Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century

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* Books: The Great Leveler. Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century. By Walter Scheidel. Princeton University Press, 2017

URL = https://press.princeton.edu/titles/10921.html


Contextual Citation

"I wrote this book to show that the forces that used to shape inequality have not in fact changed beyond recognition. 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...and whether the future is likely to be very different—even if we may not like the answers."

- Walter Scheidel (p. 22, cited in: [1])


Description

"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." (https://press.princeton.edu/titles/10921.html)


Contents

Daniel Hoyer:

"Part I offers 3 chapters describing the long-run trends of inequality, from our hierarchical primate ancestors to the first large-scale egalitarian movement as hunter-gatherer tribes managed to curtail hierarchy in order to cooperate in their food gathering, to the return of inequalities as sedentarism took hold and resources became more partible and heritable—inequalities enshrined and exacerbated by the socio-political hierarchies of the earliest large-scale and complex states.

The reader is then thrust forward in time to witness the inequalities present in the two major agrarian Empires in the ancient world, Rome and China, which Scheidel calls "the closest analogues to modern western countries(62)” for their large size, long durability, high productivity, and severe hierarchy.

We then get a broad survey of European history from the fall of Rome to the Industrial Revolution, a period that witnessed dramatic periods of growth — both in overall economic productivity as well as the unequal distribution of this production—along with periods of dramatic leveling, notably attended by major international wars and pandemic outbreaks. Specifically, the first half of the 20thcentury, which saw two World Wars and the Great Depression, was not only one of (perhaps)the most violent periods of human history, but it also (or, as Scheidel would have it, consequently) witnessed one of the largest and most widespread period of inequality reduction on record. Scheidel dubs this time the 'Great Compression'. In all, however, the general pattern outlined in these chapters is one of fairly high inequality as at least a pervasive, if not an inherent property of large-scale, agrarian, complex social formations — the kind that have dominated the planet since the Neolithic Revolution some 10,000 years ago.

After this broad survey of the history of global inequality, Parts II–V (encompassing chapters 4 through 11) each outline one of the 4 Horsemen, providing examples of the times they have visited human society and describing their devastating — but inequality-reducing—effects. It is in these chapters particularly where Scheidel is able to display his considerable historical prowess, sweeping across time and space to offer numerous positive examples of the Great Lever in action from our shared past as well as more contemporary societies. These chapters do an admirable job of interspersing quantitative measures — calculating changes in the top income share of select countries over the course of the 20thcentury, approximating the mobilization rates of theEuropean powers stretching all the way back to the 17thcentury, providing estimates for the daily wages of unskilled workers in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, or counting the death toll of pandemics from the Antonine Plague of the 2ndcentury to the Bubonic Plague of the 14th—within qualitative passages about the societies that experienced one of the violent shocks, and how inequality was affected in each case. The chapters in these Parts comprise the bulk of the book's empirical contents. The details of each case and historical example are thoroughly researched, well presented, and generally convincing.

...

Part VI (more below) is indeed devoted to discussing possible instances of widespread leveling that were not preceded or attended by destructive violence, with Scheidel concluding that the historical record simply does not present many ready examples of this. He does acknowledge a few such cases, as in Chapter 13, for instance, when he notes that many Latin American countries were largely sheltered from the violent shocks of World War II, yet did experience temporary reductions in inequality in the post-war period; however, he stresses that these reductions were very short-lived and that inequality in Latin America generally increased between 1938 and 1970. This assessment is presented as further demonstration of the general tendency for complex, highly productive societies to produce high inequality in the long term. This is demonstrated empirically and seems to hold when taking a survey of a large number of Latin American countries (15) over a longer time span (1938–1970), but it cannot quite explain the (albeit temporary) leveling that was achieved in several of these countries in the 1950s and 1960s, leveling that occurred in spite of an absence of any recent 'Great Leveler' (which Scheidel acknowledges, but immediately casts aside(380))

...

Part VI proceeds to offer, then dash, the hopes of those readers who managed to make it this far in the book still optimistic of a brighter, more egalitarian future.

Chapter 12 surveys some of the potential levelers that could reduce inequality without the need to first devastate and destroy. Specifically, Scheidel cites land reform and debt relief (and state interventions into income and wealth distribution more broadly), economic crises that would annihilate wealth particularly among the rich (which at least theoretically could reduce top incomes without bloodshed), and democratization, which has been shown to help keep inequality at bay though itself "cannot be treated as an autonomous development unrelated to violent action" (365); democracies tend to develop after violent shocks, and have proven generally ineffectual at limiting violence within societies as well. All of these mechanisms are argued to fail the test, either because they typically have not reduced inequality for a large segment of the population for extended periods (i.e. state intervention into the economy), or have themselves generally been associated with one of the Horsemen (i.e. economic crises and democratization arising after a war, or major revolutions resulting in more equitable redistribution coming after a state collapse/failure, which tends to be quite violent as well, such as with the case of the Bolshevick Revolution in Russia).

