Australia historically has enjoyed high rates of homeownership, but the rate among twenty-five to thirty-four year-olds dropped from more than 60 per cent in 1981 to only 45 per cent in 2016. In America, the largest farmland holder is Bill Gates, with over 200,000 acres, while Ted Turner and John Malone preside over lordly estates of over two million acres each - larger than several American states.Īs property has concentrated, small-holders have come under increased pressure. On the European continent overall, farmland has fallen increasingly into the hands of a small cadre of corporate owners and the mega-wealthy. In Great Britain, where land prices have risen dramatically over the past decade, less than one per cent of the population owns half of all the land. This process has developed both in the tangible and digital economies. In the United States, as the conservative economist John Michaelson put it succinctly in 2018, the economic legacy of the last decade is ‘excessive corporate consolidation, a massive transfer of wealth to the top one per cent from the middle class.’ These trends can be seen even in social democracies like Sweden and Germany. Since 1978, China’s Gini coefficient, which measures inequality of wealth distribution, has tripled.Īn OECD report issued before the Covid pandemic finds that almost everywhere, the non-rich share of national wealth has declined. In avowedly socialist China, the top one per cent of the population holds about one-third of the country’s wealth, up from 20 per cent two decades ago. Today, only one hundred billionaires own that share, and Oxfam reduces that number to a mere twenty-six. Five years ago, around four hundred billionaires owned as much as half of the world’s assets. The new autocracy rises from a relentless economic concentration which has engendered a new and fabulously wealthy elite. Don’t expect a crudely effective dictatorship out of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four: we may remain, as we are now, nominally democratic, but be ruled by a technocratic class empowered by greater powers of surveillance than those enjoyed by even the nosiest of dictatorships. But a fuller explanation of Pareto's ‘quarantine’ requires us to look at the social psychology of intellectuals.We bemoan autocracies in Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, Russia and China but largely ignore the more subtle authoritarian trend in the West. He never missed an opportunity to break the thread of exposition in order to pursue some bright idea or display his arcane erudition.
#WELCOME TO THE PLUTOCRACY FULL#
Even his admirers describe this work as ‘monstrous’ – disorganized, unnecessarily long, full of pedantic distinctions, and continually interrupted by digressions, and by digressions within digression. Why has Pareto been ‘put in quarantine’? One reason is surely the irritating nature of his master-work, Treatise of General Sociology (published in 1916). Consider the exemplary case of David Held, a theorist of great repute, who managed to write a 321 page textbook called Models of Democracy without once mentioning Pareto's name. While Marx's scattered and inconsistent remarks on ‘the capitalist state’ have spawned a vast literature, Pareto is lucky to be acknowledged in a footnote. In particular, his penetrating discussion of ‘demagogic plutocracy’ (his term for the liberal state) has been strangely ignored by analysts of Western, or ‘bourgeois’, democracy. DESPITE HIS STATUS AS A FOUNDER OF MODERN SOCIAL SCIENCE, Pareto receives little scholarly attention.
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