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The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century

Walter Scheidel

3.87 · Rating details · 774 ratings · 129 reviews

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 ...more

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Hardcover, 528 pages

Published January 9th 2017 by Princeton University Press

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Mar 11, 2020 BlackOxford rated it liked it

Shelves: history, american, economics, sociology

The Gini in the Bottle

If you dont have it already, you aint never gonna get it. Following on Thomas Pikettys 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 dont. In fact the wealth distribution in the 21st century is probably about the 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. ...more

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Nov 20, 2019 Maru Kun rated it really liked it

Shelves: economics, current-affairs

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 chapters there to cheer you up so you dont 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 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:

“...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. ...more

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Mar 26, 2018 Charlene rated it really liked it

Shelves: history, politics

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 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.
...more

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Dec 13, 2017 Mehrsa rated it really liked it

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.

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Nov 11, 2019 Peter (Pete) Mcloughlin rated it it was amazing

Shelves: 1960-to-1989, classical-world, nukes-and-the-end-the-world, politics, 1890-1959, philosophy, psychology, general-history, warfare, economics

If one reads a lot of history especially someone who reads a lot of 20th-century history this book goes well with one's intuition of what kinds of factors are important in the leveling of society's inequalities. Mass mobilization usually for war but sometimes mass mobilization in revolutionary agitation is a good way to equalize things in society. Not surprised by the latter but many might find the former a bit counterintuitive. I for one don't think militarism or total wars are what we are ...more

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Jan 12, 2018 Alex Moran rated it it was amazing

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 ...more

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Feb 15, 2017 David rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction, sociology, economics, futurism, history, academic, world-history, 21st-century, war, political-history

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 ...more

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Mar 11, 2017 Clark Hays rated it really liked it

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 ...more

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Dec 18, 2017 Daniel rated it really liked it

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. ...more

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Feb 22, 2017 Andrew Tollemache rated it really liked it · review of another edition

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).

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Dec 02, 2017 Greg rated it it was amazing

When Thomas Pikettys 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.

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!
...more

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Apr 02, 2020 Jens Cheung added it

Only 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.

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Dec 28, 2017 Andrew added it

Shelves: history

A 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 ...more

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Sep 14, 2017 Ellis Morning rated it really liked it

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! ...more

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May 28, 2017 Gary Godefroy rated it it was amazing

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 ...more

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Feb 24, 2017 Bob Duke rated it it was amazing

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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Jan 23, 2019 Noah Graham rated it it was ok

More fun than mandatory safety training
Less fun than being waterboarded.

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Apr 09, 2019 Jack rated it really liked it

