/lit/ - Literature

This is a grisly and depressing tome if I have ever read one, though hopelessness and despair are common features of the human experience. They are cornerstones in our history, and we ignore history’s tragedies to our own peril. Inspired by Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013), Walter Scheidel draws together a vast array of quantitative and narrative evidence for his central thesis that

>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… . 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 [p. 6].

The volume begins with a broad discussion of the argument, methodology, and “A Brief History of Inequality,” from the primordial use of brute force to the modern exercise of international finance capitalism. At no point does the author endorse either equality or inequality. Rather, he argues that the concentration of wealth (measured primarily by Gini coefficients — “the extent to which the distribution of income or material assets deviates from perfect equality”) has been a fundamental fact of human existence, essentially, forever. The fruits of inequality include the ultimate foes in libertarian thought, the state and all its attendant extractive parts. The egalitarian harvest, however, is a bloody and detestable mess. Scheidel maintains a careful and measured distance from his subject, able to recognize the very real social and historical problems associated with both concentration and compression. Both processes included horrifying levels of violence, and neither is truly preferable. With a word of caution to the modern devotees of “equality at all costs,” Scheidel writes,

>If we seek to rebalance the current distribution of income and wealth in favor of greater equality, we cannot simply close our eyes to what it took to accomplish this goal in the past. We need to ask whether great inequality has ever been alleviated without great violence, how more benign influences compare to the power of this Great Leveler, and whether the future is likely to be very different — even if we may not like the answers [p. 22].

https://www.cato.org/cato-journal/fall-2017/great-leveler-violence-history-inequality-stone-age-twenty-first-century