The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century by Walter Scheidel
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

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.

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