The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World) by Walter Scheidel

How only violence and catastrophes have consistently reduced inequality throughout world history

Are mass violence and catastrophes the only forces that can seriously decrease economic inequality? To judge by thousands of years of history, the answer is yes. Tracing the global history of inequality from the Stone Age to today, Walter Scheidel shows that inequality never dies peacefully. Inequality declines when carnage and disaster strike and increases when peace and stability return. The Great Leveler is the first book to chart the crucial role of violent shocks in reducing inequality over the full sweep of human history around the world.


Ever since humans began to farm, herd livestock, and pass on their assets to future generations, economic inequality has been a defining feature of civilization. Over thousands of years, only violent events have significantly lessened inequality. The "Four Horsemen" of leveling―mass-mobilization warfare, transformative revolutions, state collapse, and catastrophic plagues―have repeatedly destroyed the fortunes of the rich. Scheidel identifies and examines these processes, from the crises of the earliest civilizations to the cataclysmic world wars and communist revolutions of the twentieth century. Today, the violence that reduced inequality in the past seems to have diminished, and that is a good thing. But it casts serious doubt on the prospects for a more equal future.


An essential contribution to the debate about inequality, The Great Leveler provides important new insights about why inequality is so persistent―and why it is unlikely to decline anytime soon.

Haven't read it yet, but it's on my bookshelf waiting for me. Too much going on these past few months. :(

This is why part of me was disappointed that the "great recession" after the real estate bubble burst wasn't worse. For it to have made a significant difference in how we do things in the US, there needed to be breadlines, massive shantytowns and trucks making the morning rounds to collect bodies.

In some ways we're kinda almost there. You can really start to see the seams during disasters like hurricanes or floods. The whole just-in-time supply chain method that most of the US retailers rely on falls apart and suddenly it takes weeks for stores to stock back up to normal levels. Streets of tents and homeless are becoming more common in areas with the weather to support it.

Yes, I agree we were almost there. Just a little worse, and I think it would have tipped over into more like what I described. I just read an article in the Washington Post today about the saline drip shortages due to the disaster in Puerto Rico. But I think it will take a serious shock to the system to make any meaningful change, be that bodies on the streets, or riots and lynchings of silicon valley elites. I'd rather see breadlines that murderous mobs.

That WaPo article on saline:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2017/10/09/hospitals-scramble-to-avert-saline-shortage-in-wake-of-puerto-rico-disaster/

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Yeah, There's a quote floating around the interwebs about a guy that watched a nurse standing there to give his wife medication over the course of a few hours because they had run out of bags. This whole thing is a fucking mess.

I think climate change and the seemingly gradual building up of natural disasters might be what it takes to topple everything over. Gotta figure Amazon or Uber's Otto is going to make a play for the majority of US Logistics and transport in the next ten years. That'll lead to the whole just-in-time methodology to become so precise that we're going to be talking about just-under-the-wire. One bad wildfire/flood/hurricane season could be the tipping point for some serious widespread shortages.

At least we have cat videos and VR. 360 VR cat videos! :)

There's definitely a consistent pattern: the rich get richer, and use their wealth to distort the rules to make it easier for them to get even richer (never mind that they already have more than they can use), but harder for anyone else to join them, until finally the pitchforks and torches come out. It's guillotines all the way up.

Which would've been fine, but time after time after the pitchfork and torches phase we ended up only resetting the playing field and start slowly building up to the same bullshit again, until the next pitchfork and torches event.

I forget who it was but a while back in one of the inequality or ubi posts someone posted a video of a jenga tower toppling over with the caption Inequality 101 or something like that. :)

Educating Girls, Ending Child Marriage would be a good way to address world poverty.

Check that Economist article on Basic Income. There's Unconditional Cash Transfers (UCT or UBI) and then Conditional Cash Transfers (CCT). For CCT one of the conditions they've found works is mandatory schooling. #2Birds1Stone

Also helps with slowing population growth.

Can we just fucking eat them already?

I see an emerging market for cannibal cookbooks!

Since it's all relative. If extreme poverty does get wiped out, wouldn't primary poverty simply be redefined to the new extreme poverty?

People going hungry, people living on the streets, people dying of exposure is not relative.

But let's say the current people suffering from extreme poverty suddenly gained more wealth along with spending power, wouldn't they still end up on the street because of the shifting goalpost created by the nature of a market economy?

Obviously, the ideal situation would've been, more people can afford housing = More houses are built in more neighborhoods = Less homelessness overall.

But we're far more likely to end up having, more people can afford housing = Housing becomes more expensive = The same amount of people ended up homeless.

There's always gonna be people ending up on the tail-end of the spectrum no matter what you do. And that's the shitty reality I don't think we can solve anytime soon.

Which is more important? People or profit? The outcome you describe is what you get when you assume the answer is profit. You're not even imagining the possibility of a world where the answer becomes people. And you're not alone, which is why we will probably see mass violence long before the answer ever becomes people.

Btw, I highly recommend that Ezra Klein podcast ft Jaron Lanier midden posted the other day. They specifically talk about a lack of imagination most people seem to exhibit when it comes to our current societal situation.

