Looking forward to reading this, The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century by Walter Scheidel, published in 2017. From the description:
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.
I have commented many times in the past that from my readings in history and studies in economics, the only time when measures of equality improve have been during mass-mobilization warfare, transformative revolutions, state collapse, and when catastrophic plagues have been unloosed.
We know how to achieve equality and that is by public impoverishment from those four sources. For all but ideological sociopaths, those are not good paths for achieving income equality.
All other pathways towards forcing equality, basically various forms of communism mixed with some cockeyed dictatorships, have led to poverty induced equality. No one has been able to find a means of achieving free, competitive market-based equality which simultaneously respects natural rights and freedoms. And yet they keep chasing failure with pure hearts and good intentions. And a studied blindness to the benefits of rising inequality.
I am not being purely facetious.
For the entirety of 200,000 years, all humanity lived at a knife's edge of Malthusian survival. Everything was a temporal zero-sum game. Two or three boon years led to more children which led to starvation when a bad harvest followed. There was no saving or accumulation, no cushion against risk.
When we became agricultural 10-12,000 years ago, our health declined but survivability improved and we for the first time gained some ability to generate a sustained surplus. Sustained surpluses eventually led to risk taking and investments and capital construction and yet further improvements in productivity.
Which has always been the ultimate issue. What is the individual, community or collective capacity to improve productivity? Warlike societies who steal riches from their conquered territories, unless they are able to improve productivity, collapse sooner or later. Just as with communism, they run out of other people's money (i.e. accumulated capital). Exploitive systems can appear fantastically opulent but if they have no system of improving productivity, they eventually collapse.
In the west, starting circa 1500 with the logistics revolution, we began to get a ratcheting of productivity with one revolution in productivity leading to another, and eventually spreading across the world. The whole world has gotten richer, faster and more broadly in the past two decades and at rates never seen before. Indeed, logarithmic improvements in material productivity and well-being.
Absolute poverty has plummeted while the whole world has become distressingly unequal.
Not sufficiently noted is that the S-curves of innovation have becoming steeper and steeper in these time frames. In the 1930s some luxury innovation like an electric refrigerator took 45 years to become prevalent in the market with almost every house having one. It only took a decade for smartphones, originally a prestigious and elite luxury, to become a common utility with 35-45% of the entire world's population having one.
The pattern of luxury goods becoming commodity goods has been long established but now on an increasingly rapid scale due to the steepening S-curve. Our poorest income quintile population now lead a material goods life equivalent to that of the middle class in 1970. Phenomenal.
If you want to eliminate absolute poverty, all you have to do is pursue free market solutions in a system based on rule of law and capital accumulation. The inequality may stink but it benefits everyone.
And yet totalitarian madmen keeping running around with ideological matches, fully prepared to burn the system down in a naive and baseless expectation that a system of their own devising will lead to increasing productivity AND improving equality.
Some people never learn.
Brings to mind a variation of the opening line of one of Robert Frost's poems:
Something there is that doesn't love a free market.
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