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The Princeton Economic History of the Western World #74
The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century
How only violence and catastrophes have consistently reduced inequality throughout world history
Are mass violence and catastrophes the only forces that can seriously decrease economic inequality? To judge by thousands of years of history, the answer is yes. Tracing the global history of inequality from the Stone Age to today, Walter Scheidel shows that inequality never dies peacefully. Inequality declines when carnage and disaster strike and increases when peace and stability return. The Great Leveler is the first book to chart the crucial role of violent shocks in reducing inequality over the full sweep of human history around the world.
Ever since humans began to farm, herd livestock, and pass on their assets to future generations, economic inequality has been a defining feature of civilization. Over thousands of years, only violent events have significantly lessened inequality. The "Four Horsemen" of leveling—mass-mobilization warfare, transformative revolutions, state collapse, and catastrophic plagues—have repeatedly destroyed the fortunes of the rich. Scheidel identifies and examines these processes, from the crises of the earliest civilizations to the cataclysmic world wars and communist revolutions of the twentieth century. Today, the violence that reduced inequality in the past seems to have diminished, and that is a good thing. But it casts serious doubt on the prospects for a more equal future.
An essential contribution to the debate about inequality, The Great Leveler provides important new insights about why inequality is so persistent—and why it is unlikely to decline anytime soon.
Are mass violence and catastrophes the only forces that can seriously decrease economic inequality? To judge by thousands of years of history, the answer is yes. Tracing the global history of inequality from the Stone Age to today, Walter Scheidel shows that inequality never dies peacefully. Inequality declines when carnage and disaster strike and increases when peace and stability return. The Great Leveler is the first book to chart the crucial role of violent shocks in reducing inequality over the full sweep of human history around the world.
Ever since humans began to farm, herd livestock, and pass on their assets to future generations, economic inequality has been a defining feature of civilization. Over thousands of years, only violent events have significantly lessened inequality. The "Four Horsemen" of leveling—mass-mobilization warfare, transformative revolutions, state collapse, and catastrophic plagues—have repeatedly destroyed the fortunes of the rich. Scheidel identifies and examines these processes, from the crises of the earliest civilizations to the cataclysmic world wars and communist revolutions of the twentieth century. Today, the violence that reduced inequality in the past seems to have diminished, and that is a good thing. But it casts serious doubt on the prospects for a more equal future.
An essential contribution to the debate about inequality, The Great Leveler provides important new insights about why inequality is so persistent—and why it is unlikely to decline anytime soon.
528 pages, Hardcover
First published January 9, 2017
About the author
Walter Scheidel
33 books106 followersDickason Professor in the Humanities
Professor of Classics and History
Catherine R. Kennedy and Daniel L. Grossman Fellow in Human Biology
Walter Scheidel is the Dickason Professor in the Humanities, Professor of Classics and History, and a Kennedy-Grossman Fellow in Human Biology at Stanford University. The author or editor of sixteen previous books, he has published widely on premodern social and economic history, demography, and comparative history. He lives in Palo Alto, California.
Scheidel's research ranges from ancient social and economic history and premodern historical demography to the comparative and transdisciplinary world history of inequality, state formation, and human welfare. He is particularly interested in connecting the humanities, the social sciences, and the life sciences.
Professor of Classics and History
Catherine R. Kennedy and Daniel L. Grossman Fellow in Human Biology
Walter Scheidel is the Dickason Professor in the Humanities, Professor of Classics and History, and a Kennedy-Grossman Fellow in Human Biology at Stanford University. The author or editor of sixteen previous books, he has published widely on premodern social and economic history, demography, and comparative history. He lives in Palo Alto, California.
Scheidel's research ranges from ancient social and economic history and premodern historical demography to the comparative and transdisciplinary world history of inequality, state formation, and human welfare. He is particularly interested in connecting the humanities, the social sciences, and the life sciences.
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October 14, 2021
The Gini in the Bottle
If you don’t have it already, you ain’t never gonna’ get it. Following on Thomas Piketty’s by now famous analysis of the increasing concentration of wealth in capitalist society (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1...), Walter Scheidel credibly argues that it has always been so. Economic records stretching back to great antiquity show that those who have always get increasingly more than those who don’t. In fact the wealth distribution in the 21st century is probably about the same as it was in Egypt of the Fifth Dynasty.*
The problem, it seems, is not capitalism but agriculture, the rule of law, and social organisation of any type: “... after our species had embraced domesticated food production and its common corollaries, sedentism and state formation, and had acknowledged some form of hereditary property rights, upward pressure on material inequality effectively became a given—a fundamental feature of human social existence.” So the price we pay for a stable society is a more or less permanent state of material inequality.
Importantly, there appear to be no social policies which have ever successfully reversed the trend toward the concentration of economic power. Democracy doesn’t do it. Education and freedom of opportunity don’t do it. Taxation doesn’t do it. Technology doesn’t do it. Socialism certainly doesn’t do it: “Even in the most progressive advanced economies, redistribution and education are already unable fully to absorb the pressure of widening income inequality before taxes and transfers.”
The only thing that does do it, that interrupts the apparently inexorable flow of wealth to those who already have wealth, is disaster. Not economic disaster, per se; the rich weather stock market, currency, financial and commodity jitters better than most. It takes real disaster - extended warfare, deadly plague, civil revolution, and the abrupt dissolution of government - to make any significant difference in the long term trends in material accumulation. According to Scheidel, “Across the full sweep of history, every single one of the major compressions of material inequality we can observe in the record was driven by one or more of these four levelers.”
Unfortunately Scheidel offers no theory of how to deal with the situation, something which suggests that his analysis, although astute, is less than useful. In fact, despite his professed admiration for the work of Piketty, Scheidel’s conclusions imply that Piketty’s work too is sterile, that aside from one or more of the four disasters, there is no remedy for what is perceived as a growing problem. The rich, it seems, are always with us.
And as the rich get richer, they get more arrogant, more powerful, and arguably more corrupt. Religion and ideology have failed to alter the situation. Even armed revolt, disease, and environmental upheavals have only temporary inhibiting effects on the historical trajectory of economic inequality. Could this be the one economic law which is universal and invariable?
It appears therefore that the ancient Greeks, for whom disasters were a challenge to virtue rather than a tragedy, knew something that we don’t, namely what the Dutch philosopher, Peter Sloterdijk (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7... ) put it so laconically: “... war and happiness are inseparable...” Perhaps Homer, and after him Heraclitus, and much later Hegel, were right. War indeed might be the father of all things; or at least of all things economic. What hapless beings we are.
* Measured particularly by the Gini coefficient which indicates the degree of income and wealth concentration within a society. Scheidel’s analysis of the merits and flaws of this widely used measure is worth the price of admission to the book, if for no other reason than its revelation of the mind of an economist.
If you don’t have it already, you ain’t never gonna’ get it. Following on Thomas Piketty’s by now famous analysis of the increasing concentration of wealth in capitalist society (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1...), Walter Scheidel credibly argues that it has always been so. Economic records stretching back to great antiquity show that those who have always get increasingly more than those who don’t. In fact the wealth distribution in the 21st century is probably about the same as it was in Egypt of the Fifth Dynasty.*
The problem, it seems, is not capitalism but agriculture, the rule of law, and social organisation of any type: “... after our species had embraced domesticated food production and its common corollaries, sedentism and state formation, and had acknowledged some form of hereditary property rights, upward pressure on material inequality effectively became a given—a fundamental feature of human social existence.” So the price we pay for a stable society is a more or less permanent state of material inequality.
Importantly, there appear to be no social policies which have ever successfully reversed the trend toward the concentration of economic power. Democracy doesn’t do it. Education and freedom of opportunity don’t do it. Taxation doesn’t do it. Technology doesn’t do it. Socialism certainly doesn’t do it: “Even in the most progressive advanced economies, redistribution and education are already unable fully to absorb the pressure of widening income inequality before taxes and transfers.”
The only thing that does do it, that interrupts the apparently inexorable flow of wealth to those who already have wealth, is disaster. Not economic disaster, per se; the rich weather stock market, currency, financial and commodity jitters better than most. It takes real disaster - extended warfare, deadly plague, civil revolution, and the abrupt dissolution of government - to make any significant difference in the long term trends in material accumulation. According to Scheidel, “Across the full sweep of history, every single one of the major compressions of material inequality we can observe in the record was driven by one or more of these four levelers.”
Unfortunately Scheidel offers no theory of how to deal with the situation, something which suggests that his analysis, although astute, is less than useful. In fact, despite his professed admiration for the work of Piketty, Scheidel’s conclusions imply that Piketty’s work too is sterile, that aside from one or more of the four disasters, there is no remedy for what is perceived as a growing problem. The rich, it seems, are always with us.
And as the rich get richer, they get more arrogant, more powerful, and arguably more corrupt. Religion and ideology have failed to alter the situation. Even armed revolt, disease, and environmental upheavals have only temporary inhibiting effects on the historical trajectory of economic inequality. Could this be the one economic law which is universal and invariable?
It appears therefore that the ancient Greeks, for whom disasters were a challenge to virtue rather than a tragedy, knew something that we don’t, namely what the Dutch philosopher, Peter Sloterdijk (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7... ) put it so laconically: “... war and happiness are inseparable...” Perhaps Homer, and after him Heraclitus, and much later Hegel, were right. War indeed might be the father of all things; or at least of all things economic. What hapless beings we are.
* Measured particularly by the Gini coefficient which indicates the degree of income and wealth concentration within a society. Scheidel’s analysis of the merits and flaws of this widely used measure is worth the price of admission to the book, if for no other reason than its revelation of the mind of an economist.
April 19, 2024
Update 8.4.2020 - article by Walter Scheidel on covid-19: Why the Wealthy Fear Pandemics
Some books on insoluble global problems - climate change, water shortages, environmental degradation - add a chapter with a couple of impractical policy solutions that everyone knows could never work in the real world. The chapter’s there to cheer you up so you don’t leave a poor review on goodreads because you finished the book in a state of utter despair.
This is not one of those books. To his credit, in his final chapter, Walter Scheidel tells us his research shows that there is only one way to materially reduce global inequality in the future: all-out nuclear war:
Well, that doesn’t sound much fun. At least I could save some money and cancel my subscription to “OK!” magazine.
And if you are thinking one of Scheidel’s other “Four Levelers” of inequality might still help (being - besides mass-mobilization warfare - plague, revolution and state collapse) then you are out of luck.
These days only a “...few hundred million…” would die in a global pandemic; we would be able to monitor and stop it before it reached Black Death proportions enough to make a worthwhile change to levels of inequality. Also, our social institutions are too strong and we are all too sensible these days to allow revolution or state collapse to happen (unless we are English of course; the book was written pre-Brexit).
All-in-all this was a pretty depressing book, but that doesn’t stop it being right. The little joy that could be had from it comes from translating some of the Academicese into English:
You get the general idea.
One surprising thing I learnt was that, while mass-mobilization warfare - essentially WWI and WWII plus a few Ancient Greek wars - is the greatest leveler of inequality, this is not mainly due to bombs blowing up people’s stuff but rather to government policy action during the course of the war. Japan in WWII is a good example, with ever increasing state control over across society, price and wage controls, confiscatory taxation, inflation, compulsory investment in war bonds and similar. This is worth drawing to the attention of Robert Mercer and other billionaires in favor of “culling the masses” as they might think twice about it. Let’s hope they are reading this review.
Some books on insoluble global problems - climate change, water shortages, environmental degradation - add a chapter with a couple of impractical policy solutions that everyone knows could never work in the real world. The chapter’s there to cheer you up so you don’t leave a poor review on goodreads because you finished the book in a state of utter despair.
This is not one of those books. To his credit, in his final chapter, Walter Scheidel tells us his research shows that there is only one way to materially reduce global inequality in the future: all-out nuclear war:
“...unrestricted nuclear warfare...would represent an extreme version of systems collapse...Although contemporary science fiction accounts of a post apocalyptic world would sometimes envision high degrees of inequality between those in charge of scarce vital resources and deprived majorities, the experience of the thoroughly impoverished and less stratified post collapse communities of pre-modern history might be a better guide to conditions in a future ‘nuclear winter’...”
Well, that doesn’t sound much fun. At least I could save some money and cancel my subscription to “OK!” magazine.
And if you are thinking one of Scheidel’s other “Four Levelers” of inequality might still help (being - besides mass-mobilization warfare - plague, revolution and state collapse) then you are out of luck.
These days only a “...few hundred million…” would die in a global pandemic; we would be able to monitor and stop it before it reached Black Death proportions enough to make a worthwhile change to levels of inequality. Also, our social institutions are too strong and we are all too sensible these days to allow revolution or state collapse to happen (unless we are English of course; the book was written pre-Brexit).
All-in-all this was a pretty depressing book, but that doesn’t stop it being right. The little joy that could be had from it comes from translating some of the Academicese into English:
“...new forms of political and military power contributed to and amplified the resultant inequalities in income and wealth…”means: “I’ve got a sword so now I'm King. Give me your money”.
“...a recent study of super-rich entrepreneurs in Western countries shows how they benefited from political connections, exploited loopholes in regulation, and took advantage of market imperfections…”means: “Take your vote and stick it where the sun doesn’t shine, loser”.
You get the general idea.
One surprising thing I learnt was that, while mass-mobilization warfare - essentially WWI and WWII plus a few Ancient Greek wars - is the greatest leveler of inequality, this is not mainly due to bombs blowing up people’s stuff but rather to government policy action during the course of the war. Japan in WWII is a good example, with ever increasing state control over across society, price and wage controls, confiscatory taxation, inflation, compulsory investment in war bonds and similar. This is worth drawing to the attention of Robert Mercer and other billionaires in favor of “culling the masses” as they might think twice about it. Let’s hope they are reading this review.
