The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World, 114) by Walter Scheidel (PDF)

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How only violence and catastrophes have consistently reduced inequality throughout world historyAre 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.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: Review “Shortlisted for the 2017 Cundill History Prize, McGill University””Shortlisted for the 2017 Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award””strategy+business Best Business Book of 2017 in Economics””One of The New York Times Deal Book “Business Books Worth Reading” 2017 (chosen by Andrew Sorkin)””One of The Wall Street Journal’s What Business Leaders Read in 2017″”Selected for The HCSS Bookshelf (chosen by Stephan De Spiegeleire) 2017″”One of BBC History Magazine’s Books of the Year 2017″”One of the Microsoft Best Business Books of 2017″”One of Project Syndicate’s Best Reads in 2017 (chosen by Dambisa Moyo)””One of the Economist.com “2017 Books of the Year” in Economics and Business””One of Financial Times (FT.com) Best Books of 2017: Economics, chosen by Martin Wolf””One of The Wall Street Journal’s What Business Leaders Read in 2017, chosen by Mohamed A. El-Erian””One of the CNBC 13 Best Business Books of 2017″”One of World’s 2017 Books of the Year in “Understanding the World”””Medium.com’s Books of the Year 2017, chosen by Mark Koyama””Walter Scheidel’s The Great Leveler is a smartly argued book. As you may be able to tell from the title, Mr. Scheidel makes the case that throughout history, inequality has led only to terrible things (think pandemics and wars). For anybody who has ever debated issues related to inequality and their broader meaning, this book provides more than just a powerful thought experiment.”—Andrew Ross Sorkin, New York Times”Mr. Scheidel’s depressing view is bound to upset [those] who quite naturally might prefer to live in a world in which events might move political and social systems to figure out a more equitable way to distribute the fruits of growth without the plague, the guillotine or state collapse.”—Eduardo Porter, New York Times”Sweeping and provocative.” ― New Yorker”One by one Scheidel dismisses the non-catastrophic alternatives that have been the focus of virtually every peaceful movement for social justice: democracy, the extension of the franchise, education, economic growth, social democracy, trade unionism and the welfare state. Their effects, he demonstrates, have been comparatively trivial and have never compensated for the inexorable march of inequality.”—J. C. Scott, London Review of Books”An astonishing tour de force.”—Gregory Clark, Wall Street Journal”In [Scheidel’s] magisterial sociopolitical history The Great Leveler, inequality is shown as preferable to the alternative: society levelled by vast upheavals.”—Aaron Reeves, Nature”As a supplier of momentary relief, the Great Depression seems an unlikely candidate. . . . Yes, it brought widespread suffering and dreadful misery. But it did not bring death to millions, and in that it stands out. If that counts as relief, you can begin to imagine the scale of the woe that comes before and after. [Scheidel] puts the discussion of increased inequality found in the recent work of Thomas Piketty, Anthony Atkinson, Branko Milanovic and others into a broad historical context and examines the circumstances under which it can be reduced.” ― The Economist”Reducing inequality by peaceful means looks harder than ever, giving Mr. Scheidel’s arguments even greater resonance.”—Buttonwood, The Economist”A scholarly and ambitious book.”—Paul Mason, The Guardian”A thoroughly unsunny . . . but fascinating look at the engines of our discontent.” ― Kirkus”A new history of wealth inequality from primitive times to the present that is provoking wide debate.”—David Talbot, San Francisco Chronicle”Tight labor markets shrink income inequality by causing employers to bid up the price of scarce labor, so policymakers fretting about income inequality could give an epidemic disease a try. This might be a bit extreme but if increased equality is the goal, Stanford’s Walter Scheidel should be heard. His scholarship encompasses many things (classics, history, human biology) and if current events are insufficiently depressing for you, try his just-published book The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century. Judge this book by its cover, which features Albrecht Durer’s woodcut ‘The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.'”—George Will, Washington Post”In his remarkable new book, The Great Leveler, historian Walter Scheidel shows that . . . reducing inequality has always been a miserable business. . . . Magisterial.”—Ian Morris, BBC History Magazine”[Scheidel] draws on mountains of data to examine the social, economic and political forces that have been responsible for the growth of material inequality–and those that have reduced wealth. . . . Fascinating.”—Glenn Altschuler, Huffington Post”Scheidel’s excellent survey has the merit of drawing evidence from the smallest scrap–height in burial sites, records of wages or rations, differences in house sizes over time, for example.”