Chapter 13 likewise offers education and economic growth as potential means of peaceable leveling, but again concludes that neither is very strongly associated with inequality reduction (education often exacerbates the problem, Scheidel notes, by producing too many skilled workers for a labour market where they are not in demand, putting downward pressure on wages, plus skilled labour does not general impact capital wealth, which in fact drives much global inequality), or only occur after some violent shock.

Lastly, chapter 14 offers a few counterfactuals to assess if history would have produced instances of peaceful leveling had the violent shocks that in fact occurred did not. Again, the answer is a resounding 'not likely', especially for the Great Compression. In Scheidel's words, "it is hard to see how capital could ever have been destroyed and devalued on as comparable scale [as in fact occurred] in the absence of violent shocks (398);” namely, the two World Wars and the Great Depression.

...

Part VII recapitulates evidence for the growing inequality that has plagued the world since the 1970s and 1980s, outlining the prospects for the future. Consistent with earlier chapters, this part is quite pessimistic, pointing out the myriad indicators that inequality is likely to rise both between and within societies in the coming years. The hope is that understanding inequality from an historical perspective will provide us with the tools to correct or avoid past mistakes. A convincing, timely, and truly essential point to get across; still, a grim conclusion, for, if The Great Leveler is to be believed, then we have really only one of two terrible choices facing us: we either accept and acquiesce to the reality of high (and rising) inequality, or we hope to be visited by a Horseman so that whoever manages to survive the shock may build (at least temporarily) more equitable societies.

...

Finally, an Appendix offers a detailed summary and analysis of the Inequality Possibility Frontier (IPF), a measure designed by economic historians Branko Milanovic, Peter Lindert, and Jeffrey Williamson (Milanovic, Lindert, and Williamson 2011) to calculate the maximum possible distributional inequality given different levels of overall productivity. Scheidel highlights the limits in measures like the Gini coefficient with a maximum of perfect inequality that could never actually be reached in practice. The IPF recognizes that there is a minimum amount of total production in a society that must go to sustain the lives of the people living within it—the subsistence level. In practice, it is only a society's surplus wealth (its production beyond the subsistence level) that can be equitably or unequally distributed—an acknowledgement of realistic wealth distribution missing from Gini coefficients and most standard measures of inequality. "

(https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0hb2v9j1)

Review

Daniel Hoyer:

"The new offering from Walter Scheidel, historian of ancient Rome and long-time advocate of cross-cultural comparative history, is awe-inspiring in its scope and detailed erudition as it is disheartening in its central message. The Great Leveler opens with the programmatic observation that "Economic inequality may only recently have returned to great prominence in popular discourse, but its history runs deep. My book seeks to track and explain this history in the very long run(xv).” Scheidel quickly dashes any hope of finding a key to a future egalitarian utopia in history's lessons, instead outlining the various types of devastating violence that typically (perhaps inevitably?) attended periods of relative equality. A preview of the book's central theme comes early on, where Scheidel posits: “were there also other, more peaceful means of lowering inequality? If we think of leveling on a large scale, the answer must be no(8).”In the proceeding pages, Scheidel digests massive amounts of information—combining quantitative measures of inequality with more qualitative, prosaic descriptions of social developments and major historical events—culled from nearly every corner of the globe and sweeping from our primate ancestors thousands of years ago to our genetically-enhanced nano-technologically-boosted descendants in the nearish future.

The book's focus, of course, is on the recent past (since Industrialization) and whether —and, if so, how—societies have managed to achieve something like an equitable distribution of income and wealth, at least for short periods. Scheidel's answer is that, although most societies throughout human history have generally supported sharp distributional inequities, yes, some societies have seen this pervasive inequality, but unfortunately only as the result of major, devastating, violent shocks.

Scheidel further offers a taxonomy of such shocks, which he dubs the 4 Horsemen:

  • 1. Mass Mobilization Warfare;
  • 2. Transformative Revolution;
  • 3. State Failure/Collapse;
  • 4. Lethal Pandemics.

These forces of devastation and death have come in varying form and scale throughout history, from the collapse of Bronze Age palace societies in the eastern Mediterranean to the Bubonic Plague of western Europe and the World Wars, but in their own way each of these violent shocks carried at least the potential side-effect of disrupting and demolishing established political hierarchies and socio-economic systems, thereby providing space for more equitable societies to emerge. Scheidel is quick to note that these forces do not always serve to reduce inequality, and even when they do this has generally been short-lived, but the thrust of this lengthy survey of global inequality is that "Across recorded history, the periodic compressions of inequality brought about by mass mobilization warfare, transformative revolution, state failure, and pandemics have invariably dwarfed any known instances of equalization by entirely peaceful means (443).

...

