Elites, Minorities, and Economic Growth (review)

Elites, Minorities and Economic Growth. Edited by Elise S. Brezis and Peter Temin (Amsterdam, Elsevier, Science, B. V., 1999) 255 pp. $95.00 NLG 195 euro 88.49.

Sociologists commonly impute reality to social categories, whereas economists tend to eschew categories in favor of individuals. Historians divide on the reality of categories, but provide essential information about the role in economic growth of people belonging to various categories. Thus, reason Brezis and Temin, analysts who wish to take seriously the parts played by elites and minorities in economic growth should synthesize sociological, economic, and historical work on the subject. In June 1997, a stellar conference at Bar-Ilan University, Israel (with a session on minorities in Jordan held in Amman), brought together economists, sociologists, and historians from Europe, North America, and the Middle East for three intensive days of discussion. Visibly vivified by the debate, Brezis and Temin undertook to assemble the conference papers more or less as presented, but in a uniform format with a summary introduction. The published volume excludes sessions on Russian immigration to Israel and on minorities in Jordan, but otherwise gathers the papers from that conference. (Multiple errors of grammar and spelling suggest that, aside from recasting into a common format--separate text, endnotes, and bibliography for each paper--the papers received little or no editing.)

After an introduction by the editors that makes a heroic effort to place disparate analyses within a common framework, the published papers fall into three clusters: (1) economic, political elites and growth; (2) minorities and growth; and (3) theories of elites and minorities. They include contributions--some of them collaborative--by Temin, François Crouzet, Baruch Kimmerling, Eva Etzioni-Halevy, Jan Pakulski, György Lengyel, David Landes, Peter Mathias, Paul Bairoch, William Rubinstein, Eliezer Ayal, Steven Durlauf, Joel Mokyr, Moshe Justman, Mark Gradstein, Adam Klug, Carmel Nadav, and Brezis. Experiences treated at length include those of the United States, Britain, France, the Middle East, East Central Europe, and Southeast Asia, with many a side glance at other parts of the world.

Papers range in style from Durlauf's relatively formal economic presentation of his "memberships theory" of inequality (which, as compared with standard neoclassical accounts, attributes considerable significance to mutual interaction within social categories) to Bairoch's chatty report on Jews, the British Industrial Revolution, technological innovations, and the sciences (which finds little presence of Jews in British organizational and technological innovations between 1690 and 1790, in contrast with massive Jewish representation among outstanding scientists).

Two unsurprising but important conclusions recur: First, self- renewing elites existed everywhere; second, entrepreneurial minorities' advantages, where they occurred, depended on internal systems of commitment that reduced transaction costs and agency risks. Aside from those generalizations, disagreement arises on almost every major point; Landes (pro) and Rubinstein (con), for example, offer almost diametrically opposed evaluations of Max Weber's thesis concerning the Protestant ethic and capitalism. So be it. Elites, Minorities and Economic Growth serves not as a definitive synthesis but as a wide-ranging exploration of pressing questions that remain unresolved.

Charles Tilly
Columbia University

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