Vilfredo Pareto

Derivations are the reasons people give. Residues are the drives underneath. Study the residues.

The argument

Pareto separates what people say they are doing from what is actually moving them. The justifications, which he calls derivations, are endlessly variable and mostly rationalization. The underlying drives, the residues, are few and stable.

From that he gets the circulation of elites: ruling groups do not improve or reform so much as get replaced, one set of residues giving way to another, while the derivations are rewritten to match. The formula changes, the structure does not.

Where it sits

Read next to Mosca, who is describing the same phenomenon with more attention to institutions, and next to the psychology of system justification, which is the experimental version of the claim that people generate reasons for arrangements they did not choose.

Serious objections

• The residues are not measurable in any agreed way, which makes the framework unfalsifiable in practice.
• Dismissing stated reasons as decoration is a move that can be applied to any argument including Pareto's own, and it corrodes the possibility of taking anyone seriously.
• His work was enthusiastically claimed by Italian fascism. He died in 1923, too early for the full record, but the affinity is not accidental and should not be brushed off.