One quibble with the work is that, all together, the sheer quantity of information deployed in the relentless service of a fairly small number of central arguments can come off as somewhat repetitive. More significantly, while The Great Leveler can and should be considered a work of quantitative history—and for this, Scheidel is to be commended — cliodynamicists and readers of Cliodynamics may hope for a more explicit laying out of hypotheses and systematic assessment of the empirical evidence both for and against than is offered. Reading the work, I sometimes felt that the force of the primary arguments would have been strengthened by reducing the number of cases adduced, leaving room to balance these positive exempla with more thorough and systematic treatment of the full implications of the proposed causal mechanism.”

(https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0hb2v9j1)


Source: Citation: Hoyer, Daniel. 2018. Pulling a Little Optimism Out of a Very Grim Account of Global Inequality. A Review of The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century by Walter Scheidel (Princeton University Press, 2017). Cliodynamics9: 130–142


Discussion

Daniel Hoyer:

"Are the prospects for a more egalitarian future really this bleak? Are we simply caught between either accepting high (and likely growing)global inequality, or hoping for the next major catastrophe to strike? The Great Leveler certainly makes this argument forcefully and often. Happily, there is further room for optimism in the pages of The Great Leveler. Tucked away in the details of the Horsemen's devastating impact on human life, Scheidel introduces a contributing factor to the subsequent reductions in inequality separated(at least in part) from the devastation: institutional reform and state intervention. Time and again, mediating factors in the leveling process leading from violent shock to reduction of inequality are brought up. Outlining Japan's 'great compression' after World War II, for instance, Scheidel notes that the US occupying forces oversaw a major restructuring of Japan's economy, introducing labour and wage protections and a more progressive taxation system among other policies aimed at leveling income and wealth distribution (123–9). Scheidel concludes this section on post-war Japan with the observation that "The bloodiest years in Japanese history, a war that cost millions of lives and visited enormous destruction on the homeland, had produced a uniquely equalizing outcome (129).”But was it the war that did this, or was it the interventions, fiscal reforms, and changes to the financial system that produced this 'uniquely equalizing outcome'? Similarly, when discussing the path that led Northern Europe from the devastation of World War II to producing some of the current world's most egalitarian countries, Scheidel explains that the relatively equitable distribution of income and wealth currently enjoyed in Scandinavia compared with the rest of the world, including other parts of Europe, owes to their relatively radical taxation and social welfare spending. These fiscal policies and the institutions supporting such state-led redistribution, in turn, are said to have resulted from the war; such policies had been advocated for years, but "[m]ass mobilization war served as the catalyst that helped turn these ideals into reality (164).”A fair point, but one that again raises the question of whether both factors were necessary for Scandinavia's reduced inequality; and if so, should mass mobilization warfare get all the headlines, when institutional reforms4were at least as responsible? Again, while digesting the overwhelming evidence presented in The Great Leveler for the correlation between violent shock and inequality reduction, a key question keeps popping up: What exactly is the relationship between the putative cause and effect? At times reading the work, it seems that the relationship between these two potential causal factors (violence and subsequent policy reform) in fact explains the outcomes observed and documented by Scheidel, rather than the shocks alone. The nature of this interaction may account for the ostensible outliers, as well as the relative difference in equality achieved by different countries today. Indeed, Scheidel notes at one point that "the more balanced distribution of final incomes that is typical of the [modern] Eurozone and Scandinavia primarily depends on the maintenance of an expansive and expensive system of powerfully equalizing state interventions(425).” Scheidel goes on to explain that such policy is "unsustainable (426)”in the long term, although again without too much empirical documentation5. Nevertheless, the state interventions get pride of place in explaining the relative high equality enjoyed by northern Europe today compared to the rest of the world—but why are the conclusions focused entirely on the effects of violent shock? And if the shocks are the principal factor, why did the greater violence experienced in western and southern Europe not lead to correspondingly greater or more lasting equality there? The interaction between these causal forces appears to be key, not only because the mediation of institutional reform after some exogenous shock adds another dimension to the resulting leveling, but because it can help to uncover the continuous relationship between the degree and scope of the factors involved. For instance, are there thresholds of devastation (loss of life or capital from war or state collapse or pandemics) or a certain percentage of the available labour force mobilized for warfare that need to be reached in order for leveling to occur? Are there temporal bounds for the effects of violent shocks? For example, at several points Scheidel notes that the Great Compression of the mid-20thcentury has largely eroded, as the century's latter decades saw resurgent inequality explode almost everywhere in the world, but the reason for this is largely unexplained. Is there a shelf-life to the egalitarian reforms instituted in the 1940s and 1950s and, if so, why, exactly, are such reforms so transient? Do the systematic removal of redistributive policies during the heyday of 'liberal' economics during the 1970s and 1980s completely explain why the Great Compression of the mid 20thcentury has been unraveling?"

(https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0hb2v9j1)