Polity, Economy and Technoecology: Alternative Explanations for Income Inequality

This article reviews Simpson's (1993) commentary and extends his analysis. His contention that the influence of agrarian population density on income inequality is spurious due to a mutual correlation with land concentration cannot be sustained when optimal data sets and alternative indicators are considered. Moreover, Simpson's use of educational variables as strictly political indicators is inappropriate; he in fact never substantiates his claim that politics is paramount in stratification. Finally, most of the explained variance in income inequality is a product of the shared variances of the independent variables. Simpson's references to unique contributions are specious. I agree with Simpson (1993) that this exchange of commentaries helps to clarify issues, and I am grateful for the opportunity to do so. While Simpson apparently advances several strong reasons to suspect my previous analysis (Crenshaw 1992), in fact his critique falls well short of the mark. His nine points of contention revolve around three central concerns. First, are agrarian population density and technoeconomic heritage related, and is density's influence on income distribution spurious due to its correlation with land-ownership concentration (points 1, 2 and 7)? Second, are political democracy and educational enrollments political or economic determinants of income inequality, and what are their relationships to national development (points 3 and 6)? Finally, Simpson questions both the validity of energy consumption per capita as a measure of development and its utility in explaining the size distribution of income across nations (points 4 and 5). To take up the first point, the use of agrarian population density as an indicator of technoeconomic heritage is easily defended on both empirical and theoretical grounds. Although Simpson's supplemental analysis demonstrates the powerful influence of land concentration on income distribution, which apparently negates the effect of agricultural density, we should not accept his *Iwould like to thank William Form, Lowell Hargens, CraigJenkins, andRobertKanfmanfor suggestions and comments. Address all comments to the author, Department of Sociology, The Ohio State University, 300 Bricker Hall, 190 North Oval Mall, Columbus, OH 43210-1353. i The University of North Carolina Press Social Forces, March 1993, 71(3):807-816 This content downloaded from 157.55.39.26 on Sun, 04 Sep 2016 04:48:11 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 808 / Social Forces 71:3, March 1993 results at face value. First, he uses a nonoptimal source of data for land concentration; Muller and Seligson (1987) is preferable because these authors extend the Taylor and Hudson (1972)/Taylor and Jodice (1983) data on land distribution, yielding nine additional cases over and above the sample used by Simpson. Second, Simpson's analysis is a very narrow test; other indicators can be used to investigate the influence of agricultural inequality/density on income distribution. To provide a wider test, I also incorporate the percentage of agricultural households without land in 1970 (Muller & Seligson 1987) as an alternative measure of land inequality and the log of population density in 1960 as an alternate ecological-evolutionary indicator. Table 1 reports the results of replicating Simpson's supplemental analysis using larger data sets and alternative indicators. Gini coefficients of income inequality are dependent; both Muller (1988)/Simpson and Hoover (1989) data sets are compared. Equations 1 and 2 demonstrate that the log of agricultural density has a direct effect net of agricultural labor force and the landlessness variable, regardless of the formulation of the Gini coefficient. In equations 3 and 4, we see that agriculture density is washed out by the Gini coefficient of land concentration, but only for Hoover's sample. Finally, equations 5 and 6 suggest an unequivocal direct effect of population density on income distribution, net of other indicators and regardless of sample composition and size or formulation of the dependent variable. Although it is true that entering land concentration into the equation weakens the density coefficient, the ecological indicators are significant in 5 of 6 tests, direct refutation of Simpson's assertion that the density/inequality relationship is spurious. Moreover, these results are strengthened by eliminating influential cases, and other specifications, such as using land concentration weighted by the agrarian labor force (Muller & Seligson 1987; Boswell & Dixon 1990) lead to the same conclusions. To sum up, the results reported in my earlier article are robust; agrarian population density has a direct, negative effect on income inequality. If the question is whether land concentration is just one of many reasons that population density is related to income distribution, then the answer is yes. On the other hand, if the question is whether population density or agrarian population density are nothing more than proxies for land concentration, then the answer is clearly no. Why are population density and land-ownership concentration related at all? Simpson assumes that land concentration encourages low densities, presumably through capital-intensive agriculture which sloughs off labor and forces the population to subsist on inadequate lands or to engage in rural-tourban migration. To Simpson this allocation of land and tenure rights is clearly a political process, reflecting the unambiguous exercise of elite power. Although I would agree that the maintenance of high land-ownership concentration is in part political, this seemingly inordinate concentration of land may be in part a by-product of the transformation from horticultural to new agrarian society. Many scholars view land concentration as a result of colonialism (Boswell & Dixon 1990). What is often forgotten, however, is that the formerly horticultural societies of Latin America and Africa were thinly populated, a function of their technologies, and this shortage of labor fundamentally influenced the manner in which European colonists exploited these areas. While colonial histories are This content downloaded from 157.55.39.26 on Sun, 04 Sep 2016 04:48:11 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Polity, Economy and Technoecology / 809 TABLE 1: Gini Coefficients of Income Inequality Regressed on Alternative Measures of Land Inequality and Population Density, Holding Constant Labor Force in Agriculture, 1970' Muller Hoover Muller Hoover Muller Hoover