James Webb Young

Question 1

Pareto thought that all the world could be divided into two main types of people. These types he called, in the French in which he wrote, the
speculator and the rentier.

In this classification speculator is a term used somewhat in the sense of
our word “speculative.” The speculator is the speculative type of person. And the distinguishing characteristic of this type, according to Pareto, is that he is constantly preoccupied with the possibilities of new combinations.

Please hold that italicized definition in mind, because we shall return to
it later. Note particularly that word pre-occupied, with its brooding quality.

Pareto includes among the persons of this speculative type not only the
business enterprisers—those who deal with financial and business schemes—but those engaged with inventions of every sort and with what he calls “political and diplomatic reconstructions.”

In short, the type includes all those persons in any field who (like our President Roosevelt) can not let well enough alone and who speculate on how to change it.

The term used by Pareto to describe the other type, the rentier, is translated into English as the stockholder—though he sounds more like the bag holder to me. Such people, he says, are the routine, steady-going, unimaginative, conserving people, whom the speculator manipulates.

Whatever we may think of the adequacy of this theory of Pareto’s as an entire explanation of social groups, I think we all recognize that these two
types of human beings do exist. Whether they were born that way, or
whether their environment and training made them that way, is beside the point. They are.