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. Walter Scheidels The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century is a conglomerated analysis of the various peaks and valleys of economic inequality in both ancient and modern contexts. This encompassing text showcases the role of major levelers in terms of the condensation and expansion of monetary inequality. Scheidel examines four distinct causes of this economic leveling. This division is less historically significant and operates Walter Scheidel’s The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century is a conglomerated analysis of the various peaks and valleys of economic inequality in both ancient and modern contexts. This encompassing text showcases the role of major levelers in terms of the condensation and expansion of monetary inequality. Scheidel examines four distinct causes of this economic leveling. This division is less historically significant and operates more as an aid to meaningful engagement with the text. Additionally, Scheidel’s rejection of chronology works against the cohesion of the book. Despite these complaints, the book is effective in its ability to effectively communicate the history of ancient and modern economies in the context of monetary inequality. Moreover, Scheidel’s departure from the similar work done by other economic historians—namely Thomas Piketty—is refreshing and brings more to the table that previous analyses near the end of the text. The whole of Scheidel’s Great Leveler is primarily valuable: despite the flaws he encounters in his immense task, Scheidel does an exceptionally good job in creating a model to examine the history of violence and inequality.
Scheidel’s principle argument is contingent on the presence of the four-horsemen—that is, state failure, pandemic disease, radical revolution, and mass-mobilized warfare—which are rooted in violent societal transformation and bring about reduced economic inequality. Scheidel’s argument greatly depends on the categories he sets up. In his conjecture that these four categories are responsible for the economic leveling in both the ancient and modern world, he lists and analyzes many historical examples and identifies the leveler responsible for bringing about greater monetary equality. For the sake of the argument and for the readability of the text, this four-pronged assessment is incredibly interesting and ambitious. Scheidel handles it incredibly well given the scope of the material he covers. This is largely the extent of the horsemen mechanism, as it serves little historical purpose and more or less functions as a device to benefit the reader: the division of violent societal transformation is relatively arbitrary, which makes the four horsemen approach less convincing in the context of the entirety of ancient and modern history. Firstly, the ultimate cause of the leveling he describes is not exclusive to a single horsemen but rather the events are catalyzed by the shared trait of violent societal transformation. The horsemen argument operates as a needless divider of this violent societal transformation that continues throughout the course of history. For example, pandemic disease as described in the text—specifically throughout chapter 11—is more often a contributor to leveling rather than a primary source for the compression of economic inequality. Specifically, Scheidel mentions the Antonine plague as an agent of leveling in Roman Egypt: he states, “in the Fayyum village of Karanis number of taxpayers fell by between a third and a half between the 140s and the early 170s CE...Moreover, specific mortality data reinforce the impression of mass mortality” (Scheidel, 326). He continues, “the value of rural labor as documented in contracts rose by between a few percent and close to a fifth depending on duration of employment...Conversely, the price of non-essential foodstuffs such as oil and wine dropped relative to that of wheat” (328). In this way, the plague itself is not the direct cause of reduced economic inequality, but rather it serves as a mode for which death and the shifting demands of labor—in this case quantified by rent and real prices—can enforce the constriction of inequality. This is generally the case for many of the examples Scheidel lists within this category of leveling. In this way, the divisions Scheidel sets up as horsemen are less historically significant and are used as symbolic representations of the prolonged encroachment of violent societal transformation.
The scope of this text is both impressive and questionable. It’s amazing to see how Scheidel is able to boil down many revolutionary moments in both ancient and modern and place them into four surmounting categories. However, the text is affected by these drastic jumps and the failure to stick to any sort of chronology. Scheidel often jumps back and forth thousands of years, which attenuates the significance of the events he discusses and disallows any gradual, cultivated context for the incidents. Specifically, I think that Scheidel’s historical leaps make it harder to engage with the examples he gives because there is less cohesion and congruence in the presentation of violent transformation than there would be if he had proceeded chronologically. Specifically, if each event Although these jumps work against the cohesion of the text, they feel intentional because they work to solidify the four-pronged assessment he applies throughout the book. If he had listed his examples chronologically, there would be less need to categorize the violent transformation because it would be easier to see how non-mutually exclusive each leveler is.
Two smaller gripes I had during my reading were formed in the early stages of the text. Firstly, I found the strict adherence to the economic paradigm to be relatively unconvincing: Scheidel states, “Disparities in the distribution of income and wealth are not the only type of inequality of social or historical relevance: so are inequalities that are rooted in gender and sexual orientation; in race and ethnicity; and in age, ability, and beliefs” (9). Although the task that Scheidel provides for himself is already enormous, I feel as though the text is bereft of exploration in certain areas that could have been historically beneficial. How is it possible to thoroughly examine the history of economic inequality without considering the -isms that so strongly influence the dynamics of power? In this way, the title is a bit of a misnomer. However, I do acknowledge that this complaint is fairly minimal and could definitely be the result of publishing/marketing demands.
Secondly, I am not thoroughly convinced by the modes of which inequality is measured within the text. Early in the book, Scheidel familiarizes the reader with the Gini coefficient from which he consistently references as he progresses. Scheidel states, “the Gini coefficient measures the extent to which the distribution of income or material assets deviates from perfect equality” (11). This coefficient can occupy values between 0 and 1, with 1 representing perfect inequality and 0 representing perfect equality. Obviously there are problems with measuring and representing the “level” of inequality with a numerical value. Firstly, the Gini is a measurement that is highly dependent on the quality of evidence used to inform it. In situations lacking substantial information regarding wealth discrepancies, the Gini is subject to approximation. This problem becomes more apparent the further back in history Scheidel progresses, as the sparsity and quality of evidence generally decreases. Scheidel addresses this problem in the introduction, stating, “Prior to 1800, income inequality across entire societies can be estimated only with the help of social tables, rough approximations of the incomes obtained by the different parts of the population that were drawn up by contemporary observers or inferred” (15). Another problem with the Gini is that is not a significant indicator of a society’s quality. The various flaws Scheidel notes in the introduction make the Gini seem like little more than an arbitrary number tacked onto the end of an analysis rather than an informative description of a society’s inequality. It’s curious why Scheidel even used the Gini, since his own analysis and characterizations of economic inequality are far more substantial than the value.
Inversely, this book is incredibly well researched and presents ancient economic history in a way that is both interesting and communicable. Although the text was incredibly dense, I never felt as though the ideas Scheidel presents were exceptionally hard to understand or otherwise unattainable. This is probably the result of the four-pronged approach to his argument; arbitrariness aside, the concept of the horsemen makes it easier to examine and historical events in the context of leveling economic inequality. The historical information he draws from fits suitably into his broader argument. Numerical data are present in most areas of the text, which makes his claims more believable. For example, Scheidel’s discussion of capital gains in Japan during WW2 is met with a surplus of statistical information. These statistics, however, are never blurred or masked by confusing diction or abstraction, which makes his argument both provable and digestible; he states “the income share of households between the 95th and 99th percentiles hardly fell at all during the war and thereafter stabilized for a long time at around the same level as in the early 20th century, or about 12 percent to 14 percent of national income” (123). While the density of this book is heightened by mathematical models and statistical representations, the intricacies of his arguments are never smudged by needless complexity. Most of his statements feel both weighted and intentional, which leaves little room for extraneous and undeveloped claims.
Additionally, Scheidel builds off of the research and conjectures of other historians in a way that is both pleasing and depressing. The most obvious example is Thomas Piketty. Piketty pops in and out of the text―which makes contextual sense given the similarities between Scheidel’s Great Leveler and Piketty’s Capital—but some of the most substantial departures between the historians comes near the end of the book. On the topic of solutions to the widening wealth gap, Scheidel notes, “Piketty states outright that this proposed ‘global tax on capital is utopian idea’ but sees ‘no technical reason why’” (434). It seems Scheidel is passively critical of Piketty here, which allows for a refreshing departure from previous historical conjectures. To be reductive, Piketty’s solution predicates upon draconian taxation, while Scheidel’s is based on the rolling of heads.
In terms of lessons and potential solutions to widening wealth gaps, the last few pages of the book engage current ideas and proposals to combat this disparity. He cites Piketty, Atkinson, and Bourguignon in these final moments with a specific emphasis on tax reform and other tangentially related programs. For example, he says, “Income should be taxed in a more progressive manner...Wealth should be taxed directly and in ways designed to curtail its transmission across generations” (432). He mentions sanctions, taxation on corporations, and even a levy on capital in order to reduce public debt. While these attempts to address or mitigate income inequality are informative, they seem mostly pointless, especially after reading the previous 430 pages highlighting the prolonged violence necessary to bring about any sort of economic retribution. It’s nice to imagine a post-horsemen world in which economic equality is ingrained in the ethos of all individuals, but Scheidel’s prevailing lesson regarding violence hints towards the futility in these attempts.
The Great Leveler doesn’t immediately feel very satisfactory because it generally attests to the necessity of violence as an agent of monetary retribution. Despite the alternatives presented by Scheidel in the latter portions of the book, the eventual need for violence remains the biggest lesson. This stagnation appears to be the case in contemporary history as well, but masked by pseudo-progressivism and faux-pas reformation attempts. It’s easy to be depressed about realities like this, especially in the context of recent history. Proposals by individuals such as Anthony Atkinson seem promising, but the effectiveness of these programs is at the mercy of the institutions responsible for implementing the change.