March 26, 2018
How did the concentration of wealth make it into so few hands? Scheidel traced the origins of power back to before recorded time. Using evidence from burial sites and other anthropological finds, he was able to construct a story about the concentration of power in the hands of the leaders of each society as humans went from nomadic lives in which they foraged for food to civilization builders who used the land as currency. Scheidel surmised that original income inequality was tied not to the rise of Kings, but was instead tied to the value of plants and animals that allowed certain humans to control food production. Those humans -- who claimed these lands, and thus claimed all the riches from the food production of the plants and animals as well as the riches from the rents each person who wanted to live on the land had to pay -- were able to concentrate the wealth that land brings into their own pockets. The more land a person owned, the more power and wealth they had.
Essentially owning land meant that you as a human could direct more and more of the sun's energy into your own pocket. The sun freely gives up its energy to help plants grow. Eating plants helps animals grow. Humans spend a lot of their time securing plants and animals to keep themselves healthy and alive. When humans no longer had to forage for plants grown over long distances, and could instead domesticate plants to grow in a smaller space, then that food is then available in great abundance. The problem is, not everyone owned land equally. Once land was divided unequally, so too was wealth. When humans began passing down wealth, they were able to keep that wealth concentrated in a family over generations. With the accumulation of wealth in a confined space, a few hands, the political power could also be confined. That political power created laws that kept money in the hands of the powerful and out of the hands of the poor. Interestingly, things like the plague or some other type of catastrophe had the power to alter who was wealthy and who was not. Short of large events like this, it was difficult to establish any type of true equality once inequality had been established.
Throughout history, there have always been efforts to make things more equal, but once inequality gets a foothold, it seems hard to change, especially because the laws constructed by those in power make sure it is almost impossible. Even if a group of people were able to organize so effectively that they were successful in bring about real change in property laws and other laws that made income distribution more equal, they will likely face challenges from the wealthy powerful. If history gives us any clue, when the poor rise to get their slice of the pie, the rich often engage in great effort to make sure that does not happen. We certainly have societies now that are more equal than anything we have seen in the past. However, only time will tell if that is the rule or the exception and what wealth equality on a global scale will look like.
The second half of the book was less interesting to me-- how wealth remained concentrated in the hands of the few. It was ok, but going back to the dawn of human existence in the first part of the book really set my brain up to want more of that. So, I was sad to read about modern day humans. Not as interesting.
Essentially owning land meant that you as a human could direct more and more of the sun's energy into your own pocket. The sun freely gives up its energy to help plants grow. Eating plants helps animals grow. Humans spend a lot of their time securing plants and animals to keep themselves healthy and alive. When humans no longer had to forage for plants grown over long distances, and could instead domesticate plants to grow in a smaller space, then that food is then available in great abundance. The problem is, not everyone owned land equally. Once land was divided unequally, so too was wealth. When humans began passing down wealth, they were able to keep that wealth concentrated in a family over generations. With the accumulation of wealth in a confined space, a few hands, the political power could also be confined. That political power created laws that kept money in the hands of the powerful and out of the hands of the poor. Interestingly, things like the plague or some other type of catastrophe had the power to alter who was wealthy and who was not. Short of large events like this, it was difficult to establish any type of true equality once inequality had been established.
Throughout history, there have always been efforts to make things more equal, but once inequality gets a foothold, it seems hard to change, especially because the laws constructed by those in power make sure it is almost impossible. Even if a group of people were able to organize so effectively that they were successful in bring about real change in property laws and other laws that made income distribution more equal, they will likely face challenges from the wealthy powerful. If history gives us any clue, when the poor rise to get their slice of the pie, the rich often engage in great effort to make sure that does not happen. We certainly have societies now that are more equal than anything we have seen in the past. However, only time will tell if that is the rule or the exception and what wealth equality on a global scale will look like.
The second half of the book was less interesting to me-- how wealth remained concentrated in the hands of the few. It was ok, but going back to the dawn of human existence in the first part of the book really set my brain up to want more of that. So, I was sad to read about modern day humans. Not as interesting.
December 15, 2017
Be sure to have a stiff drink ready for when you finish this book. Basically, we probably won't be able to deal with inequality without a lot of violence. I mean, he tries at the end to say, "you never know--the future could be different than the past," but his data shows a much grimmer story. But be warned, the book is so dry. So hard to get through. Another reason to have the stiff drink in waiting.
January 12, 2018
While incredibly depressing, this is an exhaustive and deeply informative account of how inequality has been central to pretty much the entirety of human experience. What is most impressive is Scheidel's willingness to publish a book without any clear policy answers; he offers no easy solutions to seemingly insoluble questions, and it is refreshing to read an academic book on such a hot-button issue that does not pretend to have all the answers. Clearly reasoned, wonderfully structured, and providing seemingly indisputable proof of his thesis, this is a must-read for anyone interested in inequality.
February 16, 2017
The Great Leveler was a natural extension of the work done by Thomas Piketty in Capital in the Twenty-First Century and because of this takes a profoundly dismal view of the present and the future. The central notion, difficult to refer to it as a thesis, is the only way to make society more just/equal is to have a massive loss of life such as:
1) Mass mobilization warfare such as the Second World War
2) Communist Revolution such as in Russia
3) State collapse, like the Roman Empire
4) Pandemics such as the Black Death
If Piketty's solution is theft, a massive redistribution of capital via draconian taxation; then Scheidel's is genocide. In both cases, the Left appears to have departed from reason entirely and opted for massive violence: taxation and genocide.
Disturbing, but that is the Left for you.
Rating: 3 out of 5 Stars
1) Mass mobilization warfare such as the Second World War
2) Communist Revolution such as in Russia
3) State collapse, like the Roman Empire
4) Pandemics such as the Black Death
If Piketty's solution is theft, a massive redistribution of capital via draconian taxation; then Scheidel's is genocide. In both cases, the Left appears to have departed from reason entirely and opted for massive violence: taxation and genocide.
Disturbing, but that is the Left for you.
Rating: 3 out of 5 Stars
August 7, 2020
This is a richly rewarding study of inequality that brings together much of the recent literature on the topic, from Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century to the late Tony Atkinson's Inequality: What Can Be Done?. However, as the author makes explicit at the end, the aim of the book is essentially to demonstrate that the various policy programs promulgated by a host of economists (including the aforementioned) since the financial crisis, that aim to reduce inequality, are pie-in-the-sky fantasies.
Indeed, if our priors are informed by the grand sweep of human history, as opposed to the aberrant post-WWII period, then short of another mass mobilisation war on a similar scale to that of the world wars, or violent transformative revolution, or some sort of state or systems collapse, massive reductions in inequality seem exceedingly unlikely. And the nature of modern warfare almost precludes the former.
Ironically the book, certainly not anti-capitalist, gives succour to the dwindling (by 20th Century standards) band of revolutionaries who argue that violence is required to secure what they perceive to be "economic justice", and that piecemeal reform can only reduce inequality at the margins. Yet, as Scheidel also notes, historical levelings, including those that followed transformative revolutions, were short-lived: inequality has an almost natural tendency to rise or stabilise at relatively high levels in the vast majority of human societies.
He marshals an impressive volume of evidence to support this thesis - the footnotes are very rewarding in themselves - and his grasp of the literature is excellent; he fairly represents the objections to his ideas, tackles them head-on, and adroitly summarises other key debates in the literature. The sections on ancient Greece and ancient Rome were particularly illuminating. Overall, the book is well-written, though packed with facts, figures and graphs that have the potential to scare some readers away.
Speaking of which, while Scheidel does his best to describe some of the history pertinent to his case studies of levelling or potential levelling events, I would principally recommend this book to an educated individual who has some grounding in world history. With that caveat in mind, I aver that this is the best book on inequality currently out there.
Indeed, if our priors are informed by the grand sweep of human history, as opposed to the aberrant post-WWII period, then short of another mass mobilisation war on a similar scale to that of the world wars, or violent transformative revolution, or some sort of state or systems collapse, massive reductions in inequality seem exceedingly unlikely. And the nature of modern warfare almost precludes the former.
Ironically the book, certainly not anti-capitalist, gives succour to the dwindling (by 20th Century standards) band of revolutionaries who argue that violence is required to secure what they perceive to be "economic justice", and that piecemeal reform can only reduce inequality at the margins. Yet, as Scheidel also notes, historical levelings, including those that followed transformative revolutions, were short-lived: inequality has an almost natural tendency to rise or stabilise at relatively high levels in the vast majority of human societies.
He marshals an impressive volume of evidence to support this thesis - the footnotes are very rewarding in themselves - and his grasp of the literature is excellent; he fairly represents the objections to his ideas, tackles them head-on, and adroitly summarises other key debates in the literature. The sections on ancient Greece and ancient Rome were particularly illuminating. Overall, the book is well-written, though packed with facts, figures and graphs that have the potential to scare some readers away.
Speaking of which, while Scheidel does his best to describe some of the history pertinent to his case studies of levelling or potential levelling events, I would principally recommend this book to an educated individual who has some grounding in world history. With that caveat in mind, I aver that this is the best book on inequality currently out there.
September 15, 2018
This was a real slog. It makes a convincing and alarming case, but you still finish the book with a sense of optimism, since you no longer have to read the book!
Despite the last sentence, I am not complaining about dry, but detailed and careful, analysis, and there is great value in thoroughness, even when the result is less than riveting. My main gripes are, first, the choice to structure the book around the pointless division of violent societal transformation into subcases given by the "Four Horseman" of war, revolution, societal collapse, and plague. At the beginning of the book, the division seems gimmicky, but you put up with it in expectation of underpinning content; unfortunately, it turns out all of the case studies are essentially unique from each other, and the classification was arbitrary. My second main gripe is the choice to explicitly reject any sort of chronological structure. In the opening of the book, Scheidel defends his choice by saying this would impose an inaccurate taxonomy onto the study. I would respond that, in the absence of some other valid choice, a chronological structure taps into the reader's preexisting historical narrative, making the content easier to retain. I'm not advocating a strict adherence, and he could even maintain the broader Four Horseman division if he's really married to it, but there is, so far as I can tell, no reason to jump forward and then backwards again hundreds or thousands of years in a single paragraph.
More specific comments:
It was cool to learn of the existence of the freely available World Inequality Database.
Throughout the book, a repeatedly explicit assumption is that inequality is naturally constrained by the need to provide minimum subsistence for the entire population (that is, the richest cannot have so much that there is too little left for the poorest to feed themselves). This is not a self-evident upper bound to me, and it is surprising that, as careful and precise as Scheidel is, he either accepts this unquestioningly or else thinks it so obvious as to not need an explanation. To me, the two possible justifications for this axiom are either that the poorest are alive, and so this threshold is self-evidently being met, or that if the rich have too much, the poorest will soon succumb, reducing inequality by removing the low end of the tail, and thus bumping it back under the putative bound. The first defense seems too static, ignoring that societies evolve or, more basically, that a person can be starving without yet having perished. The second is perhaps more plausible, maybe requiring that "the" bound is some sort of asymptotic result that takes into account how the interplay between minimum subsistence and a changing population in the self-regulation mechanism described above. I'm not sure I'm convinced.
In a section of Chapter 1 titled The Original "1 Percent", Scheidel describes his view that it is natural that large states (where "large" is a relative term depending on the era) proliferate, as they are able to out-compete their neighbors. He views periods where city states or feudal societies dominate a region as unstable equilibria in which some novel quirk of the environment protects them. It is interesting to compare this to the strong, almost causal, narrative of societal evolution in Russell's History of Western Philosophy.
In a section of Chapter 3 titled Scaling New Heights, he mentions that public debt feeds inequality because the cost is born by society as a whole, while the rich are able to purchase and benefit from the debt. This bitter pill is sweetened slightly when he points out that this relatively modern phenomenon is still preferable to the mechanism it replaces: outright extortion and theft by the elite of older societies. Later in the section "The Drama of the Thirty Years War": The Great Leveling of Inequality from 1914 to 1945 in Chapter 5, he points out that inflation provides a leveling mechanism, as it eats away at resources disproportionately held by the wealthy (such as liquid assets or rent).
As an aside, that whole discussion of the world wars and mass mobilization warfare paints a sobering view of the price for just societies. He explicitly argues (and references a large body of literature supporting the position) that there is a strong correlation between expanded suffrage and mass warfare, as controlling interests need a way to maintain support from the general populace if there is to be any possibility of coordinating such massive cooperation on the scale needed to be competitive. Similar comments apply to social safety nets, and he argues that modern welfare states could only have been forged in such a bloody furnace; see the section "A Revolutionary Moment in the World's History is a time for Revolution, Not for Patching": From Violent Shocks to Equalizing Reform in the same chapter.
It's worth recording that I was frequently in a foul mood while reading this book; if one is not careful, it is easy to get drawn into a vortex of despair over the fear that every success we humans have had tamping down the society-wide consequences of following our basest instincts has come at the cost of hundreds of millions of lives, and, what's more, these gains are likely only temporary. It is worth noting (i) maintaining this nihilism requires one to accept that nothing original can ever be done, despite mountains of historical evidence that tomorrow will bring things not even conceivable yesterday and (ii) this pessimism requires one to accept that the Gini is an accurate measure of how good a society is (for example, it ignores the admittedly unpalatable possibility that the bottom rung of tomorrow's society may well be better than a middling rung from on yesterday's).
The science fiction scenarios (AI, human-machine interface, nanotechnology) at the end were a little jarring. It was interesting to read his speculations, but maybe a little hard to take them seriously after he spent the past four hundred pages searching for universal truths and arguing that understanding, say, pre-agrarian inequality would help one understand inequality in the modern US.
my favorite quote: "It is fair to say that the message of this book has been unremittingly bleak."
