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Cited by 262

The DOI matches its OpenAlex record; 36 of the 36 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

The Surplus Theory of Social Stratification and the Size Distribution of Personal Wealth

John Angle·1986·Social Forces

Abstract

The Surplus Theory of Social Stratification explains inequality 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 process, the Inequality Process, explains many facts about size distributions of personal wealth.

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Metadata

Authors
Angle, J.
Venue
Social Forces
Publisher
Oxford University Press
Published
1986-12-01
Volume
65
Issue
2
Pages
293-293
ISSN
0037-7732 (ISSN-L)
OpenAlex
W2116691920
Cited by
262
References
36
FWCI
0.00
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: The Surplus Theory of Social Stratification and the Size Distribution of Personal Wealth. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1093/sf/65.2.293
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Angle, J. (1986). The Surplus Theory of Social Stratification and the Size Distribution of Personal Wealth. Social Forces. https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/65.2.293

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Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.