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Nov 09, 2019 Max Tang rated it liked it · review of another edition

Walter Scheidel is a professor of ancient history at Stanford. This book is an attempt to systematically study the equalizing forces of distribution throughout the human history. The author observed that there were only four types of events that flattened economic inequality: mass warfares (>10% of the population mobilized), communist revolutions, state collapses, and plagues. He calls them four horsemen of equalization, alluding to their apocalyptic nature. Civilization could not render any Walter Scheidel is a professor of ancient history at Stanford. This book is an attempt to systematically study the equalizing forces of distribution throughout the human history. The author observed that there were only four types of events that flattened economic inequality: mass warfares (>10% of the population mobilized), communist revolutions, state collapses, and plagues. He calls them “four horsemen” of equalization, alluding to their apocalyptic nature. Civilization could not render any peaceful equalization.

Those four horsemen brought equalization through two mechanisms: 1) the destruction of capital and labor - thus flattens wealth of the rich and inflates wages; 2) strong policy responses that are only possible in time of stress (such as punitively progressive taxes and land reforms).

Scheidel built upon the analytical frameworks of Milancovic and Piketty. Milancovic attempted to develop alternative measures to Gini coefficient. Specifically, he created two important concepts - inequality extraction ratio and inequality possibility frontier. Scheidel used these concepts as his quantitative framework of analyzing inequality over a long period of time. Piketty’s framework on return of capital versus return of labor also served as an important intellectual resource, especially in explaining why wages of the mass population gained relative weight in times of distress (because of the scarcity of labor and the compression of skill premium).

Counterintuitively, Sheidel’s narrative was more insightful when he talked about two distinct periods: the most ancient societies - where data is scarce and mostly qualitative evidence was used - and the more recent World Wars - where a wealth of data could be relied on. For example, it is interesting that the invention of cereal - a hordable food source - might have contributed to inequality. Also interesting was the fact that embodied inequality was more prominent in ancient times - as assorted marriage might have passed on the hereditary traits across generations. Thus the rich was distinctively taller in a society dominated by malnutrition.

In the end Scheidel briefly discussed the peaceful alternatives that are debated among policy circles today. However, he did not develop a convincing thesis why those would not work. He also tried to hypothesize whether those violent shocks are indogenous to unequal societies - whether revolutions are destined to happen if inequality sustained for a sufficiently long time. But he quickly pointed out that it is very difficult to reach any conclusion, as violent shocks tend to happen on a recurring basis regardless of the social conditions of those times.