—Ben Collyer, New Scientist”He is a formidable global historian for whom no place or period is beyond reach. . . . Scheidel questions whether anything can prevent resurgence and persistence of inequality.”—Avner Offer, Times Literary Supplement”A readable and quirky history of economic inequality from the great apes to the modern day. . . . It is well worth the read. It is, in a word, gripping.”—Victoria Bateman, Times Higher Education”A new comprehensive and compelling account of the history of inequality by Walter Scheidel suggests that the only means of substantially levelling economic outcomes have been mass mobilisation war, violent revolution, pandemics (think bubonic plagues) and state failure.”—Ryan Bourne, City AM”One of the most important books on geostrategic trends to have been published in some years. . . . A dark masterpiece, and everyone who thinks about global trends should read it.”—Ian Morris, Stratfor”The current tome that has policy circles all abuzz.”—Dave Neese, The Trentonian”The Great Leveler is a fascinating and informative book, and likely to become a classic–as a warning about our fate if we accept inequality as a law of nature. But now we know better.”—Crawford Kilian, The Tyee”A perceptive, if grim, explanation for the ever-widening socio-economic gap in America, for the growing practice of paying corporate leaders 300 or 400 times what’s paid workers on the shop floor, and for the reasoning behind appointing a Cabinet filled with billionaires. who have little in common with average citizens.”—Bill Mares, Vermont Public Radio, “The Great Leveler is a fantastic piece of social science.”—Mark Koyama, Public Choice”This book will be widely read and spur a wave of critical scholarship.” ― Choice”Try The Great Leveler, by Walter Scheidel. In this well-reviewed nonfiction book, the author argues that only catastrophes like pandemics and great, violent upheavals like world wars can ever address economic inequality. Hey, you’re depressed anyway. Might as well be educated as to why.”—Randi Kreiss, Long Island Herald”I am greatly impressed by his ingenuity in constructing his data-sets. . . . A very brave attempt to say very important things backed up by enormous empirical research. . . . This is a fascinating, brave and important book. I recommend that you should read it.”—Michael Mann, Millennium: Journal of International Studies”Mr Scheidel’s evidence is so persuasive that readers will find themselves cheering on the Black Death as a boost to median wages.”—Janan Ganesh, Financial Times”A convincing–if depressing–portrait of wealth equalization over time and across space.”—Anthony Comegna, Cato Journal”Depressing and thought-provoking.”—Isaac Chotiner, Slate”Depressing and convincing.” ― The Economist”A bold argument which . . . offers the kind of sweeping, provocative ideas that global history lends itself to well.”—Matt Elton, BBC History Magazine”In this remarkable study, [Scheidel] argues that after agriculture (and the agrarian state) was invented, elites were amazingly successful in extracting all the surplus the economy created. . . . Mr Scheidel suggests that inequality is sure to rise. We must prove him wrong. If we fail to do so, soaring inequality might slay democracy, too, in the end.”—Martin Wolf, Financial Times”Scheidel’s book provides new insights about why inequality is so persistent–and why it is unlikely to decline anytime soon.”—Atle Hetland, The Nation”The Great Leveler is a fantastic piece of social science. . . . This is a must-read book for anyone interested in either inequality or in the long-run trajectory of human societies.”—Mark Koyama, Public Choice”It is a very good thing that this book was written as we definitely need to understand inequality and how to avoid it to make this world tolerable.” ― Pennsylvania Literary Journal”Walter Scheidel’s fascinating book about violence and inequality stimulates much thinking about both topics, causing the reader to rethink the inequality debate even aside from violence.”—William Easterly, Journal of Economic Literature”Alphaville’s favourite scholar on [inequality] is Stanford’s Walter Scheidel and, in particular, his book The Great Leveler.”—Jamie Powell, Financial Times Review “If you think you’ve heard it all about economic inequality, think again. Walter Scheidel’s analysis of what really reduces inequality is provocative, but he makes the case with reason, evidence, and style.”―Steven Pinker, author of The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined”Brilliant, erudite, and chock-full of historical detail, The Great Leveler has a powerful message and asks a big question for the twenty-first century: Can we find a cure for inequality that isn’t worse than the disease?”―Branko Milanovic, author of Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization”This is the best book on the history of income inequality. And the central message is that most significant reductions in inequality come through violence and destruction. Have a nice day!”