ABSTRACT
Alexis de Tocqueville, writing many centuries later, declared: “Remove the secondary causes that have produced the great convulsions of the world and you will almost always find the principle of inequality at the bottom. The Lorenz curve provides an extremely useful way of showing the complete pattern of a distribution, but it is impractical to try to compare whole Lorenz curves for any substantial number of countries. Inequality of land distribution does bear a relation to political instability, but that relationship is not a strong one, and many other factors must be considered in any attempted explanation. The Gini index calculates over the whole population the difference between an “ideal” cumulative distribution of land and the actual distribution. The higher the Gini index, the greater the inequality. The forms of land tenure, the amounts of land actually owned, the productivity of that amount of land, and other aspects of man’s relation to the soil are all related to political stability.