While some chapters are engaging, some other chapters seem redundant and could be boring to read. For example, Scheidel devoted copious pages to the corruption in the Roman Empire and ancient China, which in my view offers little new and quite unnecessary to support his thesis. The book would have been much more readable if it were more concise. Nonetheless, I did learn a lot about inequality - and my gratitude to Scheidel. ...more

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Sep 14, 2018 Benjamin rated it liked it

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 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." ...more

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Mar 28, 2019 Maciej Nowicki rated it really liked it

The Great Leveler by Walter Scheidel is a provocative and insightful contribution to our understanding of inequality over the long run and despite being grounded in economic history it is a book where you find serious questions about the future of inequality and the shape and structure of our societies. It shows that inequality never dies peacefully. Inequality declines when bloodbath and disaster strike and increases when stability and peace return.

Anyway, the book details some principal The Great Leveler by Walter Scheidel is a provocative and insightful contribution to our understanding of inequality over the long run and despite being grounded in economic history it is a book where you find serious questions about the future of inequality and the shape and structure of our societies. It shows that inequality never dies peacefully. Inequality declines when bloodbath and disaster strike and increases when stability and peace return.

Anyway, the book details some principal dynamics of the evolution of economic inequality. There are obviously many different types of inequality we could talk about, but the book limits to income and wealth inequality and in particular to one question – are there some patterns across the full scope of history that have repeatedly reduced economic inequality and how do they compare to other variables.

Walter Scheidel, the author of the book, names four major variables of levelling:
• mass-mobilisation warfare
• transformative revolutions
• state collapses
• catastrophic plagues
which have repeatedly destroyed the fortunes of the rich and filled up pockets of the poor.

Violent upheavals have been the single, most important means of levelling wealth and income inequality in human history. So violent disturbances are often associated with the death of tens of millions of people have been by far the most effective means of reducing economic inequality.

Starting with state collapse is simply the flipside of state formation. If we look at thousands of years of human history, most people lived in societies that were governed by states and were more or less openly predatory, unfair, hierarchical, exploitative. To a large extent, they were focused on the benefit of a small ruling class at the expense of everybody else. The longer these governments lasted the bigger they became in the form of pre-modern empires, in particular, the more potential there was for the concentration of income and especially wealth among a small ruling class, the worse it was for the rest of the population.

The second main pre-modern levelling force was pandemic, a very severe outbreak of epidemic disease. A few times in our history (black death that killed about half of all people in Britain and a third of all people in Europe, the pandemics in a new world introduced by the Europeans after 1492 that introduced smallpox and measles decimating a local population) what happens after all these occasions was that inequality went down. As a result of these epidemics, tens of millions of people lost their lives but survivors happened to be better off and the real incomes of the working class went up about 150%. Unfortunately, the idyll lasted as long as these plagues and their aftermath were active and once the stabilisation began and everything went back to normal the high levels of economic inequality showed up once again.

The third factor – mass-mobilisation is a capital phenomenon where capital holdings lost their returns on capital dramatically as a result of state intervention in the private sector associated with the war effort. Belligerent states had to raise taxes on income and wealth the rich, in order to pay for the war effort, got higher tax rates. For high earners, there was even a 90% tax introduced, and 70% for income gained large entities in the US and similar rates in Britain, France and Japan. All over the place this effectively resulted in a redistribution of resources from the rich to workers. These countries achieved full employment because of conscription systems and the money ended up, primarily, in the pockets of the working population.

Many of these events worked in the past, let’s say until 1970. In the world, we inhabit today, in an environment that is much more globalized, much more integrated than it was in the past all these things have really begun to fade. The environment today is quite different from the shape it was a couple of generations ago when we could observe significant reductions in inequality. Sadly there are estimations reflecting that it will go up rather than down in the 21st century. Globalization is enormously beneficial to many people in developing countries but disadvantageous to certain groups in developed countries which we have observed now for some time. Automation is an ongoing completely open-ended process. Nobody knows what jobs are actually going to be done by robots or by software in the coming years. From now there is certainly enormous potential for destruction of certain types of jobs. Retraining is an answer, but not a perfect remedy because we cannot just retrain our skills overnight. A lot of friction is bound to occur as a part of this process. Another “development” – ageing of the general populations we already see in Japan and in Western Europe, in particular, is going to become much more widespread. Next generations are going to have a problem because the older population of developed countries is going to receive less public funds. It will be available for aggressively the distributive programs because more money will have to be spent on caring for the pensions healthcare.