Despite the last sentence, I am not complaining about dry, but detailed and careful, analysis, and there is great value in thoroughness, even when the result is less than riveting. My main gripes are, first, the choice to structure the book around the pointless division of violent societal transformation into subcases given by the "Four Horseman" of war, revolution, societal collapse, and plague. At the beginning of the book, the division seems gimmicky, but you put up with it in expectation of underpinning content; unfortunately, it turns out all of the case studies are essentially unique from each other, and the classification was arbitrary. My second main gripe is the choice to explicitly reject any sort of chronological structure. In the opening of the book, Scheidel defends his choice by saying this would impose an inaccurate taxonomy onto the study. I would respond that, in the absence of some other valid choice, a chronological structure taps into the reader's preexisting historical narrative, making the content easier to retain. I'm not advocating a strict adherence, and he could even maintain the broader Four Horseman division if he's really married to it, but there is, so far as I can tell, no reason to jump forward and then backwards again hundreds or thousands of years in a single paragraph.
More specific comments:
It was cool to learn of the existence of the freely available World Inequality Database.
Throughout the book, a repeatedly explicit assumption is that inequality is naturally constrained by the need to provide minimum subsistence for the entire population (that is, the richest cannot have so much that there is too little left for the poorest to feed themselves). This is not a self-evident upper bound to me, and it is surprising that, as careful and precise as Scheidel is, he either accepts this unquestioningly or else thinks it so obvious as to not need an explanation. To me, the two possible justifications for this axiom are either that the poorest are alive, and so this threshold is self-evidently being met, or that if the rich have too much, the poorest will soon succumb, reducing inequality by removing the low end of the tail, and thus bumping it back under the putative bound. The first defense seems too static, ignoring that societies evolve or, more basically, that a person can be starving without yet having perished. The second is perhaps more plausible, maybe requiring that "the" bound is some sort of asymptotic result that takes into account how the interplay between minimum subsistence and a changing population in the self-regulation mechanism described above. I'm not sure I'm convinced.
In a section of Chapter 1 titled The Original "1 Percent", Scheidel describes his view that it is natural that large states (where "large" is a relative term depending on the era) proliferate, as they are able to out-compete their neighbors. He views periods where city states or feudal societies dominate a region as unstable equilibria in which some novel quirk of the environment protects them. It is interesting to compare this to the strong, almost causal, narrative of societal evolution in Russell's History of Western Philosophy.
In a section of Chapter 3 titled Scaling New Heights, he mentions that public debt feeds inequality because the cost is born by society as a whole, while the rich are able to purchase and benefit from the debt. This bitter pill is sweetened slightly when he points out that this relatively modern phenomenon is still preferable to the mechanism it replaces: outright extortion and theft by the elite of older societies. Later in the section "The Drama of the Thirty Years War": The Great Leveling of Inequality from 1914 to 1945 in Chapter 5, he points out that inflation provides a leveling mechanism, as it eats away at resources disproportionately held by the wealthy (such as liquid assets or rent).
As an aside, that whole discussion of the world wars and mass mobilization warfare paints a sobering view of the price for just societies. He explicitly argues (and references a large body of literature supporting the position) that there is a strong correlation between expanded suffrage and mass warfare, as controlling interests need a way to maintain support from the general populace if there is to be any possibility of coordinating such massive cooperation on the scale needed to be competitive. Similar comments apply to social safety nets, and he argues that modern welfare states could only have been forged in such a bloody furnace; see the section "A Revolutionary Moment in the World's History is a time for Revolution, Not for Patching": From Violent Shocks to Equalizing Reform in the same chapter.
It's worth recording that I was frequently in a foul mood while reading this book; if one is not careful, it is easy to get drawn into a vortex of despair over the fear that every success we humans have had tamping down the society-wide consequences of following our basest instincts has come at the cost of hundreds of millions of lives, and, what's more, these gains are likely only temporary. It is worth noting (i) maintaining this nihilism requires one to accept that nothing original can ever be done, despite mountains of historical evidence that tomorrow will bring things not even conceivable yesterday and (ii) this pessimism requires one to accept that the Gini is an accurate measure of how good a society is (for example, it ignores the admittedly unpalatable possibility that the bottom rung of tomorrow's society may well be better than a middling rung from on yesterday's).
The science fiction scenarios (AI, human-machine interface, nanotechnology) at the end were a little jarring. It was interesting to read his speculations, but maybe a little hard to take them seriously after he spent the past four hundred pages searching for universal truths and arguing that understanding, say, pre-agrarian inequality would help one understand inequality in the modern US.
my favorite quote: "It is fair to say that the message of this book has been unremittingly bleak."
March 12, 2017
Inequality that would make robber barons blush
Walter Scheidel, author of The Great Leveler, provides a scientifically rigorous, excruciatingly detailed and politically agnostic survey of wealth inequality from pre-history to the present. The focus is on factors that reduce, or level, that inequality and the core message is disheartening.
Given the far-reaching scope, in both time and geography, finding reliable and comparable data related to wealth requires making some assumptions — actually, a LOT of assumptions. But he’s very straightforward about that, explaining each at length including, for example, how burial practices might indicate wealth, how measures of wheat could be stand in for wages and — at least in the modern world — how reported income may not accurately reflect hidden assets.
He relies heavily on one metric especially, the Gini coefficient, which attempts to capture wealth inequality in a closed system (say, a country) in which zero represents full wealth and resource equality for all members (everyone has as much as everyone else) and 1 equaling maximum inequality, in which one person possesses all the wealth.
It’s a thorough and far-reaching study leading to a disheartening and inescapable conclusion: wealth and resource inequality (which is maximized by the compounding advantages of wealth, access to political influence and the narrowing effects of inheritance) — has always been part of the human experience.
In his view, only four things have ever leveled inequality in any significant way — mass mobilization warfare (WWI and WWII, for example), pandemics (the Plague), transformative revolutions (as in, the communist variety) and state collapse.
He walks readers through many, many explorations of each of the four examples, studying before and after wealth and resource distribution from countries around the globe and throughout recorded history (and even a bit before).
The research brings to life a troubling trend — a gulf of wealth inequality that continually increases, putting the capital and resources into the hands of a small (and shrinking) wealthy elite while extracting them from basically everyone else (especially the working- and lower-classes). Then one of the four levelers unwinds and the rich — who have the most to lose — slip down the social scale and working poor (who suddenly have a resource that’s in demand — their labor) are able to charge more and live more cheaply, and so move up the scale.
Then it all starts over again.
His research skills are incredible, so perhaps it’s no surprise the writing is solid but never lofty or in the slightest bit lyrical, but still is a punch in the gut.
For example: “…in eleven of the twenty-one countries with published top incomes shares, the portion of all income obtained by the “1 percent” rose between 50 percent and more than 100 percent between 1980 and 2010. In 2012, inequality in the United States even set several records: in that year, top 1 percent income shares (both with and without capital gains) and the share of private wealth owned by the richest 0.01 percent of households for the first time exceeded the high water mark of 1929.”
In other words, congratulation America, the chasm of inequality is now greater than during the era of the robber barons.
The question the book raises, and one he frames specifically, is — given that inequality in the U.S. is at near historic levels (or beyond) — are there any leveling events that could close the gap, even briefly, and are there in ways we could use policy to reduce inequality. The answers, it seems, are no (short of a far-reaching nuclear conflagration, which he deems unlikely), and also no, given the lack of political will needed to redistribute wealth away from the controlling elite (even though there are scads of ways — dozens of which he lists — to at least nibble around the edges without actually leveling).
It’s an important work that is, at times, mind-numbingly boring and at times pants-wettingly frightening, and almost always disheartening. I found myself almost rooting for a return of the plague, if only to knock the elites temporarily out of their golden towers and close the wealth gap just a tiny bit to the good old days of 1935.
Walter Scheidel, author of The Great Leveler, provides a scientifically rigorous, excruciatingly detailed and politically agnostic survey of wealth inequality from pre-history to the present. The focus is on factors that reduce, or level, that inequality and the core message is disheartening.
Given the far-reaching scope, in both time and geography, finding reliable and comparable data related to wealth requires making some assumptions — actually, a LOT of assumptions. But he’s very straightforward about that, explaining each at length including, for example, how burial practices might indicate wealth, how measures of wheat could be stand in for wages and — at least in the modern world — how reported income may not accurately reflect hidden assets.
He relies heavily on one metric especially, the Gini coefficient, which attempts to capture wealth inequality in a closed system (say, a country) in which zero represents full wealth and resource equality for all members (everyone has as much as everyone else) and 1 equaling maximum inequality, in which one person possesses all the wealth.
It’s a thorough and far-reaching study leading to a disheartening and inescapable conclusion: wealth and resource inequality (which is maximized by the compounding advantages of wealth, access to political influence and the narrowing effects of inheritance) — has always been part of the human experience.
In his view, only four things have ever leveled inequality in any significant way — mass mobilization warfare (WWI and WWII, for example), pandemics (the Plague), transformative revolutions (as in, the communist variety) and state collapse.
He walks readers through many, many explorations of each of the four examples, studying before and after wealth and resource distribution from countries around the globe and throughout recorded history (and even a bit before).
The research brings to life a troubling trend — a gulf of wealth inequality that continually increases, putting the capital and resources into the hands of a small (and shrinking) wealthy elite while extracting them from basically everyone else (especially the working- and lower-classes). Then one of the four levelers unwinds and the rich — who have the most to lose — slip down the social scale and working poor (who suddenly have a resource that’s in demand — their labor) are able to charge more and live more cheaply, and so move up the scale.
Then it all starts over again.
His research skills are incredible, so perhaps it’s no surprise the writing is solid but never lofty or in the slightest bit lyrical, but still is a punch in the gut.
For example: “…in eleven of the twenty-one countries with published top incomes shares, the portion of all income obtained by the “1 percent” rose between 50 percent and more than 100 percent between 1980 and 2010. In 2012, inequality in the United States even set several records: in that year, top 1 percent income shares (both with and without capital gains) and the share of private wealth owned by the richest 0.01 percent of households for the first time exceeded the high water mark of 1929.”
In other words, congratulation America, the chasm of inequality is now greater than during the era of the robber barons.
The question the book raises, and one he frames specifically, is — given that inequality in the U.S. is at near historic levels (or beyond) — are there any leveling events that could close the gap, even briefly, and are there in ways we could use policy to reduce inequality. The answers, it seems, are no (short of a far-reaching nuclear conflagration, which he deems unlikely), and also no, given the lack of political will needed to redistribute wealth away from the controlling elite (even though there are scads of ways — dozens of which he lists — to at least nibble around the edges without actually leveling).
It’s an important work that is, at times, mind-numbingly boring and at times pants-wettingly frightening, and almost always disheartening. I found myself almost rooting for a return of the plague, if only to knock the elites temporarily out of their golden towers and close the wealth gap just a tiny bit to the good old days of 1935.
September 28, 2020
The thesis of this book is simple: during peaceful times, inequality in any society will grow until it reaches pretty much the maximum possible. In agrarian or industrial societies, the "extraction rate" (the percentage of peoples surplus earnings that gets sucked up by the economic elites in one way or another) stays pretty constant at 75%, no matter what the time or place . Unless there's a leveling event. There are four different kinds of levelers: mass scale warfare, revolution with a distributive agenda, deadly pestilences and state collapse. Without violence in horrible scales, the rich will keep on getting richer.
This is a manifestly depressing thesis, which is why it's nice that there are 550 well-though-out pages detailing the ideas and showing the inevitable growth of inequality.
We think that industrial societies just got more equal because we had, I don't know, lots of wealth and democracy, I guess. But Scheidel very much does not believe this: all the equalization we had in the 20th century was due to the two World Wars and the communist revolutions. During the wars the states needed cash, so they took it where it was most plentiful: from rich people. After the war, the sacrifices the people had made emboldened the leaders to institute systems that distribute the wealth of the nations more equitably. Perhaps inequality would've started to rise again in the 50's and 60's, except that the fear of communist revolutions spreading to the west kept the politicians and the financial elites on their toes, so building the welfare state seemed like the better option.
We had a natural experiment that shows what could've happened in the West without the leveling effects of the wars: the Latin America. The world wars didn't really touch the southern America, and as a result the countries therein became notorious for their massive inequality.
Scheidel uses examples from around the globe and from different times to show how peaceful attempts to reduce inequality failed again and again, and how the only leveling events were violent.
The book was so good. When the author casually mentions that a nuclear war would be very effective at reducing inequality, you know you are reading a book that follows it's ideas to logical end points (in fairness, Scheidel does stress that despite the leveling efects, nuclear conflagaration would be a really bad thing). That's the sort of spirit I want to see in my non-fic!
This is a manifestly depressing thesis, which is why it's nice that there are 550 well-though-out pages detailing the ideas and showing the inevitable growth of inequality.
We think that industrial societies just got more equal because we had, I don't know, lots of wealth and democracy, I guess. But Scheidel very much does not believe this: all the equalization we had in the 20th century was due to the two World Wars and the communist revolutions. During the wars the states needed cash, so they took it where it was most plentiful: from rich people. After the war, the sacrifices the people had made emboldened the leaders to institute systems that distribute the wealth of the nations more equitably. Perhaps inequality would've started to rise again in the 50's and 60's, except that the fear of communist revolutions spreading to the west kept the politicians and the financial elites on their toes, so building the welfare state seemed like the better option.
We had a natural experiment that shows what could've happened in the West without the leveling effects of the wars: the Latin America. The world wars didn't really touch the southern America, and as a result the countries therein became notorious for their massive inequality.
Scheidel uses examples from around the globe and from different times to show how peaceful attempts to reduce inequality failed again and again, and how the only leveling events were violent.
The book was so good. When the author casually mentions that a nuclear war would be very effective at reducing inequality, you know you are reading a book that follows it's ideas to logical end points (in fairness, Scheidel does stress that despite the leveling efects, nuclear conflagaration would be a really bad thing). That's the sort of spirit I want to see in my non-fic!
November 11, 2019
Economic inequality is, and has been for several years now, the talk of the town. But most of this talk is political—of economic goods today, and whether and how our society should change who owns them. Little mainstream attention has been paid to the history of inequality, and here Walter Scheidel offers an exhaustive look into the past. "The Great Leveler" is a good book, if pretty dry, but the author only offers statistics and graphs, and does not consider inequality philosophically. He merely concludes that society-wide inequality can only be reduced, and that just temporarily, by death on a massive scale. That’s probably true, but it does not tell us whether, focusing more narrowly, we can reject bad inequalities while keeping good inequalities.
