Socioeconomic Growth, Culture Scale, and Household Well-Being: A Test of the Power-Elite Hypothesis

Abstract

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.