THE PUZZLE OF LENSKI'S CURVE

In: Rationality and society, Volume 12, Issue 1, p. 25-38

Abstract

This article responds to calls for more attention to theoretical issues in the study of social stratification and mobility. As a starting point, I reconsider Lenski's Power and Privilege, the last bold effort to create a general theory of social stratification. One of Lenski's most interesting assertions was that the amount of inequality would `vary directly with the size of a society's surplus'. However, the mechanisms underlying this relation were not specified and, as Lenski himself noted, direct portionality fails to hold when one moves from agrarian to industrial societies. Utilizing game theory and a rate of return model, I suggest mechanisms that account for Lenski's curve (the observed curvilinear relationship between the size of the surplus and the amount of inequality).