In this book Walter Scheidel competently explores the history of cataclysmic events that have “leveled” the inequality of wealth and income in societies. “Leveling” is the term he uses for narrowing the income and wealth between the more affluent elites in a society and the less well-off masses. The scope of exploration is all of recorded human history (even scantily recorded pre-modern periods), so Scheidel captures a wide range of leveling events. He groups these into four classes, which he terms the “four horsemen” of equalization (in an ironic nod to the biblical Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse). He identifies these four major classes of events which disrupt society and cause wealth and income leveling as mass mobilization warfare, radical revolution, state failure and plague. While state failures have occurred throughout history, plague was a more common leveler in pre-modern times, and mass mobilization warfare and radical revolution are more modern phenomena.
Scheidel clearly demonstrates that significant inequality of wealth and income has been prevalent throughout recorded human history, across all epochs, cultures and geographies. Supporting this broad view, Scheidel cites a wealth of historical information, from a wide range of sources. He uses direct information where he can, and infers from proxy indicators for pre-modern periods where direct, comprehensive data is unavailable. Against this historic backdrop of inequality, Scheidel presents dozens of examples of cataclysmic events that led to some significant degree of leveling of wealth and income in a society. And these events are indeed cataclysms, which leveled wealth and income by destroying the wealth of the elites, rather than by uplifting the material welfare of the less well-off. And as Scheidel admits, in every case the post-apocalyptic society returned to wealth and income inequality as it recovered from the cataclysm.
Scheidel’s comprehensive review of material inequality across time and cultures is impressive, and his analysis of the events that caused leveling of wealth in a society is convincing. He has captured, and categorized, the major historical events that have disrupted the normal inequality of wealth and income. This is an excellent book for anyone who is looking for a thorough analysis of this issue.
I have several issues, however, with the ideological assumptions and philosophical underpinnings of Scheidel’s thesis. First and foremost is the weak justification for the implicit assumption that material leveling is even desirable, especially given the evidence that material inequality has been the prevailing, stable condition throughout the history of mankind. If inequality is the natural order, then why aspire to undo it? He spends exactly seven paragraphs in a section titled “Does It Matter” addressing this question, and not answering it satisfactorily. Beyond the unsupported assertions that inequality could harm economic growth or cause civil war, he falls back on the leftist shibboleths of “normative ethics” and “social justice”. These are well-known euphemisms or “dog whistles” for simple envy.
A more significant issue I have with Scheibel’s analysis is that he focuses solely on income equality rather than on the prosperity of the society. He demonstrates how difficult it is to write an economic history without a deep understanding of economics. Scheibel glosses over the mechanics of how economies (and societies) operate, and how income (and wealth, the accumulation of income over time) is fundamentally created, not “distributed.” That is why the Great Enrichment over the past two or three centuries is such an important event in economic history, because the overall wealth of societies was increased by more than an order of magnitude, regardless of its “distribution.” If the condition of “the poor” were really his moral concern, then he would be more interested in whether the less well-off were able to obtain adequate diets, achieve longer life expectancy, escape desperate work for sustenance only, achieve some level of education and betterment, and so forth. All of that progressed tremendously during the Great Enrichment. Rather than focusing on the prosperity of all members of the society, he continues to focus, even in the relatively affluent modern era, on comparative material inequality rather than on the absolute material condition of the less affluent. A telling indicator of his lack of economic rigor is that Scheibel never identifies a level of material equality that he would view as “satisfactory”, either theoretically or by historic example.
A related weakness in Scheibel’s analysis is his tacit assumption that prosperity somehow is a divine gift or the natural evolution of history, but material inequality is the only phenomenon that we need to analyze and manage. While he uses a lot of numbers, he does not relate them to how economies operate in creating income and wealth. He fails to distinguish between the subsistence agrarian economies and forced state expropriation of land (the primary source of wealth for most of mankind’s existence) that dominated most of human history, and the unconstrained, market-based, high wealth creation, trading economies of the last 250 years. There is something different about the causes and moral bases of wealth and income inequality between those two eras that Scheidel completely overlooks – or avoids. Scheidel does clearly explain that for most of mankind’s history, wealth and income inequality was created by military and religious elites using violence to extract surplus production from the agrarian economy (nominally in return for protection from external predators and god-driven calamities). Unfortunately, Scheibel sees no distinction between that history and current societies based on high economic productivity (far beyond agriculture), democratic governance, free exchange and trade, and accumulated wealth based on productive activity rather than ownership of land. It is difficult to ignore the difference between the wealth accumulated by Louis XIV and that accumulated by Bill Gates, but Scheibel manages to skate by it. It is a serious fallacy in Scheibel’s narrative to conflate the causes of the material inequality that operate in these two very different types of societies. There was a major change in most economies during and subsequent to the Great Enrichment, after which the prosperity of everyone increased significantly and the activities that create income and wealth changed dramatically. Yet Scheibel does not recognize and explore this.
Perhaps the most “fatal” issue with Scheidel’s thesis is that the great levelings occured as a result of cataclysmic events that killed a significant portion of the population and materially reduced the living standard of all of the survivors, rich and poor. As he shows, leveling has occurred historically because the resources of the rich are destroyed or disrupted proportionately more, not because the poor were uplifted. Generally they suffered too. A narrow exception might be considered the peasants who survived the plague, whose wages definitely rose – if you consider just this factor and not all of their family members and neighbors who perished to make their labor more valuable. If you accept Scheidel’s assumption that wealth and income equality is a desired state or direction for human societies, then Scheidel’s conclusion appears to be that “Civilization, in order to be saved, must first be destroyed.”
Finally, Scheidel concludes his book weakly. After incontrovertibly documenting that inequality is widespread, that leveling can only be accomplished through widespread violence, impoverishment and death, and that any leveling is only fleeting, he has no real answer for how to reach his implicit nirvana of material equality. He concludes with some wishful longing for some future mechanism or process to reduce inequality without all the downsides. These ruminations feel as detached from reality as the view that material equality is both natural and desirable.
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Top reviews from other countries
Charles Macek
Read this ahead of Picketty.
Reviewed in Australia 🇦🇺 on December 14, 2020Jeffrey Sayer
Awesomely comprehensive - impressive scholarship
Reviewed in Australia 🇦🇺 on January 11, 2018
Terry Davies
Interesting historical comparisons of inequality for whole societies
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on January 29, 2021