―Tyler Cowen, author of The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream”This brilliant and thoroughly researched book solves a major paradox in the study of historical inequality. If we accept Thomas Piketty’s rule that returns on capital are greater than the rate of economic growth, the 10,000 years of evolution since the Neolithic period should have resulted in all wealth becoming concentrated in the hands of a single individual or family. The Great Leveler explains why that didn’t happen. A major breakthrough in our understanding of the historical dynamics of income and wealth inequality.”―Peter Turchin, author of Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth”Inequality and violence are fundamental features of human society. No one before Walter Scheidel has shown us just how closely they have been intertwined. This is a masterful new assessment of an age-old problem.”―David Stasavage, coauthor of Taxing the Rich: A History of Fiscal Fairness in the United States and Europe”The Great Leveler makes a convincing case.”―Robert J. Gordon, author of The Rise and Fall of American Growth”This superb, and superbly written, book justifies its profound but pessimistic conclusion that in world history inequality has declined significantly only as a result of violent changes caused by wars, state breakdown, or pandemics. It should have a huge impact on world historians and generate interesting and important debates about growing inequality in today’s world.”―David Christian, author of Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History”Walter Scheidel offers a fascinating and powerful analysis of how worldwide income and wealth inequality have evolved from the Neolithic revolution to today. No other book on inequality has the temporal breadth or reach of Scheidel’s book. And his interpretation is strikingly new.”―Philip T. Hoffman, author of Why Did Europe Conquer the World? From the Back Cover “If you think you’ve heard it all about economic inequality, think again. Walter Scheidel’s analysis of what really reduces inequality is provocative, but he makes the case with reason, evidence, and style.”–Steven Pinker, author of The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined”Brilliant, erudite, and chock-full of historical detail, The Great Leveler has a powerful message and asks a big question for the twenty-first century: Can we find a cure for inequality that isn’t worse than the disease?”–Branko Milanovic, author of Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization”This is the best book on the history of income inequality. And the central message is that most significant reductions in inequality come through violence and destruction. Have a nice day!”–Tyler Cowen, author of The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream”This brilliant and thoroughly researched book solves a major paradox in the study of historical inequality. If we accept Thomas Piketty’s rule that returns on capital are greater than the rate of economic growth, the 10,000 years of evolution since the Neolithic period should have resulted in all wealth becoming concentrated in the hands of a single individual or family. The Great Leveler explains why that didn’t happen. A major breakthrough in our understanding of the historical dynamics of income and wealth inequality.”–Peter Turchin, author of Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth”Inequality and violence are fundamental features of human society. No one before Walter Scheidel has shown us just how closely they have been intertwined. This is a masterful new assessment of an age-old problem.”–David Stasavage, coauthor of Taxing the Rich: A History of Fiscal Fairness in the United States and Europe”The Great Leveler makes a convincing case.”–Robert J. Gordon, author of The Rise and Fall of American Growth”This superb, and superbly written, book justifies its profound but pessimistic conclusion that in world history inequality has declined significantly only as a result of violent changes caused by wars, state breakdown, or pandemics. It should have a huge impact on world historians and generate interesting and important debates about growing inequality in today’s world.”–David Christian, author of Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History”Walter Scheidel offers a fascinating and powerful analysis of how worldwide income and wealth inequality have evolved from the Neolithic revolution to today. No other book on inequality has the temporal breadth or reach of Scheidel’s book. And his interpretation is strikingly new.”–Philip T. Hoffman, author of Why Did Europe Conquer the World? About the Author Walter Scheidel is the Dickason Professor in the Humanities, Professor of Classics and History, and a Kennedy-Grossman Fellow in Human Biology at Stanford University. The author or editor of sixteen previous books, he has published widely on premodern social and economic history, demography, and comparative history. He lives in Palo Alto, California. Read more

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐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.