Also the post-work article Raph posted the other day, highly relevant.

If those filthy rich people made some calls and said, "I need a ten thousand tonnes of rice in Gambia, Uganda, and Rwanda, each by the end of February, plus two million malaria vaccines," do you really think they couldn't make it happen?

Ten thousand tonnes, sure. You could probably feed 2% of the world's population in extreme poverty for one day with that and existing markets and production channels could probably supply it without creating any serious shortages.

The remaining 98%... for the entire year? Agriculture production can't just go "poof" and appear out of the aether.

Besides - where is this money going to come from? Most of the wealth owned by the super-rich is not tied up in liquid assets, and most of their capital gains did not come from liquid assets. To free up the cash to buy that rice they would need to sell assets. If they sell those assets then someone else has to buy them. So where is that money going to come from?

Seriously, I don't think you've thought this through...

I mean, even let's imagine that they *can* liquidate enough to stimulate development of new agricultural production - who would run those farms? Should the same super-rich person hold onto them as assets? What happens next year when the money runs out? Who will the farms sell to now that the super-poor people they were developed to help now have little change in their economic circumstances and their rich benefactors can't afford to continue liquidating their capital to keep feeding them? The whole thing collapses.

This is an infrastructure problem, not a "feed the poor" problem. Wiping out poverty isn't a thing you can just turn a knob and do. You need to develop cities, waste management, roads, industry, production, agriculture, power distribution, ports... this takes time. Lots of time, and lots more money than a few million tonnes of rice. Articles like this woefully oversimplify the scale of the task with some painful sophistry and ridiculous number flinging. It's just not like that.

Yes, I have thought this through, although I admit I am not an economist or global logistics expert.

"What happens next year when the money runs out?"
Are you being facetious? This is obviously not a one time, overnight solution. It is a systemic and systematic redistribution of resources. The numbers put forth are clearly intended to show how a small fraction of the most wealthy have many, many times what would be needed to get the job done, if they and we as a society chose to make it happen.

I agree that a huge part of the problem is an infrastructure problem, but that is very definitely secondary to the motivation problem. I'm not saying the entire problem can be resolved over night, but I am saying that if the wealthy wanted to make it happen, and fast, they could. No, obviously world hunger, poverty, lack of medical care can not be eliminated in two months. I agree that realistically, it would take years to get the distribution infrastructure in place. A big part of all the feeding, housing, medical care, etc. to eliminate poverty is obviously building the infrastructure necessary to deliver. That is all very doable, but first you have to want to do it.

I don't think food shortages are a problem when 1/3 of the food on the planet already goes to waste every year and US obesity rates range from 22% to 38%, depending on state, and Europe catching up fast.http://www.fao.org/save-food/resources/keyfindings/en/
https://stateofobesity.org/rates/ http://www.euro.who.int/en/health-topics/noncommunicable-diseases/obesity/data-and-statistics

As for the difficulty of liquifying assets, it's globally insignificant. If we use Oxfam's numbers, we are only talking about $107 billion, annually and globally. That's a relative drop in the bucket, and should not cause any noticeable disruption to world markets. It is 0.0025% of the US GDP, and a few decimal places even smaller of the global GDP.

Who should run those farms? How about a small fraction of those currently stuck in poverty?

You're still talking about delivering aid. Aid doesn't solve the problem - development does. Aid is a bandaid. Development is much, much more expensive than aid and it takes much longer. If you build infrastructure to deliver aid you're now just committed to a losing cause.

If you want to talk about food waste, this isn't a problem of the rich having too many assets, it's a problem of everyday people just eating too much and wasting too much. So why are we proposing a solution where the rich are somehow responsible and ought, by conscience, to be liquidating assets when the real issue is entirely to do with an efficiency problem of distribution and consumption?

How much food did you waste last year? Why is that the fault of some rich guy who owns too much stuff?

Yes, in the old world economic model, I think you are right. I think that model only works, however, when productivity remains below some threshold and costs remain above another. As I've said in other posts and threads, we now just have a lot more people than we need to house, clothe, feed, and entertain us all. As long as we cling to the outdated concept that to deserve basic human rights one must have a full time job, poverty will lock a vast swath of humanity in undeserved misery.

Money is money. Doesn't matter if it belongs to the rich or poor. If a person cannot sell a capital asset for cash, then the asset is not fairly valued.

When a wealthy person pays a tax and the money is used to purchase goods/services, the wealthy will benefit as more money is being circulated in the economy. A wealthy person that owns a farm or a grocery store will see more demand. They can raise prices or sell more goods, increasing their profitability.

You can force them to pay their fucking taxes tho. Because as you've just described it, their wealth is dependent upon the infrastructure of a society they are leeching to death.

Except we've seen exactly how your scenario plays out in sweat shops across the globe. Hell, we've seen how that plays out in the US's company towns and gentrification efforts. All you're describing is a less violent form of colonization where the populace go from starving to slightly less starving wage slaves.

And don't even get me started on the cult of micro-lending

On the other hand, throwing money at poor people works surprisingly well.

Pshaw sir! If we were to keep throwing money at poor people, they wouldn't be able to remain poor now, would they?