The flipside of secular ageing is immigration, the idea that if there are more and more elderly people and not enough young people it will just have more people coming from other parts of the world. In the case of Europe, it would have to be the Middle East. It would have to be Africa which creates new challenges with respect to inequality. Something we have not really seen yet because the processes really are just beginning on a large scale, but there are lots of... (if you like to read my full review please visit my blog https://leadersarereaders.blog/the-gr...) ...more

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Nov 11, 2019 Charles J rated it really liked it

Economic inequality is, and has been for several years now, the talk of the town. But most of this talk is politicalof 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 ...more

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Nov 18, 2019 Chris Esposo rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Walter Schiedel has written an expansive historical analysis on the nature of material inequality in various human societies, with a focus on the nature of it's growth, and the 'forces' that can stop its advance. On those two broad topics, the book more heavily focuses on the later. Scheidel's overall thesis is that despite much focus on policy/economic solutions, inequality in material wealth (land/currency/etc.) has only ever shown marked declines through the imposition of 4 "forces" or events Walter Schiedel has written an expansive historical analysis on the nature of material inequality in various human societies, with a focus on the nature of it's growth, and the 'forces' that can stop it’s advance. On those two broad topics, the book more heavily focuses on the later. Scheidel's overall thesis is that despite much focus on policy/economic solutions, inequality in material wealth (land/currency/etc.) has only ever shown marked declines through the imposition of 4 "forces" or events (or typologies of events) on a society, these are :

1. Mass mobilization warfare
2. Revolutions
3. State collapses
4. Natural disasters

Further, he paints a grim portrait on the possibility of alleviating material inequality via policy tools like economic transfers or social welfare programs, though this part of the argument is the weakest in my opinion, since it’s the most open-ended. The main focus of the text is dedicated to outlining the historical fact that an oft-unintended consequence of natural and human-made disasters is that material wealth for the society that fell victim to those disasters often equalized (however that was measured for the particular store of wealth in that society) after. However, this is history, not physics, and the proposed event-consequence causal relationship is not so clean or simple. Each leveling-force needs to be broken down further, to explain how a specific type of mass-mobilization war may have impacted their participant societies uniquely (The American Civil War vs. WWI etc.), and whether each participant/victim of the event are each likely to experience a leveling, or if the consequent is dependent on which “side” a particular society/polity found itself. Thus, each of the above ‘force’ or event-type receives several illustrations from the historical record, with accompanying commentary and analysis.

Of particular interest to me is a subject Schiedel has chosen to “bury” in the way he has chosen to array the sequence of topics in this book, namely whether there’s a (good/high) chance of successfully leveraging policy/peaceful means to “level” society, with only a single chapter towards the end of the text that challenges the evidence from the economic growth/wealth convergence theories from the standard neoclassical approaches. Specifically, he outlines, then counters, Simon Kuznets hypothesis on the trajectory of inequality, characterized by his famous "inverted U" curve that display inequality, usually measured by the Gini coefficient, as a function of GDP-per-capita.

This result, taken in context with the standard narratives on economic growth, would suggest that as a nation develops, and as it became more productive, it's GDP-per-capita would rise, there would be some "phase" in the initial development, where societal inequality (usually instrumented via income/wealth inequality in the studies) would also rise. However, that rise would peak at some point, and from that "moment" on, as the nation developed further, inequality would would depreciate (i.e. Gini/entropy decreases). Schiedel mentions that through a simple conditioning of the data, specifically on whether a nation had experienced a "leveling event" in the previous few decades, the resultant cross-sectional chart shows no recognition of being a Kuznet's curve, nor are there statistical evidence to suggest the Kuznet relation exists. This is because most of the nations that have high GDP-per-capita and low inequality, are exactly those nations in Western Europe and East Asia, the two regions that bore the brunt of material and human destruction during the second world war, and other subsequent industrial-scale warfare like the Korean War. Thus, with their removal, there aren’t enough nations on the “other side” of the curve-inflection point to suggest that an inflection exists at all.

As an aside, the veracity of Kuznet's thesis has been in doubt among academic economists (as far as I know), independent of this argument. A great section on this topic can be found in the excellent undergraduate textbook “Economic Growth” by Weil, which is both easy to read, and sufficiently technical (i.e. no need to solve/characterize discrete/iterative systems equations), to give a well-read general readers an understanding of the idea. Though whatever their issues with Kuznet’s work may be, Scheidel's point is probably more convincing, as he provides a plausible mechanism by which mass-mobilization warfare has leveled inequality via actual historical accounts vs. a purely statistical objection. Specifically, in the case of WW2, for both Japan and Germany, the Allies imposed strong economic policies aimed at distributing capital from the former/defeated elites of the Axis nations, to the "common" people, as a way to punish those elites, as well as to decentralize economic power in the defeated nations to make it more difficult for another antagonistic-clique to emerge, and marshal the resources of either Japan or Germany again.

This combined with the scale of human destruction experienced in Europe and Asia via deaths, disabilities, and emigration to other nations, like the United States, temporarily put a premium on labor vis-a-vis capital, creating an environment where more “socialistic” policies could persist or thrive, like a nationwide healthcare guarantee, guarantees on education/higher education etc. which are all found in much of Western Europe, and to a lesser extent, East Asian nations.

