 Should these new organizations fail in their bid for global competitiveness, however, Mexico will be relegated to the status of yet another weak, dependent state (but with an elastic and potentially very lucrative market) to be manipulated in the interest of the transnational power elite (e.g., Nestlé, Archer-Daniels-Midland, Cargill), and rural economies will collapse altogether. Bodley provides a powerful theoretical framework and a rigorous analysis of quantitative data. My only disappointment is with the lack of a rich ethnographic context to complement the quantitative socioeconomic data set upon which the article trades. We never come to know the elites, the downwardly mobile, or those in between. However, only so much can be done within the limits of an article, and what the author has done he has done very well. Reply JOHN H. BODLEY Pullman, Wash., U.S.A. 8 VII 99 I thank all the commentators for their helpful and encouraging appraisals of an ambitious and complex article. I am pleased that most of them seem to agree that culture scale is an important variable, that connections between scale, power, and human agency are worthy of investigation, and that it is useful to distinguish between domestic-, political-, and commercial-scale cultures. Some find my perspective directly applicable to their own experiences in the American Midwest (Dirks and McDonald) and in South Texas and Mexico (McDonald). It was not my intention, as Hyndman suggests, to "privilege" biocultural approaches over political economy approaches in my review of the growth-related literature. I welcome any perspective that will help us understand how and why growth occurs and how growth affects the well-being of households. While the commentators point to some of the difficulties in developing such a broad explanatory framework, they are generous and constructive in their criticisms. I am delighted to be informed of relevant new leads in the work of other researchers. Adams focuses on my use of the concepts of power, elite, and scale. He considers the standard Weberian definition of power as imposing one's will over others inadequate when applied to the impersonal and highly diffuse power relationships that exist in large-scale societies. However, I intentionally extend the concept of "will" to call attention to precisely these situations of diffuse and obscure power. I want a concept to cover anonymous power in complex societies and the unintended consequences of its use. The underlying reality is that, to follow Adams's example, the billionaire is in fact exercising his will over others when he makes seemingly anonymous decisions that allocate vast economic resources in ways that affect the lives of millions of people. The crucial theoretical point is that as social scale increases, specific individuals do wield more power, even as they become less visible as individuals. This is why, despite their importance, the human effects of scale increase seem so mysterious and have been so long overlooked. Adams also has trouble with my concept of elites as those at the top of any power scale and recommends the approach of political scientists Field and Higley (1980), who focus on strategically situated individuals in bureaucracies in complex societies. I prefer a broader concept of elites that can be applied to any measurable scale of power in any society, whether based on the number of individuals that a director might mobilize in a productive enterprise or someone's apparent wealth calculated in grain-equivalent values or the appraised value of personally owned real property. Likewise, scale is a flexible concept involving order-of-magnitude differences in measurable quantities that can produce qualitative differences. I did not cite but am comfortable with Webster's dictionary definitions of scale as "anything graduated ... used as a measure ... a graded system from the lowest to the highest." Scale differences can be found on many dimensions, but not all will prove useful. Elites are no doubt theoretically connected to power by a circular definition, as Adams notes. Others find this intuitively obvious, but nevertheless the cultural role of power elites often remains obscure. Dirks questions whether the observed outcomes of growth in scale are the result of elite-directed cultural evolution as I propose rather than simply the "natural" result of "scaling law." He also asks whether the power-elite hypothesis is a testable theory. Like functionalism, the power-elite theory is heuristic. Although difficult if not impossible to falsify, it remains useful. The size of cultural systems is by definition determined by various limits to scale. In order for growth to occur, existing limits must be overcome. Elite actions that have overcome limits have historically been richly rewarded. We thus have circumstantial evidence of growth-promoting elite agency. It is more difficult to find cases of scale increase that occur with no demonstrable elite agency or that actually punish elites, but it would be important to examine any such cases. Growth may not benefit all elites. There is no necessary conflict between scaling law and elite agency, because elites are simply taking advantage of the "natural" power-concentrating effects of scale increase that were observed by Zipf, Pareto, Mosca, and other scale theorists including Mayhew and Schollaert. In larger, more complex systems, where much greater power is concentrated, it is crucial to examine the possible role of elites. I agree with Dirks that we must be skeptical of single-factor explanations, but the disproportionate flow of growth benefits to elites is strong evidence for elite direction. However, in order for growth to occur, nonelites must do their part and share responsibility for the outcome even if they receive a smaller proportion of the rewards of growth and pay more of the costs. Hyndman, with direct experience in the Palouse, concurs with my observation that poor households are better-off in no-growth villages than in larger urban places. He wonders why, given the obvious agricultural wealth of the rural Palouse, I focused on urban elites rather than farmers. Many Palouse villages are ultimately dependent on agriculture, but agriculture is now overshadowed by other sectors of the economy in larger urban places and in the Palouse region generally. A preliminary look at Palouse agricultural property elites suggests that similar growth processes are at work in the rural sector, but that must be a separate research project. Adams commends me for perhaps inventing certain interesting elements of my approach and finds the three scale levels very useful. This particular conceptualization of domestic-, political-, and commercial-scale cultures evolved directly from the small-, large-, and global-scale culture organizational framework that I first presented in a 1991 conference paper (Bodley 1991, 1995) and used in the first edition of my Cultural Anthropology (1994a) and in Bodley (1994b). My treatment of social power borrows heavily from Mann (1986). There are also obvious close parallels between Wolf's (1982) kin-based, tributary, and capitalist economic systems and my broader tripartite scale scheme. DeMarrais notes that I omitted property debt from my Palouse analysis. It would be useful to include debt, but this is of course not public information. However, in the business world it is common to rank businesses by the value of their assets rather than their net worth. It is the power obtained from leveraging assets that often allows the amassing of further assets and power. As DeMarrais notes, we now need to ask how economic elites actually influence political power and the direction of the global economy. It is interesting that many cultural processes that generate growth and concentrate elite power also remove elites from local communities. I must respond to the implication in some of the comments, especially those of Adams and McDonald, that assessor's records are somehow not "ethnographic" data. In my view any quantitative data set can become "ethnographic" when it is used as descriptive anthropology. For example, the Domesday Survey is a quantitative data set that is also richly ethnographic. Likewise, quantitative property ownership records provide valuable insights on ancient Roman and Aztec life and can thus be used ethnographically. The 200,000 individual parcels of property that I examined in my Palouse research do not provide the kind of quantitative data that economists or sociologists have been interested in, but they do make it possible to ask many ethnographic questions. Much more can be gleaned from such property ownership data, including insights on kinship, family structure, and gender relations. I would hope that other anthropologists would examine public records of this sort in other settings. 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World development report 1995: Workers in an integrating world. Oxford: Oxford University Press. First citation in article 1 In the United States, the emergence of corporate agriculture in the 1940s and 1950s clearly deepened rural inequality. This is nowhere more clearly articulated than in Walter Goldschmidt's (1947) landmark study of the impact of industrial agriculture on rural communities in California. _________________________________________________________________ Forwarded for info and discussion from the New Paradigms Discussion List, not necessarily endorsed by: *********************************** Lloyd Miller, Research Director for A-albionic Research (POB 20273, Ferndale, MI 48220), a ruling class/conspiracy research resource for the entire political-ideological spectrum. Quarterly journal, book sales, rare/out-of-print searches, New Paradigms Discussion List, Weekly Up-date Lists & E-text Archive of research, intelligence, catalogs, & resources. 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