Episode 18: The Conversation No One Wants to Have about Inequality

Are war, famine, and natural disaster the only ways to reduce inequality? According to one historian, yes

New ways of governing, policy, protests, and more have been introduced across the globe for centuries to try and curb inequality. So, what actually worked? According to Walter Scheidel, author of The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century, history reports that violence and catastrophe are the only proven effective interventions.

On February 26th, Walter Scheidel, Dickason Professor in the Humanities, Professor of Classics and History, Stanford, joined This Week in Dystopia host Chris Robichaud for a conversation at Harvard Kennedy School about inequality. They answer the questions no one wants to ask like, is violence really the only way to curb inequality? Is inequality in society okay? How much inequality?

Thanks to the Joblessness and Urban Poverty Research Program at the Wiener Center, HKS, and the Students Association for the Alleviation of Poverty and Social Inequality for organizing a great event.

Walter Scheidel

Dickason Professor in the Humanities, Professor of Classics and History, and Catherine R. Kennedy and Daniel L. Grossman Fellow in Human Biology

Scheidel’s research focuses on ancient social and economic history, with particular emphasis on historical demography, labor, inequality, and state formation. He is interested in comparative and transdisciplinary approaches to the study of the premodern world, and has been trying to build bridges between the humanities, the social sciences, and the life sciences.

The most frequently cited active-duty Roman historian adjusted for age in the Western Hemisphere, Scheidel is the author or (co-)editor of 18 books, has published well over 200 articles, chapters, and reviews, and has lectured in 26 countries. Scheidel is preparing a book on the connections between the fall of the Roman empire and the creation of the modern industrialized world, an e-publication on the Roman monarchy in global comparative context, and a general survey of ancient demography, and has been co-editing The Oxford World History of Empire (2 vols., with Peter Bang and Christopher Bayly †). He launched an international research initiative for the comparative study of ancient Mediterranean and Chinese empires, co-founded the Princeton/Stanford Working Papers in Classics, created the interactive web site Orbis: The Stanford Geospatial Network Model of the Roman World, which has received over a million visits and attracted global media coverage, and is co-editor of the journal Historia and the monograph series Historia Einzelschriften and Oxford Studies in Early Empires. He was awarded a New Directions Fellowship of the Mellon Foundation and a Guggenheim fellowship, and is a Corresponding Member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.

The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century

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.

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