Beside the usual case-studies, there were a couple of historical cases I think were of particular interests, which includes the collapse of the societies in Mycenae, and the pre-Columbian politics of central/south America, as well as the Taping Rebellion of the mid-1800s, effectively a hybrid pre-industrial/industrial civil war within Qing China, that was responsible for more deaths than among the entirety of the entire first world war for all belligerents. Though there have been books, and even movies (a la Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto) that have addressed the catastrophes of pre-Columbian mezo-America, as well as the collapse of Mycenaean (which have figured heavily in some “ancient alien” conspiracy theories unfortunately), the Taiping Rebellion is probably the least known to a western audience.

Given the numerous and diverse sources and cases, it's difficult to judge how strong the interpretations/views of these events are with respect to Schiedel's thesis. There's also an added complexity of inference and measurement. Until recently, accounting data did not exist for most people in the world, especially in the ancient world, with possibly the exception of dynastic China and parts of Imperial Rome. Making statistical inference impossible. Likewise, measurement is another difficulty since standards and consistency of accounts, as well as what was being accounted for (land ownership vs currency say) must have varied widely in the ancient world, as well as the pre-industrial eras.

What can’t be disputed is the book introduces enough diverse topics to provide an excellent start to a diligent reader who is interested in understanding the inequality of antiquity and the landscape of global inequality prior to the “second wave” of globalization (early 1900s). The author’s warning at the end, that those who wish to alleviate inequality should “be careful what you wish for” since again, his argument suggests that inequality is a “natural state” in social ‘systems’, that can only be achieved through catastrophe, was curious. If his intent was to imbibe in the reader this notion, it didn’t work for me. What I got out of the book was that the current tools being forwarded by professional policy makers are ill-equipped to meet the challenge of inequality, and if nothing is done, there could be trouble in the future as inequality reaches extremely high levels. Though, to be fair, the author points out that there is merely an associative relationship between inequality and the “four forces”, not a causal one. Thus, those that suggest urgency to fix the current state of social welfare across the West are “stepping beyond the data” as the author sees it.

Overall, a good addition to this topic, that bridges a gap on inequality studies/text, which are often focused too narrowly on modern dilemmas, or are focused entirely on the United States. A great accompanying text with more data on 20th century American inequality would be “A Century of Wealth in America”. Recommended ...more

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Jan 13, 2019 Babak Fakhamzadeh rated it liked it

Shelves: sub-saharan-africa, classical-times, current-affairs, eastern-europe, far-east, latin-america

Scheidel sets out his claim early on; Four kinds of violent rupture flatten societal inequality: mass mobilisation warfare, transformative revolution, state failure and pandemics.
And, the author makes an irrefutable case. But, the book is also a barrage of facts and figures that quickly become tedious, even though Scheidel already uses extensive use of footnotes.

An interesting apparent contradiction that Scheidel implicitly points out is that higher level of inequality are associated with lower ...more

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Oct 24, 2019 Johann_tor added it

Shelves: history, economics

When a lot of stuff gets broken, people that have more stuff will tend to have less stuff afterwards. When a lot of people die, people that have more stuff die also. So inequality falls. So far so understandable. The claim of the book is that, historically, inequality fell considerably ONLY when the above conditions applied. There have been no consistent gains for inequality thanks to policy changes, the historical record shows, because people with a lot of stuff also have political power and ...more

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Aug 08, 2017 Todd rated it really liked it

Short of mass mobilization for war, historic social upheaval, plague or flat out collapse of social/governmental institutions, income inequality is impossible to alleviate. Such is the case made by Walter Schneider. Not that we'd actually want any of these events to happen again, but the likely fact is that globalization along with technological and medical advances make any of these four scenarios exceedingly unlikely today and into the future. Conclusion - unless the future is noticeable ...more

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Mar 28, 2017 Jackson Cyril rated it liked it

Shelves: history

Scheibel's Great Leveler proposes that not only is inequality something embedded in our DNA-- with our closest primate relatives living in heavily hierarchical societies-- but that historically speaking, economic equality has been achieved only (not perfect equality, but something close) under four conditions:
Pandemic
Revolution
"mass mobilization warfare"
state failure--i.e. modern Somalia
He calls these the "four horsemen", and tries to highlight that a significant lack of inequality is ...more

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Feb 26, 2018 Kit marked it as must-find

Shelves: to-read-pol-hist

Recommend by Jordan Peterson both on GB 2/23/18, and with John Anderson on 4/13/18.