Scheidel says he was inspired to write this book by the 2013 release of Thomas Piketty’s Capital, a very lengthy attack on modern Western distributions of income and wealth. Piketty’s core point, as I understand it (like most people, I own a copy and have not read it), is that under modern capitalism rates of return to capital exceed rates of return to labor, and therefore, absent state intervention, inequality will, on average, inevitably increase. Scheidel took it upon himself to investigate the ebb and flow of past inequality, with an eye to how it had been ameliorated in the past. Probably not to his surprise, he discovered that the only effective mechanisms of equalization have ever been his Four Horsemen, cousins to those of Saint John: mass mobilization war; Communist revolution; total system collapse; and pandemic disease. Changes short of these, including democracy, education, technology, and broad economic growth, have no lasting effect, and often no effect at all, on inequality. In other words—if you want to reduce inequality by any significant amount, a lot of people have to die. And even then, empirically, inequality will, soon enough, creep back into any society, vitiating the “benefit” achieved earlier.
Sounds depressing. It is depressing. Most of the book is endless, highly convincing, technical details about the Four Horsemen and their impact at various times in history. The bulk of the technical detail revolves around the Gini coefficient for income, for which, to a greater or lesser degree in many eras of history, values can be assigned. Much less emphasis is placed on the Gini coefficient for wealth, since data on wealth is harder to obtain, both historically and still in modern times. In some instances, though, rough percentages of wealth held by defined segments of society can be estimated. A lot of this is eye-glazing; Scheidel even includes a lengthy appendix on relevant measuring concepts, including theoretical maximum extraction rates and other interesting ways of looking at income and wealth distribution. Scheidel is very careful to state the precision he thinks assignable in each of the scores of cases he examines, which varies widely (although he ignores the problem with Gini measures of income, that people move rapidly in and out of income brackets). At the end, the author is pretty convincing that mass death is all that has ever had a significant impact on broad measures of inequality in any society.
Scheidel is not exaggerating the sweep of his analysis. He does start from the Stone Age, talking about hunter-gatherer societies, which (especially after the advent of weapons made all men pretty equal, until much later Sam Colt made them all completely equal) had very low levels of inequality (except to the extent they were slaveholding, as were many American Indian tribes), largely because it was hard for anyone at all to obtain more than a subsistence living. Then we get the rise of agriculture and the first states, which by increasing surpluses increased inequality, often to extremely high levels (as in pharaonic Egypt), with Scheidel’s basic point being that increases in technology and economic development always increase inequality. We get Rome, too, along with the Ottomans and many other ancient empires, and then a great deal about medieval Europe, for which the records are by far the best for any pre-modern society. Inequality was sometimes extreme, sometimes less extreme, but always very significant, by all obtainable measures.
Except when people died. The First Horseman, mass mobilization warfare, gets the most text. All past societies were violent. Most violence, though, didn’t reduce inequality. Pre-modern war, in general, whether on a tiny or large scale, just transferred wealth from one set of elites to another, while destroying assets such that sometimes inequality went up, rather than down. In Scheidel’s analysis, only twentieth-century mass warfare reduced inequality, and not on a consistent basis. For example, Japan, hit by a perfect storm of leveling during World War II due to regulation, inflation, taxes and capital destruction, followed by occupation by victors bent on redistribution and elimination of old elites, and the discrediting of prior social structures, saw a very significant drop in inequality. Other countries saw less, and those not much involved (e.g., Argentina) saw none.
The author attributes this broad leveling, during and in the decades immediately after World War II (which he calls the Great Compression), to the mass mobilization effects of the world wars. The exact causal chain, though, he’s pretty vague on. He argues that leveling even in countries, like America, which did not experience capital destruction or occupation, was due primarily to political requirements—the need to satisfy the masses they were getting something through their sacrifice. Scheidel therefore attributes the Great Compression to various new government policies, from high taxes on income and estates to the welfare state, as well as to government-aided changes, such as increased unionization. He does not attribute it to broader education, or technology, or democracy as such. His claim is, rather, that the political desire and will by elites to engage in leveling was a function of mass mobilization for the wars. There must be truth in that, although certainly ideological politicians are always eager to take advantage of crises to ram through policies they could not have otherwise, so how much is necessarily a result of the wars isn’t clear, since most of these policies had been pushed for decades by Progressives and their counterparts abroad (after all, the Progressives got their ideas from the Germans). Regardless, the Great Compression has been slowly unraveling, and even in Japan, within sixty years inequality had risen back close to historical norms. And, as is well known, inequality in the United States has increased dramatically over the past thirty years, with almost all of the benefits of economic growth accruing to the top 20%, the professional-managerial elite, while the rest of our society stagnates, told a myth of social mobility to encourage them to keep working toward an ever more impossible goal.
All this sounds simple, and it is in summary, but Scheidel offers reams of analysis of historical warfare and its effects on leveling, with an eye to distinguishing modern mass mobilization warfare and its effects. He covers the American Civil War, the Chinese Warring States period, and Roman warfare, concluding that all of these had only occasional and temporary leveling effects, which he attributes to none of these being truly wars that involved mass mobilization of society. He contrasts this to Ancient Greece, where he finds that true mass mobilization, even if small in absolute numbers, tended to reduce inequality over long periods of time, which he attributes, as in the modern era, to the political power that accrued to all orders of society as long as they served in the military, and the need of the ruling classes to keep mass mobilization on track. Scheidel notes, for example, the cultural imperative among the Greeks for the rich to spend freely on public goods, something that sharply reduced inequality, though he calls it a form of taxation, which is a stretch. But it must be true that a mass mobilization society encourages the ruling class, in one way or another, to contribute to the common good, by some combination of cultural imperative and implicit threat.
The Second Horseman, Communist revolution, is in a way derivative of the First. The summation here is simple—the Communists killed tens of millions, and that reduced inequality (though Scheidel mostly ignores if that just meant everyone was worse off, all poorer together). But whenever and wherever Communism gave way to reality-based systems, inequality returned to normal levels, or higher. Scheidel contrasts modern Communist revolutions to the French Revolution, the only significant pre-modern ideological revolution, finding that the French Revolution did not, contrary to the general impression, significantly reduce inequality in France. (He ignores that the Jacobins were not economic illiterates like Communists, and so did not destroy their own economy as the Communists always did.) After reviewing other candidates for ideological revolt, such as the Taiping Rebellion, Scheidel concludes “Prior to 1917, the gap between ideological goals and preindustrial realities was too wide to be bridged by force.” Such force included all the innumerable peasant rebellions of medieval times. Only Communism, abetted by modern technology, could kill and coerce enough people to result in substantial leveling.
The Third Horseman, systemwide collapse, no doubt is very leveling. But the cure is worse than the disease, Scheidel is quite clear. Not for him the James C. Scott idea that collapse is, for the most part, a gentle reassertion by the common people of their independent rights and a mere decapitation of an extractive elite. From Mycenean Greece to Tang Dynasty China to Somalia, everyone is worse off, even if they are more equal. And, soon enough, as always, inequality reasserts itself. Finally, we get the Fourth Horseman, pandemic disease. Most pandemics don’t kill enough people to level. Some do, including the Black Death, which as is well known, substantially improved the pay and state of the laboring classes, as labor increased its value relative to capital, the more so the less coercive power the upper classes had, as in England relative to Mamluk Egypt. But even with leveling pandemics, after a hundred or a few hundred years, inequality reverted to the mean, as did wages. Only during the Industrial Revolution did workers begin to earn as much in England as they had in 1450.
All four Horsemen are thus voluminously documented. But they have all left the stage, or so it appears (and Scheidel tells us why he thinks they have all permanently left the stage). And so, what we have today, across most of the world, is growing economies but also steadily growing inequality, reverting to the historical norm of very significant inequality. In other words, in the developed world, the Great Compression has been effectively decompressing for thirty years, and in the developing world, there is just as much inequality as always in history. No change appears imminent. Scheidel thinks this is a problem, but he offers no solution. Even if governments were to take drastic redistributive measures, as recommended by many leftists, such as massive wealth taxes and confiscatory income taxes, for which there is no political will, Scheidel doubts this trend can be reversed. When you combine a growing pie with the power of a subset of society to seek economic rents, this is what you get, whether you are a Bronze Age peasant or a Silicon Valley fast food worker.
Not that Scheidel is opposed to leftist solutions—he eagerly, and jarringly given that he says they are all both impossible and ineffective, endorses a long laundry list of such proposals, many with a very tenuous connection to inequality, like “creation of a global wealth register,” making “bankruptcy law more forgiving to debtors,” unspecified “campaign finance reform,” and much more along the same lines. I suppose, as a Harvard professor, he has to genuflect to leftist pieties, but it’s a bit annoying, even though I agree with quite a few of these policies, such as limiting executive pay. (I find that I have more and more in common with Jacobin magazine, although we are not going to converge.) But, regardless, since the Horsemen have exited, or so it appears, Scheidel says that more inequality is likely in our future. Politics is a vain hope. Nor will technology help; it is more likely to exacerbate inequality (he does not cite the movie Elysium, but some variation on that is basically what he predicts). The end.
All very interesting, but I want to explore what Scheidel does not—is economic inequality bad, and if so, to what degree under what societal conditions? This is a question that does not lend itself to simple analysis or answers; any response is always going to be a weighing of many different, often vague and indeterminate, factors. We don’t get anything useful in this regard from The Great Leveler—which in this regard offers only unargued and unsupported normative judgments, such as references to the wealthier paying their “fair share”; less inequality being necessarily “more equitable”; and increasing taxes being “tax reform.”
We constantly hear from many sources broad claims that inequality is bad for society. Piketty says it promotes “instability”; Robert Gordon, in his The Rise and Fall of American Growth, says it is terrible for the economy. But neither says why; it is just a bald conclusion. Any random look around at others talking about inequality will get you pretty much the same result. Those who desire to reduce inequality usually think it adequate to portray the reduction of inequality as a moral imperative with sound, but vague, social benefits. They never discuss the role of simple envy, a universal human characteristic, and the reader suspects that envy looms larger in the thinking of most opponents of inequality than they are willing to admit. Scheidel is pretty typical: channeling others, he offers two pages noting without his usual backup and statistics that some claim that inequality reduces economic growth, and can lead to “internal conflict.” Fumbling, he mutters that we should perhaps instead focus on “normative ethics and notions of social justice,” then disclaims responsibility for that as “well beyond the scope of my study” and flees for the exit. We can see pretty clearly that those who criticize inequality never seem to have a thought-out set of reasons why and under what circumstances it’s bad. Mostly they just jabber, point in the air, and say that someone else will tell you, or imply that it’s obvious. It’s circular, and useless, as a way of examining social policy.
So let’s start from first principles. What is . . . . [review completes as first comment.]
Scheidel says he was inspired to write this book by the 2013 release of Thomas Piketty’s Capital, a very lengthy attack on modern Western distributions of income and wealth. Piketty’s core point, as I understand it (like most people, I own a copy and have not read it), is that under modern capitalism rates of return to capital exceed rates of return to labor, and therefore, absent state intervention, inequality will, on average, inevitably increase. Scheidel took it upon himself to investigate the ebb and flow of past inequality, with an eye to how it had been ameliorated in the past. Probably not to his surprise, he discovered that the only effective mechanisms of equalization have ever been his Four Horsemen, cousins to those of Saint John: mass mobilization war; Communist revolution; total system collapse; and pandemic disease. Changes short of these, including democracy, education, technology, and broad economic growth, have no lasting effect, and often no effect at all, on inequality. In other words—if you want to reduce inequality by any significant amount, a lot of people have to die. And even then, empirically, inequality will, soon enough, creep back into any society, vitiating the “benefit” achieved earlier.
Sounds depressing. It is depressing. Most of the book is endless, highly convincing, technical details about the Four Horsemen and their impact at various times in history. The bulk of the technical detail revolves around the Gini coefficient for income, for which, to a greater or lesser degree in many eras of history, values can be assigned. Much less emphasis is placed on the Gini coefficient for wealth, since data on wealth is harder to obtain, both historically and still in modern times. In some instances, though, rough percentages of wealth held by defined segments of society can be estimated. A lot of this is eye-glazing; Scheidel even includes a lengthy appendix on relevant measuring concepts, including theoretical maximum extraction rates and other interesting ways of looking at income and wealth distribution. Scheidel is very careful to state the precision he thinks assignable in each of the scores of cases he examines, which varies widely (although he ignores the problem with Gini measures of income, that people move rapidly in and out of income brackets). At the end, the author is pretty convincing that mass death is all that has ever had a significant impact on broad measures of inequality in any society.
Scheidel is not exaggerating the sweep of his analysis. He does start from the Stone Age, talking about hunter-gatherer societies, which (especially after the advent of weapons made all men pretty equal, until much later Sam Colt made them all completely equal) had very low levels of inequality (except to the extent they were slaveholding, as were many American Indian tribes), largely because it was hard for anyone at all to obtain more than a subsistence living. Then we get the rise of agriculture and the first states, which by increasing surpluses increased inequality, often to extremely high levels (as in pharaonic Egypt), with Scheidel’s basic point being that increases in technology and economic development always increase inequality. We get Rome, too, along with the Ottomans and many other ancient empires, and then a great deal about medieval Europe, for which the records are by far the best for any pre-modern society. Inequality was sometimes extreme, sometimes less extreme, but always very significant, by all obtainable measures.
