Ever since human beings have domesticated plants and animals we have experienced inequality. It was around 10,000 years ago in the region known as the Fertile Crescent (including parts of numerous modern day Middle Eastern countries like Iraq, Syria, Israel, Lebanon, Turkey, and Egypt) where the agricultural revolution first began and humans became a sedentary species. It was the advent of private property, (this is “my stuff” and that is “your stuff”) that allowed people to begin accumulating personal assets, which, obviously, led some to acquire more than others. Ever since then, inequality has been off to the races.
All of us humans who have lived in any society since this transitional period have experienced inequality to some degree, whether we are the wealthy elite at the top or the working poor at the bottom. Unless we are members of a hunter-gatherer tribe, we exist somewhere in the hierarchy of our given society. It is a natural part of the organization of people—someone must be at the top and someone must be at the bottom. What history shows is that over time, those at the top slowly accumulate more and more while those at the bottom retain less and less. It is a universal truth that wealth accumulates at the top and it makes sense: those with power use their power to keep their power and increase it.
In his book, Scheidel tackles the project of understanding how and why inequality is reigned in and leveled out in the rare instances that is it. The short answer is violence and mass death. He describes what he calls “the four horsemen of economic leveling” (decreasing wealth inequality) which are mass-mobilization warfare, transformative revolutions, state collapse, and plagues. What all these events have in common is mass suffering and loss—what causes them to decrease overall inequality is that the wealthy simply have more to lose. Never in history have the lower classes achieved more wealth to become more equal; it has always been the fall of the wealthy that has leveled the playing field.
Two of the greatest economic leveling events in history are the two world wars. Everybody in society was expected to chip in and do their part on behalf of the war effort, and the wealthy gave more because they had more to give. Overall, it was through a combination of “low savings rates and depressed asset prices, physical destruction and the loss of foreign assets, inflation and progressive taxation, rent and price controls, and nationalization” that accounted for the scale and timing of the compression of income and wealth inequality. The end of the First World War saw first a boom in the 1920s, followed by a depression in the 1930s, which led to the creation of the ‘welfare state’ in the United States, as President Roosevelt’s New Deal sought to take care of the poorest Americans. Despite this, the global depression made way for the Nazi Party to take control in Germany, and the Second World War was soon upon us, leveling inequality even more. Thankfully, the Allied powers did a better job of cleaning things up in the wake of this second global catastrophe. Here in the United States, union membership was at its height in the 1950s, a direct result of the lower classes banding together and advocating for better working conditions. It was economic leveling in the wake of the war that led to the boom of the middle class in America.
Increased wages for the working class was also the result of the Black Death of the 13th century, a plague that killed somewhere between a third and half of the population of Europe and Eurasia. The shortage in supply of laborers in England and Western Europe gave them the upper hand and they were able to bargain for better wagers and increase their living standards. Sadly, this was not the case for workers in Eastern Europe and Eurasia, as the elites in these regions used violence to keep the poor institutionalized at the bottom of the social hierarchy. “If microbial assaults were met with sufficient human force to suppress bargaining,” our author writes, “elites were able to maintain or quickly restore high levels of inequality” using violence. Ultimately, the leveling effects of plagues were constrained in two ways: over time, as population numbers recovered and the increased supply of workers lowered their market value, and by the social and political environment in which they unfolded. It was thus only in some cases and for some time that epidemic disease substantially reduced inequality.
The Communist revolutions are another example of a great leveler, one that follows the same pattern of initial leveling, followed by a sustained period of rising inequality. They did the initial leveling via expropriation, collectivization, and price-setting. Yet, “even when society was deeply penetrated by ruthless revolutionaries, enforced equality lasted only as long as these regimes were in power and stayed the course. The moment they fell, as in the Soviet Union and its satellites or in Cambodia, or changed track, as in China or Vietnam, inequality of income and wealth rapidly returned.”
The biggest driver of wealth creation and inequality is economic growth. While humanity first saw this growth with the agricultural revolution, the biggest leaps occurred during the industrial revolution and the technological revolution. Capitalists will argue that a rising tide lifts all boats, and this is true. It is also true, however, that it lifts the largest boats the highest. One of the realities of economic inequality is that the longer it persists, the greater it becomes. In the United States today, for example, the top .01% of the population possesses more wealth than the bottom 80%. “Thousands of years of history boil down to a simple truth: ever since the dawn of civilization, ongoing advances in economic capacity and state building favored growing inequality.”
To summarize, the only known mechanism for decreasing wealth inequality is widespread violence and mass death, historically caused be one of Scheidel’s four ascribed horsemen: mass-mobilization warfare, transformative revolutions, state collapse, and plagues. “Even though this is not an iron law—not all communist revolutions were particularly violent, for example, and not all mass warfare leveled—it may be as close as we can hope to get to a general premise.”
As we find ourselves in a time of unprecedented inequality, both in the United States and globally, and the labor classes of the world are clamoring for their fair share, will one of these violent horsemen rear it’s head?