The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century. Walter Scheidel. 2017.
The author’s thesis is that throughout recorded history extremely violent shocks have been necessary for essentially all substantial reductions in inequality. These shocks are identified as the Four Horsemen of Leveling—mass mobilization warfare, transformative revolution, state failure, and lethal pandemics. An enormous volume of examples from all of recorded history and from all parts of the globe is presented in support of these findings.
The exhaustive review shows that high inequality has been the default condition of humanity for thousands of years as “history has alternated between long stretches of rising or high and stable inequality interspersed with violent compressions.” This pattern has been a feature of human existence ever since agriculture began producing surpluses that could be captured by predatory elites with hereditary property rights. This process was enhanced by state formation, commercialization, and the exercise of political, military, and ideological power by elites. This has been the norm from the ancient and premodern civilizations of Mesopotamia, China, India, Egypt, Rome, Greece, Medieval Europe, Mesoamerica, South America, and others up to the major countries of the modern world.
The first of the Four Horsemen of Leveling, warfare, must rise to the level of mass mobilization to result in widespread reduction of inequality. With wars of sufficient intensity and duration, both winning and losing sides experience substantial decreases in inequality, not just from destruction of capital, but also from a changed political climate with respect to inflation, taxes for the rich, and conditions for workers. World Wars I and II, where all combatants lost a great deal and experienced considerable leveling, are prime examples of this process. Earlier preindustrial warfare usually did not rise to this level and usually did not contribute to a widespread reduction of inequality because of its more limited scale.
The second Horseman, transformative revolution, requires similarly pervasive mobilization of resources in every single town and village to achieve radical leveling. The Twentieth Century Communist Revolutions of Russia, China, and some smaller states are prime examples of this process. These revolutions resulted in markedly reduced inequality brought about by expropriation, extreme bloodshed, and considerable loss of wealth. Many earlier uprisings, including the French Revolution, also sought redress of grievances but rarely succeeded in significantly reducing inequality, at least in part because the necessary violence and control were beyond preindustrial means.
The third Horseman, state failure, occurred when earlier states were unable to check internal and external challengers, protect key allies and associates of rulers, and extract revenues required for these tasks and for enriching the power elite. Typical outcomes included loss of control of subjects and territory and replacement of state officials by warlords. Inequality decreased because the wealth of elites had been protected by the state and in many cases had been acquired by close association with the state as a source of rents and corruption. Examples of this processes include, Bronze-age Greece (Mycenae), the Tang Dynasty in China, the western half of the Roman Empire, the Classic Maya Civilization, and modern Somalia.
The fourth Horseman, lethal pandemics, resulted in such massive loss of life that market forces changed to the disadvantage of elites and in favor of workers and peasants. In the Fourteenth Century, the Black Plague killed 1/3-1/2 of Europeans and resulted in large tracts of abandoned and idle land and a shortage of workers. Thus the value of lands and rents of elites deceased markedly, and the wages available to surviving workers increased markedly. Interestingly, then as now, elites who favored laissez-faire when it worked for them, now demanded government intervention to suppress the rising cost of labor. However, the imbalance was so severe that market forces asserted themselves over government fiat and coercion. Examples include the Black Plague, the Columbian Exchange (gold and silver to Spain and Portugal in return for small pox and measles to the Americas, which caused more devastation than the Black Plague), the Justinian Plague of early Byzantium, the early Roman Empire Plague, and numerous others.
Special attention is given to the Great Compression of 1914 to 1945, which included World War I, the Great Depression, World War II, and the Great Communist Revolutions. The extreme violence of the time resulted in massive loss of life (well over 100 million killed), massive destruction of property, and extensive redistribution of property by taxation and inflation to fund the war and by confiscation in communist countries. As a consequence, inequality decreased markedly, particularly after World War II, so that the top 0.01% lost over 90% of wealth in France and Japan and 80% of income in the U.S.
Inequality remained low for several decades after World War II until about 1980 when it began an inexorable rise back to the much higher levels before the Great Compression. Numerous additional examples are provided to show that this is the usual sequence. Once violent shocks have passed, nothing is left with sufficient strength to restrain the market and other forces that inevitably lead to rebounding inequality. Thus the relative equality of the Great Compression that many of us thought was the normal status quo was actually a marked exception from the long-term baseline of much higher inequality.
In addressing the role of violence in falling inequality, the author mentions but does not try to answer some interesting related questions. He does not study the inverse of his thesis, namely whether high inequality gives rise to violent shocks. However, he does comment that “there is currently no compelling reason to assume a systematic causal connection between…inequality and…violent shocks.” Also, he focuses on the distribution of material resources within societies but not between countries. Hence, he acknowledges that northern European countries manage inequality much better than the U.S., showing that policy differences matter, but limits discussion to his view that European policies may be unsustainable due to aging and slower economic growth.
So what hope is there for those who think extreme inequality is not only unfair but bad for economies? The author explores a wide variety of potential candidates for peaceful alternatives for reduction of inequality. These include land reform, farm debt relief, economic development, democratization, education, emancipation, economic crises, and others. Generally, these conditions are found to have no correlation with consistently reduced inequality, except when associated with violence, such as with land reform. In addition, transformative violence from the Four Horsemen of Leveling is unlikely to return any time soon in the modern world, and no sane person would want it to. Consequently, the next long stretch is likely to be a relatively peaceful return to rising inequality.
2. The Great Leveler (high inequality throughout history, except briefly after catastrophes)