Except when people died. The First Horseman, mass mobilization warfare, gets the most text. All past societies were violent. Most violence, though, didn’t reduce inequality. Pre-modern war, in general, whether on a tiny or large scale, just transferred wealth from one set of elites to another, while destroying assets such that sometimes inequality went up, rather than down. In Scheidel’s analysis, only twentieth-century mass warfare reduced inequality, and not on a consistent basis. For example, Japan, hit by a perfect storm of leveling during World War II due to regulation, inflation, taxes and capital destruction, followed by occupation by victors bent on redistribution and elimination of old elites, and the discrediting of prior social structures, saw a very significant drop in inequality. Other countries saw less, and those not much involved (e.g., Argentina) saw none.
The author attributes this broad leveling, during and in the decades immediately after World War II (which he calls the Great Compression), to the mass mobilization effects of the world wars. The exact causal chain, though, he’s pretty vague on. He argues that leveling even in countries, like America, which did not experience capital destruction or occupation, was due primarily to political requirements—the need to satisfy the masses they were getting something through their sacrifice. Scheidel therefore attributes the Great Compression to various new government policies, from high taxes on income and estates to the welfare state, as well as to government-aided changes, such as increased unionization. He does not attribute it to broader education, or technology, or democracy as such. His claim is, rather, that the political desire and will by elites to engage in leveling was a function of mass mobilization for the wars. There must be truth in that, although certainly ideological politicians are always eager to take advantage of crises to ram through policies they could not have otherwise, so how much is necessarily a result of the wars isn’t clear, since most of these policies had been pushed for decades by Progressives and their counterparts abroad (after all, the Progressives got their ideas from the Germans). Regardless, the Great Compression has been slowly unraveling, and even in Japan, within sixty years inequality had risen back close to historical norms. And, as is well known, inequality in the United States has increased dramatically over the past thirty years, with almost all of the benefits of economic growth accruing to the top 20%, the professional-managerial elite, while the rest of our society stagnates, told a myth of social mobility to encourage them to keep working toward an ever more impossible goal.
All this sounds simple, and it is in summary, but Scheidel offers reams of analysis of historical warfare and its effects on leveling, with an eye to distinguishing modern mass mobilization warfare and its effects. He covers the American Civil War, the Chinese Warring States period, and Roman warfare, concluding that all of these had only occasional and temporary leveling effects, which he attributes to none of these being truly wars that involved mass mobilization of society. He contrasts this to Ancient Greece, where he finds that true mass mobilization, even if small in absolute numbers, tended to reduce inequality over long periods of time, which he attributes, as in the modern era, to the political power that accrued to all orders of society as long as they served in the military, and the need of the ruling classes to keep mass mobilization on track. Scheidel notes, for example, the cultural imperative among the Greeks for the rich to spend freely on public goods, something that sharply reduced inequality, though he calls it a form of taxation, which is a stretch. But it must be true that a mass mobilization society encourages the ruling class, in one way or another, to contribute to the common good, by some combination of cultural imperative and implicit threat.
The Second Horseman, Communist revolution, is in a way derivative of the First. The summation here is simple—the Communists killed tens of millions, and that reduced inequality (though Scheidel mostly ignores if that just meant everyone was worse off, all poorer together). But whenever and wherever Communism gave way to reality-based systems, inequality returned to normal levels, or higher. Scheidel contrasts modern Communist revolutions to the French Revolution, the only significant pre-modern ideological revolution, finding that the French Revolution did not, contrary to the general impression, significantly reduce inequality in France. (He ignores that the Jacobins were not economic illiterates like Communists, and so did not destroy their own economy as the Communists always did.) After reviewing other candidates for ideological revolt, such as the Taiping Rebellion, Scheidel concludes “Prior to 1917, the gap between ideological goals and preindustrial realities was too wide to be bridged by force.” Such force included all the innumerable peasant rebellions of medieval times. Only Communism, abetted by modern technology, could kill and coerce enough people to result in substantial leveling.
The Third Horseman, systemwide collapse, no doubt is very leveling. But the cure is worse than the disease, Scheidel is quite clear. Not for him the James C. Scott idea that collapse is, for the most part, a gentle reassertion by the common people of their independent rights and a mere decapitation of an extractive elite. From Mycenean Greece to Tang Dynasty China to Somalia, everyone is worse off, even if they are more equal. And, soon enough, as always, inequality reasserts itself. Finally, we get the Fourth Horseman, pandemic disease. Most pandemics don’t kill enough people to level. Some do, including the Black Death, which as is well known, substantially improved the pay and state of the laboring classes, as labor increased its value relative to capital, the more so the less coercive power the upper classes had, as in England relative to Mamluk Egypt. But even with leveling pandemics, after a hundred or a few hundred years, inequality reverted to the mean, as did wages. Only during the Industrial Revolution did workers begin to earn as much in England as they had in 1450.
All four Horsemen are thus voluminously documented. But they have all left the stage, or so it appears (and Scheidel tells us why he thinks they have all permanently left the stage). And so, what we have today, across most of the world, is growing economies but also steadily growing inequality, reverting to the historical norm of very significant inequality. In other words, in the developed world, the Great Compression has been effectively decompressing for thirty years, and in the developing world, there is just as much inequality as always in history. No change appears imminent. Scheidel thinks this is a problem, but he offers no solution. Even if governments were to take drastic redistributive measures, as recommended by many leftists, such as massive wealth taxes and confiscatory income taxes, for which there is no political will, Scheidel doubts this trend can be reversed. When you combine a growing pie with the power of a subset of society to seek economic rents, this is what you get, whether you are a Bronze Age peasant or a Silicon Valley fast food worker.
Not that Scheidel is opposed to leftist solutions—he eagerly, and jarringly given that he says they are all both impossible and ineffective, endorses a long laundry list of such proposals, many with a very tenuous connection to inequality, like “creation of a global wealth register,” making “bankruptcy law more forgiving to debtors,” unspecified “campaign finance reform,” and much more along the same lines. I suppose, as a Harvard professor, he has to genuflect to leftist pieties, but it’s a bit annoying, even though I agree with quite a few of these policies, such as limiting executive pay. (I find that I have more and more in common with Jacobin magazine, although we are not going to converge.) But, regardless, since the Horsemen have exited, or so it appears, Scheidel says that more inequality is likely in our future. Politics is a vain hope. Nor will technology help; it is more likely to exacerbate inequality (he does not cite the movie Elysium, but some variation on that is basically what he predicts). The end.
All very interesting, but I want to explore what Scheidel does not—is economic inequality bad, and if so, to what degree under what societal conditions? This is a question that does not lend itself to simple analysis or answers; any response is always going to be a weighing of many different, often vague and indeterminate, factors. We don’t get anything useful in this regard from The Great Leveler—which in this regard offers only unargued and unsupported normative judgments, such as references to the wealthier paying their “fair share”; less inequality being necessarily “more equitable”; and increasing taxes being “tax reform.”
We constantly hear from many sources broad claims that inequality is bad for society. Piketty says it promotes “instability”; Robert Gordon, in his The Rise and Fall of American Growth, says it is terrible for the economy. But neither says why; it is just a bald conclusion. Any random look around at others talking about inequality will get you pretty much the same result. Those who desire to reduce inequality usually think it adequate to portray the reduction of inequality as a moral imperative with sound, but vague, social benefits. They never discuss the role of simple envy, a universal human characteristic, and the reader suspects that envy looms larger in the thinking of most opponents of inequality than they are willing to admit. Scheidel is pretty typical: channeling others, he offers two pages noting without his usual backup and statistics that some claim that inequality reduces economic growth, and can lead to “internal conflict.” Fumbling, he mutters that we should perhaps instead focus on “normative ethics and notions of social justice,” then disclaims responsibility for that as “well beyond the scope of my study” and flees for the exit. We can see pretty clearly that those who criticize inequality never seem to have a thought-out set of reasons why and under what circumstances it’s bad. Mostly they just jabber, point in the air, and say that someone else will tell you, or imply that it’s obvious. It’s circular, and useless, as a way of examining social policy.
So let’s start from first principles. What is . . . . [review completes as first comment.]
December 2, 2017
When Thomas Piketty’s book Capital was published three years ago, I had hoped it would mark the beginning of a serious discussion about the growing wealth inequality in the United States and, indeed, throughout much of the world. Unfortunately, this has not happened, the matter shouldered aside by the more incendiary issues of terrorism, immigration, and populist nationalism and, on the part of politicians and media alike, a seeming unwillingness to delve too deeply into its many implications.
But the wealth gap continues to widen: as of 2016, the top 1% of the population of the US owned 38.6% of the nation’s wealth, representing a mean average household wealth of $18,623,000. By contrast, the bottom 90% of US citizens held just 22.8% of total wealth, and the bottom 40% actually had a negative household wealth approaching $11,000. Similarly, the global elite 1% owns 50.1% of the world’s wealth, even though almost half the world’s population earns less than $2.50 a day and, of this group, 1.3 billion people somehow manage to survive on less than $1.25 a day.
Walter Scheidel’s The Great Leveling compared to Piketty’s focus on the United States and Europe since the Industrial Revolution, a period for which detailed records exist by which to accurately assess disparities in income and wealth – is extremely ambitious as he attempts to assess levels of inequity as far back as prehistoric times. Unlike the voluminous hard data available to Piketty, though, for most of the period Scheidel studied few detailed records exist. Consequently, he closely examined what archaeology has found: graves, for instance, that yielded greater ornaments or weapons than others, or the size and contents of excavated ancient dwellings. From these and similar findings he was able to extrapolate probable levels of wealth inequity in antiquity.
Given the realities of human nature, it is hardly surprising that varieties of inequity appear to be a consistent feature of human societies; even the burial sites of hunter-gatherers reveal that some of their dead were buried with more jewelry, weapons, and gifts than was common for most.
However, Scheidel concludes that significant inequality did not really “take off” until after the end of the last Ice Age when a transition “to new modes of subsistence and new forms of social organization that eroded forager egalitarianism and replaced it with durable hierarchies and disparities in income and wealth [began]. For these developments to occur, there had to be productive assets that could be defended against encroachment and from which owners could draw a surplus in a predictable manner. Food production by means of farming and herding…came to be the principal driver of economic, social, and political change.”
He observes that the two most crucial determinants of inequality were individual possession of land and livestock and the ability to transmit accumulated wealth to heirs. Over time, as settlements grew in size, both the magnitude and complexity of inequity increased. While in the earliest societies the number of very wealthy was relatively small, consisting primarily of the religious-political elite, as communities expanded in size and wealth the number of those who were better off swelled: joining the rulers were bureaucratic servants of the state, landed families, and wealthy merchants.
One of Piketty’s most important findings was that, over time, the return on capital always exceeds gains in income originating from labor. Scheidel’s findings affirm this, for the elites consistently dodged taxation, especially on wealth accumulation.
Scheidel notes, however, that the upward march of inequality has experienced dramatic collapses in the past, such as followed the decline of the Roman Empire in the West and after the Black Death decimated Europe’s population. Time and again, past wealth inequities were compressed as a consequence of one or more of what he calls “the Four Horsemen of Leveling” – mass mobilization warfare, transformative revolution, state failure, and lethal pandemics. Despite such leveling, however, within only a few generations the growth of wealth disparity resumed.
Piketty’s Capital also noted this pattern when he discussed the period of wealth compression from the 1930s into the early 1970s, and its subsequent rebound. What we now remember as a “golden age” –when gains in income and wealth were more widely distributed – was the direct result of the 20th century’s two world wars and the Great Depression that eroded the wealth of the rich through higher taxes, rapid devaluation of currencies, and destruction of physical assets. But, as is clear from the vantage point of the 21st century, this egalitarian period did not last long, either.
Is a future fearsome visit of one or more of the “Four Horsemen,” then, the only way that our current period of massive inequity can end?
There are policies that have worked in the past to deliver greater prosperity to the majority, including creating and sustaining vital social nets (for unemployment, illness and old age), the existence of thriving labor unions, and truly progressive taxation on income and accumulated wealth, as was demonstrated in the immediate post-World War II period. However, since the wealthy and powerful are always seeking ways to enhance their status advantage over the rest of us, inevitably they succeed in weakening or destroying these same policies, as is clear from the West’s social and political history since the 1970s.
Unfortunately, addressing – let alone acting to correct – severe wealth inequality is absent from the agendas of most Western states. Only China has made addressing the consequence of wealth inequality – poverty – a priority. In the United States, on the other hand, our government is currently pushing measures that would increase it.
We know what policies work to correct wealth inequity. What we lack is the will and courage to demand them!
But the wealth gap continues to widen: as of 2016, the top 1% of the population of the US owned 38.6% of the nation’s wealth, representing a mean average household wealth of $18,623,000. By contrast, the bottom 90% of US citizens held just 22.8% of total wealth, and the bottom 40% actually had a negative household wealth approaching $11,000. Similarly, the global elite 1% owns 50.1% of the world’s wealth, even though almost half the world’s population earns less than $2.50 a day and, of this group, 1.3 billion people somehow manage to survive on less than $1.25 a day.
Walter Scheidel’s The Great Leveling compared to Piketty’s focus on the United States and Europe since the Industrial Revolution, a period for which detailed records exist by which to accurately assess disparities in income and wealth – is extremely ambitious as he attempts to assess levels of inequity as far back as prehistoric times. Unlike the voluminous hard data available to Piketty, though, for most of the period Scheidel studied few detailed records exist. Consequently, he closely examined what archaeology has found: graves, for instance, that yielded greater ornaments or weapons than others, or the size and contents of excavated ancient dwellings. From these and similar findings he was able to extrapolate probable levels of wealth inequity in antiquity.
Given the realities of human nature, it is hardly surprising that varieties of inequity appear to be a consistent feature of human societies; even the burial sites of hunter-gatherers reveal that some of their dead were buried with more jewelry, weapons, and gifts than was common for most.
However, Scheidel concludes that significant inequality did not really “take off” until after the end of the last Ice Age when a transition “to new modes of subsistence and new forms of social organization that eroded forager egalitarianism and replaced it with durable hierarchies and disparities in income and wealth [began]. For these developments to occur, there had to be productive assets that could be defended against encroachment and from which owners could draw a surplus in a predictable manner. Food production by means of farming and herding…came to be the principal driver of economic, social, and political change.”