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Mar 31, 2018 Laurent Franckx rated it really liked it

In his unexpected bestseller on economic inequality, "Capital in the Twenty-First Century", Thomas Piketty had argued that the only period in which wealth inequality decreased were the disastrous decades ranging from 1914 to 1945: the period of the two World Wars and the Great Depression. However, Piketty's argument was based on data covering just the last two centuries and a limited number of countries.
In this ambitious book, Walter Scheidel starts where Piketty stopped. Scheidel has conducted In his unexpected bestseller on economic inequality, "Capital in the Twenty-First Century", Thomas Piketty‎ had argued that the only period in which wealth inequality decreased were the disastrous decades ranging from 1914 to 1945: the period of the two World Wars and the Great Depression. However, Piketty's argument was based on data covering just the last two centuries and a limited number of countries.
In this ambitious book, Walter Scheidel starts where Piketty stopped. Scheidel has conducted an impressive survey of all evidence on inequality, ranging from prehistoric times till now. His key conclusion isn't particularly hopeful: the mechanisms that promote the accumulation of wealth among a tiny elite are so powerful, that only cataclysmic events can undo them. Scheidel's four horsemen are: mass-mobilization warfare, transformative revolutions, state collapse, and catastrophic plagues.
Contrary to what we would expect, these events are relatively rare.
For instance, until World War 1, even major wars did not require a complete mobilization of all available resources. It is only the large scale total wars of the twentieth century that created a context where literally everybody had to contribute to the war effort. For the ultra-rich, this meant extortionary top marginal taxation levels and high levels of inflation (surprisingly, the destruction of physical capital did not play a major role in this leveling).
Similarly, most revolutionary fights in the past ended in complete failure, and, when there was indeed a change of the guard at the political, level, it only resulted in a limited redistribution (the French revolution is a case a point). Only the communist revolutions in Russia and China in the 20th century resulted in a major leveling of income, but at the cost of totalitarianism, large scale massacres and famines.
If you are not convinced, then let Scheidel take you through a journey that starts with our hunter-gatherers ancestors. You may ask how one can say anything meaningful about inequality in societies that have left no written traces. Well, most of the evidence is indeed indirect.
For instance, if you find a child's grave that is decorated with (probably) expensive ornaments, you can assume that this reflects inherited privilege (whereas the same ornaments on an adult's tomb could reflect his personal merits in life).
Similarly, you may have no written records of wealth, but you can find the archeological traces of houses, and calculate a Gini coefficient (a widely used measure of inequality) for the surface of houses.
Of course, this means that the interpretation of the evidence requires a lot of auxiliary assumptions, and some of them are inevitably controversial. However, Scheidel is always very open about the degree of uncertainty surrounding his estimates, and is careful not to draw radical conclusions with respect to a specific situation of the evidence is ambiguous or of low quality. Actually, the level of detail may put off some readers - a lot of the material could have been relegated to an appendix, and this would have improved the readability of the text a lot.
I should add here that some authors have questioned the "received wisdom" that hunter-gatherer societies were essentially egalitarian and that increasing inequality is just a by-product of us become sedentary agricultures - see for instance https://www.eurozine.com/change-cours... . I don't feel qualified to arbiter on this, but let us just conclude that there's still a lot of uncertainty regarding the lifestyles of our distant ancestors, and that a lot is likely to remain uncertain.
I have a more fundamental criticism regarding modern economic history. Scheidel discusses inequality in both pre-tax and net incomes. However, he does not discuss the point that, in modern societies, a significant amount of redistribution does not work through direct handouts, but through the subsidization of club goods - education, culture, amateur sports - or the provisions of public health insurance. Of course, it is not obvious who will be the main beneficiaries of these goods. It has been argued that most of these benefits are subject to the "Matthew effect", and mainly benefit the middle classes rather than the poor.
Also, in his policy thinking, Scheidel focuses only on inequality. He barely addresses the question whether it is more desirable to have an egalitarian society with a lot of poverty rather than a highly unequal society where most poverty has been eradicated. The issue is raised occasionally, but mostly implicitly (Scheidel is very clear that he does not favor the return of any of the four horsemen to reduce existing inequalities).
But these are minor flaws in an impressive work of scholarship that I would highly recommend to anyone with an interest in inequality.

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Dec 21, 2019 Cyrus Samii rated it liked it

I made it about 2/3 through before putting it down, as it grew repetitive and seemingly with little more insight to add.

Scheidels main argument is that, when you look at the long history of changes in societal inequality, that variation in inequality is attributable to remarkably consistent forces: inequality rises in peacetime as a seemingly natural consequence of markets, corruption, and wielding of state power to help the rich get richer, and inequality is diminished by cataclysmic events I made it about 2/3 through before putting it down, as it grew repetitive and seemingly with little more insight to add.

Scheidel’s main argument is that, when you look at the long history of changes in societal inequality, that variation in inequality is attributable to remarkably consistent forces: inequality rises in peacetime as a seemingly natural consequence of markets, corruption, and wielding of state power to help the rich get richer, and inequality is diminished by cataclysmic events such as natural disaster or war. On the latter, at least when it comes to big drops in inequality, there isn’t much indication that humans have accomplished much “equalizing” through rational bureaucratic approaches to redistribution.

