ABSTRACT
Taste is also not amenable to change by appeal. Elsewhere, in another celebrated passage, Pareto writes: Take a man who is eating a chicken; someone wishes to demonstrate to him that he would experience more pleasure if he ate only half of it and gave the other half to his neighbor. Tastes are not nearly as unfathomable as Pareto indicated, nor are they completely without causality. People do have different tastes and aspects of taste appear to be unexplainable. Nothing need deny that; that is the author's “of course.” But, contrary to Pareto, even the liking or disliking of spinach occurs with some degree of predictability. Claus Offe asks whether it is possible to argue seriously that misperception occurs randomly. If there is a larger pile of misperceptions at the lower ends of the social hierarchy than at the top, they begin to look less benign.