He observes that the two most crucial determinants of inequality were individual possession of land and livestock and the ability to transmit accumulated wealth to heirs. Over time, as settlements grew in size, both the magnitude and complexity of inequity increased. While in the earliest societies the number of very wealthy was relatively small, consisting primarily of the religious-political elite, as communities expanded in size and wealth the number of those who were better off swelled: joining the rulers were bureaucratic servants of the state, landed families, and wealthy merchants.
One of Piketty’s most important findings was that, over time, the return on capital always exceeds gains in income originating from labor. Scheidel’s findings affirm this, for the elites consistently dodged taxation, especially on wealth accumulation.
Scheidel notes, however, that the upward march of inequality has experienced dramatic collapses in the past, such as followed the decline of the Roman Empire in the West and after the Black Death decimated Europe’s population. Time and again, past wealth inequities were compressed as a consequence of one or more of what he calls “the Four Horsemen of Leveling” – mass mobilization warfare, transformative revolution, state failure, and lethal pandemics. Despite such leveling, however, within only a few generations the growth of wealth disparity resumed.
Piketty’s Capital also noted this pattern when he discussed the period of wealth compression from the 1930s into the early 1970s, and its subsequent rebound. What we now remember as a “golden age” –when gains in income and wealth were more widely distributed – was the direct result of the 20th century’s two world wars and the Great Depression that eroded the wealth of the rich through higher taxes, rapid devaluation of currencies, and destruction of physical assets. But, as is clear from the vantage point of the 21st century, this egalitarian period did not last long, either.
Is a future fearsome visit of one or more of the “Four Horsemen,” then, the only way that our current period of massive inequity can end?
There are policies that have worked in the past to deliver greater prosperity to the majority, including creating and sustaining vital social nets (for unemployment, illness and old age), the existence of thriving labor unions, and truly progressive taxation on income and accumulated wealth, as was demonstrated in the immediate post-World War II period. However, since the wealthy and powerful are always seeking ways to enhance their status advantage over the rest of us, inevitably they succeed in weakening or destroying these same policies, as is clear from the West’s social and political history since the 1970s.
Unfortunately, addressing – let alone acting to correct – severe wealth inequality is absent from the agendas of most Western states. Only China has made addressing the consequence of wealth inequality – poverty – a priority. In the United States, on the other hand, our government is currently pushing measures that would increase it.
We know what policies work to correct wealth inequity. What we lack is the will and courage to demand them!
May 26, 2020
The book contains lots of interesting information, covering most of human history. However, the author seems convinced that any information is worth mentioning, regardless of its relevance to the argument being formulated, like when he clarifies, when talking about state collapses in ancient times, that the city of Megiddo is on “the plain of the biblical ‘Armageddon’”. Besides this excessive attention to minutia, the book suffers with successive reiterations of the main arguments. First they are presented in broad lines, then they are outlined, after that they are thoroughly detailed, number after excruciating number, with many caveats about the quality of data available or the scope of the conclusions reached. At the end of each chapter there is a summary as well as at the very end of the book. The author really wants to be sure that we the readers will not stray away from his line of thought. At least for me, it all made the reading a little bit tiresome. In the end, given that most levelling episodes throughout history occurred in spite of human agency (the only exception are the revolutionary movements, whose outcomes do not seem very tempting for the modern audience), it remains unclear for me why such levelling should be more important than simple poverty reduction from an economic point of view. I realize that wealth concentration goes hand in hand with political cronyism, but the blueprint for overcoming its shortcomings remains at fault. Perhaps a more focused approach had allowed the author enough time to address this conundrum.
December 18, 2017
This book posited that only 4 things can reduce inequality: war, revolution, government collapse, and epidemic. Numerous historical examples were given, and whenever inequality decreased, it was always accompanied by massive economic collapse. Depressingly, the author explained that even this levelling is unlikely to be repeated in future.
He also explained what policies worked previously (e.g. land reform). It required massive Robinhood like actions by the governments.
Extremely depressing read. However, I am not entirely convinced by his arguments, because he did not explain why some countries (Scandinavia) are more equal than others. With his extensive knowledge of economic history, he should have been able to explain this. Of course they are homogenous groups; however there are lots of homogenous countries that are not egalitarian. Instead, the author basically just told us inequality is inevitable and nothing would work to decrease it. I think he can do better than that.
He also explained what policies worked previously (e.g. land reform). It required massive Robinhood like actions by the governments.
Extremely depressing read. However, I am not entirely convinced by his arguments, because he did not explain why some countries (Scandinavia) are more equal than others. With his extensive knowledge of economic history, he should have been able to explain this. Of course they are homogenous groups; however there are lots of homogenous countries that are not egalitarian. Instead, the author basically just told us inequality is inevitable and nothing would work to decrease it. I think he can do better than that.
Read
December 28, 2017A massive, strongly evidence-based tome of the sort I tend to be quite fond of, making the same points again and again and again. Namely, that humans tend towards inequality, unless this is disrupted by war, violent revolution, famine, or plague, and even the social democratic calm period of the mid-20th Century was more a byproduct of two world wars and the cataclysmic destruction of the ancien regime then it was of the cautious, Keynesian practices that we associate with that time period. It's not exactly breezy, but it is important, and it's worth considering -- now this is the point where I go interrogate the evidence and read the counter-arguments.
February 22, 2017
A very interesting book that takes a super long term contrarian take on Piketty to argue almost all true periods of income equalization were due to catastrophic societal disasters like social revolution(Bolsheviks), state collapse (Roman Empire), epidemics (Great Plague) and mass moblization warfare (WWI and WW2).
Read
April 3, 2020Only observations of the causes of inequality with semi-hegelian historicism. Scheidel did indeed realise the conventional dark side of neoliberal realities, but provides no case study of solutions.
January 29, 2021
Worth reading if interested in (part of) the big picture.
As all great pictures on a big topic it omits dozens of relevant things but, I would say, the overall message is not unconvincing (and not even new, to tell the truth).
Economic historians do not like it, but I am afraid that's just a bit of envy :)
As all great pictures on a big topic it omits dozens of relevant things but, I would say, the overall message is not unconvincing (and not even new, to tell the truth).
Economic historians do not like it, but I am afraid that's just a bit of envy :)
June 21, 2022
Este libro hacia 3 años lo había comprado y lo había dejado en la página 100, se me hacía difícil su lectura, ahora que lo retomó, veo con otros ojos este libro. La lectura para nada es amena, hay lugares en que si lo es, pero en su mayoría no. Un punto a destacar es que es muy clara la tesis del autor a lo largo del libro, con cuál es claro lo que intenta hacer él en cada parte.
En la introducción tenemos un esbozó de las ideas que recorrerán el libro, como los 4 jinetes que nivelan la desigualdad: guerras, revoluciones, colpaso de Estados o imperios y pestes, la desigual tratada en el libro es una económica, teniendo presente el coeficiente Gini y el porcentaje de ingresos, aunque es claro que entre más atrás de mire la historia, más difícil es mirar esos datos como tal.
La primera parte es una aproximación histórica de la desigualdad, desde sus orígenes hasta el siglo XX, si nos remontamos al paleolítico es difícil establecer elementos de desigualdad más allá de elementos característicos en las tumbas, ya es con el desarrollo de la agricultura y la ganadería que empiezan las desigualdades debido al surgimiento de la propiedad y las herencias, está últimas lo que hacen es mantener la desigualdad entre generaciones, elementos como templos, edificios públicos y muros defensivos son prueba de la desigualdad en la época antigua.
Si se hace un esbozó de la desigualdad, el imperio romano y chino, son unos de los más desiguales debido a sus aristocracia, en Europa entre el año 1000 al 1300 el gran desarrollo económico, comercial, demográfico y urbano aumentaron mucho la desigualdad que tuvo su fin con la llegada de las peste negra, solo es hasta el siglo XV con la era de la colonización de nuevas tierras que la desigualdad aumentará producto de una nueva élite comercial, aunque imperios como el otomano distribuyen mejor sus riquezas. El largo siglo XIX mantendría la desigualdad basada en la acumulación de capital.
En la segunda parte, la desigualdad del siglo XIX tendrá un freno: la guerra, el gran ejemplo de esto es Japón, que luego de su intervención en la segunda guerra mundial paso de ser uno de los países con mayor desigualdad a uno mucho más igualitario producto de la ocupación estadounidenses, que con el fin de evitar ideas del imperialismo, fomentó un democratización en el país nipón, impulsando cambios políticos, sociales y agrarios, como una reforma agraria y el fin de los conglomerado familiares empresariales.
Los países que estuvieron en las dos guerras mundiales, vieron una reducción de la desigualdad, las élites más ricas vieron desaparecer sus grandes fortunas más no las distribuyeron, los conflictos que movilizan tantas másas conlleva a mejorar las políticas sociales, a un crecimiento del sindicalismo y un mayor aumento de la democracia. Pero, las guerras civiles y pre modernas, no cumplen está norma, por lo general favorecen a un bando o a un sector, la contracción de la desigualdad se da en guerras más modernas, que movilicen el 2% de la población de un país, cosa que inició desde las guerras napoleónicas.
En la tercera parte, tenemos las revoluciones que nivelan la desigualdad, los ejemplos más emblemáticos son las revoluciones de corté comunista como la china y rusa, estas generaron igualdad por medio de la democratización, expropiación y control de precios, todo ello mediado por mucha violencia, aunque algunas veces esta última no es tanta.
La revolución francesa, si bien eliminó muchos privilegios de la nobleza, está continuo, y la concentración de la riqueza paso ahora a manos de una nueva clase media, por tanto, no hay una transformación tan radical. Las revueltas campesinas y urbanas tanto pre modernas como modernas, muy pocas veces cambian muchas cosas, y tiene objetivos distintos que el de atacar la desigualdad, finalmente, las reformas agrarias son importantes para atenuar la desigualdad.
En la cuarta parte, tenemos el colapso de imperios, estados o sistemas como contenedor de la desigualdad, la prueba de esto es que el fin de la dinastía China Tang elimino de plano la riqueza de la aristocracia más rica, en Roma, su colapso supuso el fin de una élite romana que llevo a ciertas mejoras en las clases más bajas, aunque muchas veces el fin de Estados no implica un aumento de la igualdad como es el caso de Somalia.
En la quinta parte, tenemos a las plagas como elemento nivelador, la peste negra es el mayor referente a cuanto esté jinete, luego de un periodo de crecimiento medieval, la peste dio fin a este, con la reducción de la población la mano de obra valía más, y por ende el precio de la misma, los campesinos ahora podían tener una mejor dieta y comprar objetos algo lujosos, aunque el tiempo y las mismas circunstancias mantiene a raya está igualdad, en países de Europa del este se asentuo aún más la servidumbre, cosa contraria que paso en occidente.
Otros ejemplos de esto, está en la viruela y sarampión traídos a América que mejoraron los salarios indígenas, plagas como la de Justiniano y la Antonina, llevaron a una reducción del precio de la tierra, una mejora en lo salarios y una bajada en los precios de ciertos productos. El hambre por su parte, no genera mucha mortalidad en comparación con las pestes, aunque conlleva a una aumento de los salarios no implica una distribución de la riqueza. Finalmente en lugares afectados por la guerra y la peste, la mano de obra sube su precio y la élite pierde riqueza.
En la sexta parte, queda la alternativa de mirar si es posible reducir la desigualdad por medios pacíficos, una forma es con una reforma agraria, lo que se muestra en que cuando está es impulsada por medios pacíficos su alcance es cortó, la violencia lleva a una mejor distribución de la riqueza, las reformas agrarias se llevaron a cabo, luego de una guerra o por el miedo a esta, o al propio comunismo, igualmente mayor democracia no implica más igualdad.
Siguiendo la misma línea que un país sea más Rico o que tenga más PIB, no implica mayor igualdad, la prueba de esto son países del Golfo Pérsico, esto deja claro que la violencia es importante para impulsar la igualdad, si se especula sobre otros mundos posibles, se da cuenta de que sin está los cambios tal vez si hubiesen ocurrido, pero de una manera muy lenta.
La última parte, es una mirada a la desigualdad contemporánea y futura, desde la década de 1970 aumento la desigualdad en todo el mundo, la economía de mercado y la globalización de la economía asentuo la desigualdad entre la población rica y la pobre, cosa que también ocurre entre países, una nueva élite financiera se queda con todo, el decenso del sindicalismo a llevado a peores salarios, y la educación ya no es garantía de movilidad social, todo es producto de una época de relativa paz y estabilidad.
El aumento de la vejez en Europa y en países del lejano Oriente llevará a un aumento de la desigualdad, lo que implicaría una mayor migración ante estos, lo que generaría más xenofobia, el futuro de la medicina genética en un futuro implicará mayor desigualdad. A modo de conclusión es la violencia y las turbulencias sociales las que contraen la desigualdad, no medios pacíficos, estamos ante una época de mucha concentración de capital.
En fin, el libro no es malo, pero siento que es de mayor interés para personas que les guste la economía y el tema de la desigualdad y pobreza, este libro es un gran complemento, a mi parecer, de libros de Piketty, este texto ofrece es una mirada más histórica.
En la introducción tenemos un esbozó de las ideas que recorrerán el libro, como los 4 jinetes que nivelan la desigualdad: guerras, revoluciones, colpaso de Estados o imperios y pestes, la desigual tratada en el libro es una económica, teniendo presente el coeficiente Gini y el porcentaje de ingresos, aunque es claro que entre más atrás de mire la historia, más difícil es mirar esos datos como tal.
La primera parte es una aproximación histórica de la desigualdad, desde sus orígenes hasta el siglo XX, si nos remontamos al paleolítico es difícil establecer elementos de desigualdad más allá de elementos característicos en las tumbas, ya es con el desarrollo de la agricultura y la ganadería que empiezan las desigualdades debido al surgimiento de la propiedad y las herencias, está últimas lo que hacen es mantener la desigualdad entre generaciones, elementos como templos, edificios públicos y muros defensivos son prueba de la desigualdad en la época antigua.