With regard to rises in inequality, Scheidel’s reading is that the process of wealth accumulation during peacetime repeats historically— eg same pattern repeats in each peacetime in Chinese history, from the Han dynasty peacetime starting in third century BCE to the contemporary Communist China peacetime starting in the mid 20th century CE. This analysis, and perhaps more compellingly with the analysis of the Roman empire, show that much of this inequality and wealth accumulation was attributable to state power combined with rent seeking, and not just unequal returns to capital in a free market system:

“In premodern societies, very large fortunes regularly owed more to political power than to economic prowess. They differed mostly in terms of their durability, which was critically mediated by state rulers’ ability and willingness to engage in despotic intervention. Intense resource concentration at the very top and high inequality were a given, and although wealth mobility varied, this was of little concern to those outside plutocratic circles.”

Some of the things I didn’t like about the book:
- Generally, I find these kinds of historical accounts to be non-falsifiable. How could one possible tell whether the evidence is cherry picked or not? That being the case, does any of this stand as meaningful evidence??
- More specifically, the focus on a very limited set of income measures obscured the role of fiscal intervention that redistributes through, e.g., services. So by construction the methodology downplays the potential for redistributive policies to look like they had meaningful effects.

A big question that I had was, what can the study of pre-modern inequality yield for us today? I can think of two responses to this question:

First in a descriptive sense, our present is not that far away from the pre-modern periods discussed in the book. The inequalities that were accumulated during the period studied continue to have shape current wealth distributions. And so our understanding of where these disparities came from can help us to understand from where the disparities that we witness presently came.

Second, I think the idea here is that there are forces and mechanisms that create inequality and that the level it, and that those forces are timeless. We have forces such as differential returns to capital relative to wages, as well as rent seeking, which have timeless quality to them that may help us to understand dynamics that are at work in the present. Insofar as those mechanisms are as universal feature of the human condition, then there is no real distinction between the pre-modern and current, modern period.

The part of the book that I found most interesting was the discussion of the leveling effect of the 20th century world wars. This discussion was quite provocative, and if you buy Scheidel’s take, it means that comparing today to say mid 20th century income distributions and policies may be very misleading. (*cough* Piketty *cough*) This is because the mid 20th century was a period following massive war destruction, which is a leveling force. Policies in effect at the time may be rather irrelevant to inequality levels at the time, at least in a first order sense. Eg Scheidel argues that "unionization rates were highly sensitive to the shocks of the two world wars and thus cannot be considered a direct function or manifestation of democracy per se." Essentially Scheidel’s analysis suggests that we need to control for *recent calamity* to make proper comparisons. That said US case doesn’t fit Scheidel’s analysis all that well because the World Wars were overseas and didn’t devastate property at home. So the mechanism would have to be more about mass mobilization warfare, which Scheidel does not develop, but can found in the work of, e.g., Scheve and Stasavage. (An implication of Scheve and Stasavage’s work is that tax rate comparisons may not be so apt either, at least in assessing what might be politically feasible, given that tax rates were the product of social norms of equality that were cultivated during the wars but that tend to fade in the absence of war.) ...more

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About Walter Scheidel

Walter Scheidel

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Dickason 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 ...more

Books by Walter Scheidel

Escape from Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity

Rome and China: Comparative Perspectives on Ancient World Empires

The Cambridge Companion to the Roman Economy

The Science of Roman History: Biology, Climate, and the Future of the Past

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“For thousands of years, civilization did not lend itself to peaceful equalization. Across a wide range of societies and different levels of development, stability favored economic inequality. This was as true of Pharaonic Egypt as it was of Victorian England, as true of the Roman Empire as of the United States. Violent shocks were of paramount importance in disrupting the established order, in compressing the distribution of income and wealth, in narrowing the gap between rich and poor. Throughout recorded history, the most powerful leveling invariably resulted from the most powerful shocks. Four different kinds of violent ruptures have flattened inequality: mass mobilization warfare, transformative revolution, state failure, and lethal pandemics. I call these the Four Horsemen of Leveling. Just like their biblical counterparts, they went forth to “take peace from the earth” and “kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.” Sometimes acting individually and sometimes in concert with one another, they produced outcomes that to contemporaries often seemed nothing short of apocalyptic. Hundreds of millions perished in their wake. And by the time the dust had settled, the gap between the haves and the have-nots had shrunk, sometimes dramatically.” — 2 likes

“In the United States, both of the dominant parties have shifted toward free-market capitalism. Even though analysis of roll call votes show that since the 1970s, Republicans have drifted farther to the right than Democrats have moved to the left, the latter were instrumental in implementing financial deregulation in the 1990s and focused increasingly on cultural issues such as gender, race, and sexual identity rather than traditional social welfare policies. Political polarization in Congress, which had bottomed out in the 1940s, has been rapidly growing since the 1980s. Between 1913 and 2008, the development of top income shares closely tracked the degree of polarization but with a lag of about a decade: changes in the latter preceded changes in the former but generally moved in the same direction—first down, then up. The same has been true of wages and education levels in the financial sector relative to all other sectors of the American economy, an index that likewise tracks partisan polarization with a time lag. Thus elite incomes in general and those in the finance sector in particular have been highly sensitive to the degree of legislative cohesion and have benefited from worsening gridlock.” — 0 likes

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