Abstract
The Surplus Theory of Social Stratification explains of wealth in terms of (1) the fugitivity of wealth not needed to sustain the production of more wealth, (2) the tendency of wealth to flow into the hands of those who are already disproportionately wealthy, and (3) the ability of workers in an industrial society to retain a greater share of the wealth they produce than workers in societies with more primitive technologies. Size distributions of wealth from societies at different levels of technology can be fitted by a family of gamma distributions, whose shape parameter is related to a society's level of technology. The Surplus Theory implies a stochastic process that generates gamma-like distributions. Analysis of this the Inequality Process, explains many facts about size distributions of personal wealth. This paper presents a general theory of the size distribution of personal wealth. The paper shows that the Surplus Theory of Social Stratification implies a stochastic called here the inequality process, that reproduces the major features of size distributions of personal wealth in societies at various technological levels. 'This paper brings together two literatures without cross-citations. These are (1) the literature on the fitting of probability density functions to size distributions of personal wealth, and (2) the literature in anthropology, social archeology, and sociology on the emergence of as populations of hunter/gatherers developed agriculture, the literature of the Surplus Theory of Social Stratification. This paper assumes that the concept of wealth has very nearly the same meaning in societies as different as those of hunter/gatherers on the one hand and industrial societies on the other. However, no comparisons
Published Version
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