Si se hace un esbozó de la desigualdad, el imperio romano y chino, son unos de los más desiguales debido a sus aristocracia, en Europa entre el año 1000 al 1300 el gran desarrollo económico, comercial, demográfico y urbano aumentaron mucho la desigualdad que tuvo su fin con la llegada de las peste negra, solo es hasta el siglo XV con la era de la colonización de nuevas tierras que la desigualdad aumentará producto de una nueva élite comercial, aunque imperios como el otomano distribuyen mejor sus riquezas. El largo siglo XIX mantendría la desigualdad basada en la acumulación de capital.
En la segunda parte, la desigualdad del siglo XIX tendrá un freno: la guerra, el gran ejemplo de esto es Japón, que luego de su intervención en la segunda guerra mundial paso de ser uno de los países con mayor desigualdad a uno mucho más igualitario producto de la ocupación estadounidenses, que con el fin de evitar ideas del imperialismo, fomentó un democratización en el país nipón, impulsando cambios políticos, sociales y agrarios, como una reforma agraria y el fin de los conglomerado familiares empresariales.
Los países que estuvieron en las dos guerras mundiales, vieron una reducción de la desigualdad, las élites más ricas vieron desaparecer sus grandes fortunas más no las distribuyeron, los conflictos que movilizan tantas másas conlleva a mejorar las políticas sociales, a un crecimiento del sindicalismo y un mayor aumento de la democracia. Pero, las guerras civiles y pre modernas, no cumplen está norma, por lo general favorecen a un bando o a un sector, la contracción de la desigualdad se da en guerras más modernas, que movilicen el 2% de la población de un país, cosa que inició desde las guerras napoleónicas.
En la tercera parte, tenemos las revoluciones que nivelan la desigualdad, los ejemplos más emblemáticos son las revoluciones de corté comunista como la china y rusa, estas generaron igualdad por medio de la democratización, expropiación y control de precios, todo ello mediado por mucha violencia, aunque algunas veces esta última no es tanta.
La revolución francesa, si bien eliminó muchos privilegios de la nobleza, está continuo, y la concentración de la riqueza paso ahora a manos de una nueva clase media, por tanto, no hay una transformación tan radical. Las revueltas campesinas y urbanas tanto pre modernas como modernas, muy pocas veces cambian muchas cosas, y tiene objetivos distintos que el de atacar la desigualdad, finalmente, las reformas agrarias son importantes para atenuar la desigualdad.
En la cuarta parte, tenemos el colapso de imperios, estados o sistemas como contenedor de la desigualdad, la prueba de esto es que el fin de la dinastía China Tang elimino de plano la riqueza de la aristocracia más rica, en Roma, su colapso supuso el fin de una élite romana que llevo a ciertas mejoras en las clases más bajas, aunque muchas veces el fin de Estados no implica un aumento de la igualdad como es el caso de Somalia.
En la quinta parte, tenemos a las plagas como elemento nivelador, la peste negra es el mayor referente a cuanto esté jinete, luego de un periodo de crecimiento medieval, la peste dio fin a este, con la reducción de la población la mano de obra valía más, y por ende el precio de la misma, los campesinos ahora podían tener una mejor dieta y comprar objetos algo lujosos, aunque el tiempo y las mismas circunstancias mantiene a raya está igualdad, en países de Europa del este se asentuo aún más la servidumbre, cosa contraria que paso en occidente.
Otros ejemplos de esto, está en la viruela y sarampión traídos a América que mejoraron los salarios indígenas, plagas como la de Justiniano y la Antonina, llevaron a una reducción del precio de la tierra, una mejora en lo salarios y una bajada en los precios de ciertos productos. El hambre por su parte, no genera mucha mortalidad en comparación con las pestes, aunque conlleva a una aumento de los salarios no implica una distribución de la riqueza. Finalmente en lugares afectados por la guerra y la peste, la mano de obra sube su precio y la élite pierde riqueza.
En la sexta parte, queda la alternativa de mirar si es posible reducir la desigualdad por medios pacíficos, una forma es con una reforma agraria, lo que se muestra en que cuando está es impulsada por medios pacíficos su alcance es cortó, la violencia lleva a una mejor distribución de la riqueza, las reformas agrarias se llevaron a cabo, luego de una guerra o por el miedo a esta, o al propio comunismo, igualmente mayor democracia no implica más igualdad.
Siguiendo la misma línea que un país sea más Rico o que tenga más PIB, no implica mayor igualdad, la prueba de esto son países del Golfo Pérsico, esto deja claro que la violencia es importante para impulsar la igualdad, si se especula sobre otros mundos posibles, se da cuenta de que sin está los cambios tal vez si hubiesen ocurrido, pero de una manera muy lenta.
La última parte, es una mirada a la desigualdad contemporánea y futura, desde la década de 1970 aumento la desigualdad en todo el mundo, la economía de mercado y la globalización de la economía asentuo la desigualdad entre la población rica y la pobre, cosa que también ocurre entre países, una nueva élite financiera se queda con todo, el decenso del sindicalismo a llevado a peores salarios, y la educación ya no es garantía de movilidad social, todo es producto de una época de relativa paz y estabilidad.
El aumento de la vejez en Europa y en países del lejano Oriente llevará a un aumento de la desigualdad, lo que implicaría una mayor migración ante estos, lo que generaría más xenofobia, el futuro de la medicina genética en un futuro implicará mayor desigualdad. A modo de conclusión es la violencia y las turbulencias sociales las que contraen la desigualdad, no medios pacíficos, estamos ante una época de mucha concentración de capital.
En fin, el libro no es malo, pero siento que es de mayor interés para personas que les guste la economía y el tema de la desigualdad y pobreza, este libro es un gran complemento, a mi parecer, de libros de Piketty, este texto ofrece es una mirada más histórica.
May 2, 2021
I've no legitimate choice but to rate this book with a full five stars, though it is NOT for everyone and is even more academic than the dissertations I edit for a living. This is partially the reason for the five stars; this book is thoroughly, extensively and relentlessly researched. "Nuance" doesn't even begin to cover it. This was a surprising read to me because I made an assumption and didn't read the description. On the title alone, I thought the book would detail how protest, violent protest specifically, was needed for addressing inequality. Scheidel really does mean "violence" - not violent protest and he means violence on a massive scale; that this is what it takes to snatch the often well-established and insulated preferential and lucrative treatment and handling of the rich and, more importantly, of the truly and elite wealthy. Noting what he calls the four horsemen of leveling inequality (war, revolution (which rarely succeeds), collapse, and plagues/pandemics) Scheidel makes a breathtaking (in scope) and exhaustive (in reading) journey though proving how right he is about each of these. He then turns to alternatives that fail to really level inequality in the way the horsemen - especially the first one - are able to do, and proves that he's right about his original thesis. He presents things in a way as if he is trying his damnedest not to be right, but facts, analysis and common sense just won't let him do this. He ends with a flurry of large scale measures/policies (some tried and true and some quite less popularized) to combat inequality, which is really what he wants to do. It's inevitable and here to stay though, and other than wondering how he may have altered his writing to account for COVID (which he may not have), the end result of all this is sobering. Violence really is the answer but at what cost, he asks. At what cost that one is willing to pay? If you're anything like me, looking at the totality of how humans have met head to head with the four horsemen, you'll close the book grateful that you're even still alive as you can see how unlikely that could have been at any given time. It's a mad, mad, inequitable world.
December 19, 2022
Read because it was one of WORLD Magazine's Books of the Year several years ago. Actually listened to it as an audiobook which was probably a mistake as there are many numerical facts and figures which were hard to follow in audio format.
Author assumes inequality is bad and, therefore, fails to establish that idea before embarking on his thesis. Main thesis is that the only things that level out economic inequality are war, revolution, government failure, and plague. He made his argument well (in spite of using a lot of what he calls "proxy data" for ancient or pre-writing civilizations). But without establishing that inequality is bad, I was mostly left thinking that at least three of those four levelers (plague excluded) just level everyone to be poorer which hardly seems ideal. I disagreed with almost all his (mostly government-directed) ideas for less devastating ways to level inequality in the final part of the book as well.
Some interesting ideas in the book, but I would have preferred it as an essay or blog post because a full book on the topic seemed to be beating a dead horse. I got the main point in the first few chapters and everything else after just felt tedious.
Author assumes inequality is bad and, therefore, fails to establish that idea before embarking on his thesis. Main thesis is that the only things that level out economic inequality are war, revolution, government failure, and plague. He made his argument well (in spite of using a lot of what he calls "proxy data" for ancient or pre-writing civilizations). But without establishing that inequality is bad, I was mostly left thinking that at least three of those four levelers (plague excluded) just level everyone to be poorer which hardly seems ideal. I disagreed with almost all his (mostly government-directed) ideas for less devastating ways to level inequality in the final part of the book as well.
Some interesting ideas in the book, but I would have preferred it as an essay or blog post because a full book on the topic seemed to be beating a dead horse. I got the main point in the first few chapters and everything else after just felt tedious.
November 12, 2020
A chilling book. Can reason fix inequality? Calm policy making aimed at balancing growth and welfare? The author appears to argue not. Instead, different forms of violence and catastrophe (war, revolution, state collapse, plague) are at play. These levelers have destroyed the fortunes of the rich and reduced inequality, only to see a reversal over time and inequality return over time. Does this represent our future today??
September 14, 2017
Violence is the only thing that effectively levels inequality in society, and “equality” usually means “everyone is equally poor.” A depressing conclusion, but the author has painstaking data to support the point. “Be careful what you wish for,” indeed!
January 27, 2019
More fun than mandatory safety training
Less fun than being waterboarded.
Less fun than being waterboarded.
January 5, 2021
I'm giving this book only three stars because I'm not really its audience. Weighing in at 504 dense pages, nearly each page filled with numerous statistics on Gini coefficients, Scheidel's tome seems targeted at an academic reader in economics or economic history. A 10-page summary done as a New Yorker article probably would have sufficed to make the point to a general reader.
And it's a good point. Economic inequality, which is higher today in most countries than it's been in nearly a century, isn't so easy to fix. At least judging by history. Whether it's wealth or income, the rich have always been with us and as long as there is an economy, the rich will always be with us.
But can we make the 1% less rich while making the 99% less poor? Don't count on it. Barring catastrophes major enough to kill enough people to disrupt world order, the rich will just keep getting richer. History backs this up, Scheidel claims.
That's hard to accept, since many people alive today can remember when things were different. Starting in the New Deal and continuing through the 1970s, economies in the US and beyond were much more equal. But in the 1980s inequality started to grow again, reaching levels today not seen since the 1920s or even the Gilded Age of the late 19th century.
With good public policy like more progressive taxation to make the 1% pay their fair share, and more progressive social programs to help lift the poorest people up, can't we go back to a more New Deal level of income and wealth equality? Some experts have even predicted that since the economy has swung so far towards inequality, that as part of a cycle that would restore some kind of natural balance, the economy may naturally swing back to more equality on its own in coming years.
Scheidel doesn't think so. He argues that the recent decades of relative equality were unique and don't provide a model for the vast expanse of economic history. The period of 1914-1980 did enjoy a compression of inequality in the economies of most of the world. But this compression would not be easy to reproduce without the events of this period, which all happen to have been not just violent, but extremely violent: two unprecedented World Wars along with violent Communist revolutions and the Great Depression.
Without all that violence, no equality. Inequality is the rule and equality is the exception argues Scheidel. Peace and health bring inequality. Only death and suffering can shake it.
History back to the dawn of time shows that humans and the primates that preceded us nearly always create unequal social orders. Once farming societies appeared, that social hierarchy translated into unequal economic systems. To the deep chagrin of utopian levelers, inequality has turned out to be the natural state of both our species and global civilization.
Economic inequality has only ever contracted in a substantial way with the appearance of the four horsemen of leveling: mass mobilization war of the kind seen only in the twentieth century, state collapse, violent revolution, and global pandemic.
And for real leveling, you can't go half way on any of these. If the catastrophe isn't big enough, and if enough people don't die, then you won't get much contraction of inequality.
Just think about the economy during the Covid-19 pandemic. Millions of people worldwide lost their jobs but yet, despite a few scary days of drops, the stock market soared overall. The pandemic and quarantine didn't cause massive leveling. If anything, it made inequality worse. What economic disruption did occur just caused the poor to get poorer while helping the rich get richer. That's because the suffering just wasn't disruptive enough.
The Black Death of the middle ages killed up to half of people in different parts of Europe, killing so many rich people as to disrupt their management of society while at the same time killing so many poor people as to create a shortage of unskilled labor that helped workers demand higher pay and better conditions. By contrast, at nearly 2 million deaths as of January 2021, Covid just isn't deadly enough to disrupt things and give increased value to the unskilled labor that's the main economic asset of the poor or to destroy the capital assets that undergird the rich.
At the rates of a world war or the bubonic plague, a modern pandemic would have to kill hundreds of millions of people to disrupt economic inequality today. And that kind of suffering is just too high a price to pay in order to make our economies more equal. Nobody wants any of the four horsemen of leveling to mount their steeds. So, we must find a peaceful way to get some leveling -- or else, just do without. While everybody seems to think inequality is bad, Scheidel seems to be suggesting that it's a disease we can live with, because the cure is much worse.
This is a thought-provoking book with a depressing conclusion. Don't expect to contract economic inequality easily. A little contraction can occur through politics by tinkering with taxes and distributions, with trade rules and union rules. But absent catastrophe like World War I or II that threatens the existence of a nation or group of nations, there won't develop enough political will to really soak the rich.
And it's a good point. Economic inequality, which is higher today in most countries than it's been in nearly a century, isn't so easy to fix. At least judging by history. Whether it's wealth or income, the rich have always been with us and as long as there is an economy, the rich will always be with us.
