The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality

The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century Hardcover – 15 Feb 2017
by Walter Scheidel (Author)

5.0 out of 5 stars 1 customer review

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 20th 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.

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Product details

Hardcover: 536 pages
Publisher: Princeton University Press; 1 edition (6 January 2017)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0691165025
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Jeffrey Sayer
5.0 out of 5 starsAwesomely comprehensive - impressive scholarship12 January 2018
Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase
This is a magnificent account of the history of events that have impacted on equality and inequality. A magisterial overview of many of the main events of human history. The richness of examples makes for dense, rather dry reading at times. But i persevered to the end and was glad that I had. Few books synthesise such a wealth of information.

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Greg G
5.0 out of 5 starsHumans are much better at sharing the poverty than sharing the wealth
21 March 2017 - Published on Amazon.com
Verified Purchase
Walter Scheidel tackles a very ambitious project here. He attempts nothing less than a one volume account of economic inequality throughout all of human history. In my opinion he succeeds brilliantly.

This is a book of impressive scholarship. It is rare that someone is motivated to study this topic without an obvious political and policy agenda. Even after finishing the book I still could not tell you what Professor Scheidel’s political views are. The book is descriptive not prescriptive.

The thesis of the book is that, throughout all of human history, only violent cataclysms and plagues have produced significant and long standing reductions in economic inequality. Peace and prosperity always tend to lead to increasing inequality over the long term. With the benefit of hindsight, this is less surprising than it first appears. The overwhelming majority of humans have always lived with little or no economic savings or financial net worth. That is the constant.

Peace and prosperity necessarily change the net worth and income of the richest more than the poorest because the economic situation of the poorest just can’t get a lot worse. The effect of compounding earnings is very powerful and not intuitively well understood by most people. This effect is even more dramatic when it spans several generations in a family. Increasing (or at least high and stable) inequality has been the default tendency throughout all of human history.

Scheidel cites what he calls the Four Horsemen of economic leveling: mass mobilization warfare, transformative revolution, state collapse and plagues as the only forces that have consistently led to major economic leveling. It is important to note that only mass mobilization warfare has this effect. Ordinary warfare tends to shift fortunes between victor and vanquished without overall leveling.

The period of the 20th Century that included the two World Wars and the communist revolutions represented one of the great economic levelings in all of human history. Those of us who grew up just after those events consequently have a somewhat distorted view of what is a typical historical level of economic inequality. Before reading this book I felt that there was something abnormal about he increasing degree of economic inequality we see around us. After reading it I feel like I knew all along this was inevitable. It is a rare book that can change your perspective like that.

Scheidel is not arguing that economic inequality is good. He is well aware of the role of plunder and cronyism in contributing to it. He realizes that economic inequality is problematic for a number of reasons including the possibility that it may contain the seeds of the next cataclysm. He is just giving the history here not making any argument about the appropriate policy response.

It’s not that the cataclysms that produce leveling don’t also hurt the poor. They always do. It’s just that the rich have a lot more to lose when a lot of people lose everything. Scheidel closes with this: “All of us who prize greater economic equality would do well to remember that with the rarest of exceptions, it was only ever brought forth in sorrow. Be careful what you wish for.”

To put it another way, and to put it in the words of Woody Allen, after the next great leveling we may well look back on the previous period of inequality and think “We were happy then but we didn’t know it."
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Pumpjack
4.0 out of 5 starsInequality that would make robber barons blush
12 March 2017 - Published on Amazon.com
Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase
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.
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Patricia De Llano
3.0 out of 5 starsBe careful with the audiobook. This is not meant to be listened to.
14 March 2018 - Published on Amazon.com
Verified Purchase
Be careful with the audiobook.

The book itself is quite good for what it's trying to do. It's a comprehensive summary of all the instances where inequality has changed throughout history, trying to establish the causes of these changes.

Because the author wanted to be data-driven, precise and comprehensive, there is a lot of data and not much narrative.

This is very well suited for a written book, where you can look at all the data on the pages at once, going back and forth from one data point to another.

Unfortunately, it doesn't work for an audiobook. I had to rewind once every minute or two, totalling hundreds or thousands of times I had to rewind. It's also really hard to keep the focus on: when you're walking and hearing "the share of the national income to the top decile went from 17.6% to 15.2% between 1921 and 1933 in Australia, but 19.7% to 14.3% in France", it's pretty easy to zoom out.

That would be ok if the audiobook came with a free kindle. Unfortunately, it doesn't. At the steep price of both versions, I don't think it's acceptable to only sell a barely usable one.
Read less30 people found this helpful.

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