But can we make the 1% less rich while making the 99% less poor? Don't count on it. Barring catastrophes major enough to kill enough people to disrupt world order, the rich will just keep getting richer. History backs this up, Scheidel claims.
That's hard to accept, since many people alive today can remember when things were different. Starting in the New Deal and continuing through the 1970s, economies in the US and beyond were much more equal. But in the 1980s inequality started to grow again, reaching levels today not seen since the 1920s or even the Gilded Age of the late 19th century.
With good public policy like more progressive taxation to make the 1% pay their fair share, and more progressive social programs to help lift the poorest people up, can't we go back to a more New Deal level of income and wealth equality? Some experts have even predicted that since the economy has swung so far towards inequality, that as part of a cycle that would restore some kind of natural balance, the economy may naturally swing back to more equality on its own in coming years.
Scheidel doesn't think so. He argues that the recent decades of relative equality were unique and don't provide a model for the vast expanse of economic history. The period of 1914-1980 did enjoy a compression of inequality in the economies of most of the world. But this compression would not be easy to reproduce without the events of this period, which all happen to have been not just violent, but extremely violent: two unprecedented World Wars along with violent Communist revolutions and the Great Depression.
Without all that violence, no equality. Inequality is the rule and equality is the exception argues Scheidel. Peace and health bring inequality. Only death and suffering can shake it.
History back to the dawn of time shows that humans and the primates that preceded us nearly always create unequal social orders. Once farming societies appeared, that social hierarchy translated into unequal economic systems. To the deep chagrin of utopian levelers, inequality has turned out to be the natural state of both our species and global civilization.
Economic inequality has only ever contracted in a substantial way with the appearance of the four horsemen of leveling: mass mobilization war of the kind seen only in the twentieth century, state collapse, violent revolution, and global pandemic.
And for real leveling, you can't go half way on any of these. If the catastrophe isn't big enough, and if enough people don't die, then you won't get much contraction of inequality.
Just think about the economy during the Covid-19 pandemic. Millions of people worldwide lost their jobs but yet, despite a few scary days of drops, the stock market soared overall. The pandemic and quarantine didn't cause massive leveling. If anything, it made inequality worse. What economic disruption did occur just caused the poor to get poorer while helping the rich get richer. That's because the suffering just wasn't disruptive enough.
The Black Death of the middle ages killed up to half of people in different parts of Europe, killing so many rich people as to disrupt their management of society while at the same time killing so many poor people as to create a shortage of unskilled labor that helped workers demand higher pay and better conditions. By contrast, at nearly 2 million deaths as of January 2021, Covid just isn't deadly enough to disrupt things and give increased value to the unskilled labor that's the main economic asset of the poor or to destroy the capital assets that undergird the rich.
At the rates of a world war or the bubonic plague, a modern pandemic would have to kill hundreds of millions of people to disrupt economic inequality today. And that kind of suffering is just too high a price to pay in order to make our economies more equal. Nobody wants any of the four horsemen of leveling to mount their steeds. So, we must find a peaceful way to get some leveling -- or else, just do without. While everybody seems to think inequality is bad, Scheidel seems to be suggesting that it's a disease we can live with, because the cure is much worse.
This is a thought-provoking book with a depressing conclusion. Don't expect to contract economic inequality easily. A little contraction can occur through politics by tinkering with taxes and distributions, with trade rules and union rules. But absent catastrophe like World War I or II that threatens the existence of a nation or group of nations, there won't develop enough political will to really soak the rich.
December 28, 2020
Walter Scheidel's The Great Leveler is a very thought-provoking book that leaves you wondering whether greater income and wealth equality is something worth chasing or, even, something we can chase. The largest empirical lesson the book teaches us is that periods of relative equality are rare. Progressive tax and redistribution programs can help arrest growing inequality and may help temporarily equalize, but the results are insignificant compared to the few great periods of leveling in human history.
For most of human history, steep inequality was probably impossible. You can only have inequality in a world where average output per capita is above sustenance. Only when there's a surplus can it be captured by one or a few individuals, rather than spread out equally among the population. It follows that inequality is a feature that came about after the transition to agrarian agriculture and was, in fact, exceedingly rare among foraging and hunter-gatherer societies.
Once the transition to agriculture took place, inequality — very high inequality, in fact — became the norm. There are three major leveling events in Western history, two of which also have a global history: the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the Bubonic Plague, and the Great Compression between 1914–50. No other periods of equalization can match the same degree of change in the rate of inequality.
Scheidel organizes historical periods of steep increases in economic equality into major themes or causes of the change. There are four: war, revolution, plague, and system collapse. He looks at a broad range of evidence for each of the four. He finds that it's not just any wars that reduce inequality, it's industrialized warfare that requires mass mobalization, of which we have just two examples: World War I and World War II. Equally, it's not just any plague. Coronavirus is not going to equalize our society. It requires death on massive proportions, like the 30–50% death rates of the Bubonic Plague. And it's not just any revolution that will do the trick, but revolutions accompanied by violence and the use of state violence to enforce radical ideological redistributions — two fit the bill, the communist revolutions in Russia and China. The horrors of system collapse speak for themselves.
In other words, when abstracting from the causes, there are two features to equalizing periods: mass deaths and the destruction or consumption of capital at a gargantuan, global scale.
He does look at peaceful attempts at equalizing and finds that they all come short. No less important, even marginal gains are temporary. The major evidence for peaceful equalization comes from Latin America, which began to see reductions in inequality in the 2000s, but these trends were marginal by comparison and reversed in the 2010s. Where dramatic regulatory changes were made that helped to maintain relative equalizing are in countries that suffered from the equalizing effects of plague, war, and revolution, and even here the gains are temporary. The high relative levels of economic equality achieved in the United States, as a result of the Great Depression and World War II, and Russia, as a result of the communist revolution and the violent force needed to enforce collectivization, were erased by the 1990s (sooner in the U.S.).
The great lesson of the book, that very high inequality is a feature of complex civilization and that equalizing is rare, requiring death and violence on a massive scale, is a very difficult one during a social era that eschews inequality and seeks to equalize. It makes us rethink how we can achieve these ambitions and whether they are achievable at all, or whether we should start to think about the exceptional period between 1870–1990, and more specifically the period between 1920–1970, as a coincidence. That is, whether the correlation between the greatest period of economic growth and an era of significant equalization are not two things that go together – as perhaps Kuznets would have us believe –, but rather two things that happened to align because a great period of technological advancement (which began way before 1914 and the beginning of equalization) intersected one of the great violence and death (WWI, social revolutions, WWII, and the rise of communism in China and Vietnam).
Whatever your takeaways, if you're curious about economic inequality, its raison d'etre, and what to do about it, The Great Leveler is a must-read.
For most of human history, steep inequality was probably impossible. You can only have inequality in a world where average output per capita is above sustenance. Only when there's a surplus can it be captured by one or a few individuals, rather than spread out equally among the population. It follows that inequality is a feature that came about after the transition to agrarian agriculture and was, in fact, exceedingly rare among foraging and hunter-gatherer societies.
Once the transition to agriculture took place, inequality — very high inequality, in fact — became the norm. There are three major leveling events in Western history, two of which also have a global history: the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the Bubonic Plague, and the Great Compression between 1914–50. No other periods of equalization can match the same degree of change in the rate of inequality.
Scheidel organizes historical periods of steep increases in economic equality into major themes or causes of the change. There are four: war, revolution, plague, and system collapse. He looks at a broad range of evidence for each of the four. He finds that it's not just any wars that reduce inequality, it's industrialized warfare that requires mass mobalization, of which we have just two examples: World War I and World War II. Equally, it's not just any plague. Coronavirus is not going to equalize our society. It requires death on massive proportions, like the 30–50% death rates of the Bubonic Plague. And it's not just any revolution that will do the trick, but revolutions accompanied by violence and the use of state violence to enforce radical ideological redistributions — two fit the bill, the communist revolutions in Russia and China. The horrors of system collapse speak for themselves.
In other words, when abstracting from the causes, there are two features to equalizing periods: mass deaths and the destruction or consumption of capital at a gargantuan, global scale.
He does look at peaceful attempts at equalizing and finds that they all come short. No less important, even marginal gains are temporary. The major evidence for peaceful equalization comes from Latin America, which began to see reductions in inequality in the 2000s, but these trends were marginal by comparison and reversed in the 2010s. Where dramatic regulatory changes were made that helped to maintain relative equalizing are in countries that suffered from the equalizing effects of plague, war, and revolution, and even here the gains are temporary. The high relative levels of economic equality achieved in the United States, as a result of the Great Depression and World War II, and Russia, as a result of the communist revolution and the violent force needed to enforce collectivization, were erased by the 1990s (sooner in the U.S.).
The great lesson of the book, that very high inequality is a feature of complex civilization and that equalizing is rare, requiring death and violence on a massive scale, is a very difficult one during a social era that eschews inequality and seeks to equalize. It makes us rethink how we can achieve these ambitions and whether they are achievable at all, or whether we should start to think about the exceptional period between 1870–1990, and more specifically the period between 1920–1970, as a coincidence. That is, whether the correlation between the greatest period of economic growth and an era of significant equalization are not two things that go together – as perhaps Kuznets would have us believe –, but rather two things that happened to align because a great period of technological advancement (which began way before 1914 and the beginning of equalization) intersected one of the great violence and death (WWI, social revolutions, WWII, and the rise of communism in China and Vietnam).
Whatever your takeaways, if you're curious about economic inequality, its raison d'etre, and what to do about it, The Great Leveler is a must-read.
February 14, 2021
Asi sa už stáva zvykom, že najlepšie knihy čítam vždy na začiatku roka. Great Leveler som začal čítať v angličtine, vzhľadom na ťažkú tému som uvítal český preklad, pri čítaní v Kindle som pochopil, že knihu potrebujem mať aj v papierovej verzii. Áno, vlastním ju v troch verziách 😉 Walter Scheidel je v "mojich kruhoch" absolútna špička, vyučuje na Stanforde a píše veľmi hrubé knihy, ktorých recenzenti sú tak isto "Liga majstrov" (K. Harper, B. Milanovic, I. Morris, T. Piketty, P. Turchin). Veľký nivelizátor opisuje ťažkú a pesimistickú tému. Veľká časť archeológov a historikov, ak aj opisuje niečo negatívne a komplexnejšie, tak sa to snaží zakončiť pozitívne. Veď viete ako tvrdím(e), že po katastrofe moru v stredoveku prišla renesancia... Scheidel sa však drží presných dát z výskumu. Nevypustí niečo, na čo nemá dostatok dôkazov. Scheidel hovorí, že od kedy žijeme usadlým spôsobom života, je v ľudskej spoločnosti nerovnosť. Niekto je ten hore, väčšina z nás sa však skláňa dole. Nerovnosť sa v každej spoločnosti zväčšuje, ak ju však chcete zmierniť, v dejinách to nastalo, len ak prišiel jeden zo štyroch jazdcov apokalypsy - vojna (ale len s masovou mobilizáciou), revolúcia (poriadna transformatívna), kolaps (veľký) alebo obrovská pandémia (Čierna smrť v stredoveku). Áno, je to depresívne, keď viete, že sa pravdepodobne nemýli a dáta sedia. Naše dejiny zjavne nie sú vystavané na ľudskosti, ak si však chcete zachovať falošnú nádej, tak si radšej prečítajte Yuvala Harariho alebo Rutgera Bregmana, kto však má odvahu na skutočnosť, mal by siahnuť k Scheidelovi. Asi väčšina z nás, by chcela spravodlivý svet, ten sa však v dejinách rodil len vo veľkých bolestiach s neistým výsledkom. Dávajme si pozor na to, čo si prajeme.
May 28, 2017
This is an exhaustive analysis of income and wealth disparity throughout history. I would call it non-fiction's Ulysses. It's not for everyone and takes grit and time to finish, but it's an important book, with reams of supporting data. The major premise is that increasing income and wealth disparity have always been the norm, only checked or reversed briefly by the violence of major wars, revolution, or occasionally, pestilence. It's hard to argue with this pessimistic view after being overwhelmed by the evidence. Scheidel ends with more than 20 recommendations of how to peacefully reduce the gap with everything from a more progressive income tax to endowing all children with stocks and bonds. Good luck with that one! I highly recommend this book.
December 26, 2019
读完中文版本之后才发现自己也买了英文版，就断断续续把中文版里觉得别扭的章节部分又重读了英文。
不平等早已深入到社会的方方面面，如果把视角抬高会发现局部不平等恰好是更大范围的平等。生态的演进似乎就在这种钟摆和嵌套的逻辑框架之内进行着。作者通过大量的调研和数据，尝试寻找��以找到不平等的“唯一根源”，但它几乎是不存在的。因此寻求某一种解决方案一次性解决所有的、长期的不平等，也不存在。唯有暴力战争可以周期性的打破固有生态，解决不平等，但战争之后就是下一个不平等周期的开启，往复循环。
本书学术性较强，虽读来略显枯燥和干涩，但作者提供的严谨的逻辑和充分的数据，给读者留下充足的思考空间。身处当下动荡的环境中，值得阅读。
不平等早已深入到社会的方方面面，如果把视角抬高会发现局部不平等恰好是更大范围的平等。生态的演进似乎就在这种钟摆和嵌套的逻辑框架之内进行着。作者通过大量的调研和数据，尝试寻找��以找到不平等的“唯一根源”，但它几乎是不存在的。因此寻求某一种解决方案一次性解决所有的、长期的不平等，也不存在。唯有暴力战争可以周期性的打破固有生态，解决不平等，但战争之后就是下一个不平等周期的开启，往复循环。
本书学术性较强，虽读来略显枯燥和干涩，但作者提供的严谨的逻辑和充分的数据，给读者留下充足的思考空间。身处当下动荡的环境中，值得阅读。
February 25, 2017
A depressing book. The only effective levelers of inequality have been wars, plagues and bloody revolutions. The author makes use of Piketty's work about rising inequality and how wealth and income accrues to those who already are so advantaged.
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