⭐Review of Scheidel’s “The great leveler” by Paul F. Ross Income diversity has received important recent attention (Piketty, 2014; Atkinson, 2015; Milanovic, 2016) as well as earlier attention (Kuznets, 1966). It is a very important topic deserving that attention. Scheidel (2017) adds to the discourse. Viewpoints are widely divergent suggesting that important work pulling things together needs to be done. Scheidel (2017) approaches with an historian’s perspective. He seeks to draw instances from the entire range of human history – from times accessible only through archaeology to the present time – in which income inequality has grown but particularly in which income inequality has decreased. Increasing____________________________________________________________________________________Scheidel, Walter The great leveler: Violence and the history of inequality from the stone age to the twenty-first century 2017, Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ, xvii + 506 pages____________________________________________________________________________________inequality is treated as the normal way things operate in human history. “What are the circumstances that reduce income inequality?” is the question he seeks to answer. His answer is that there have been four precursors to shrinking inequality … massive warfare, transformative revolution, state collapse, and lethal, widespread epidemic. He says, in conclusion, that these “four horsemen” are dead, not a part of the threat of modern life, but writes in his closing sentences “All of us who prize greater economic equality would do well to remember that with the rarest of exceptions, it was only ever brought forth in sorrow. Be careful what you wish for (p 444),” apparently still of the view that reducing income inequality is not possible without the push of immense human sorrow. Scheidel introduces the topic in three chapters, considers “war” in three more chapters, then “revolution” in two chapters, “collapse” in one chapter, “plague” in two chapters, and both imagined alternatives and the future in five more chapters. Scheidel is an historian. Historians understand that one discovers what happened to the best of one’s ability, then takes thought to discover the “why” of the events. This reader is a behavioral scientist. He understands that one discovers what links precursors and outcomes by observing as large a sample of the outcomes as possible, recording systematically the multiple precursors that conceivably could bear on the outcomes for each instance in which an outcome is observed, and then discovers by statistical examination the precursors that lead reliably to the outcomes. This reader also understands that, while Scheidel points to hundreds of instances in which evidence of relatively low inequality is seen (when a relatively low Gini coefficient can be inferred from the data available), being able to record for each of those instances the 30 to 50 or 100 variables that may contribute to minimized income inequality is entirely out of reach for today’s historian and scientist. This scientist’s preferred method for answering the question is not available to Scheidel or anyone else at this moment in time. From this reader’s perspective, Scheidel is confident he knows the effective means for inducing minimum inequality, then collects stories – lots of them – to demonstrate his point. The reading was very valuable for this reader, introducing me to the details of the Russian revolution and the Maoist revolution that I had not yet learned. Scheidel’s citation of his sources – over 900 articles and books as listed on 37 pages – and his habit of describing at the close of each paragraph where he got his information – in the form of a footnote on the very same page as the discussion itself – are gifts to the reader and to the scholar. He notes correctly that his history could not have been written a decade earlier for a very large part of the work he cites has been published recently. Still, there are important flaws in this work and in its earlier cousins. Big Gap #1. These authors agree, as does this reader, that minimizing income inequality is a worthy, even essential, social goal. But none discuss that goal in an orderly way, describing its benefits. Big Gap #2. Past theories (e.g. Piketty, Kuznets) are not reviewed and criticized systematically. Big Gap #3. Remedies suggested by Scheidel and by earlier authors are presented in remedy-per-sentence format, not seriously discussed, and not evaluated for their likely contribution to the desired outcomes. See Scheidel pages 432-435 under the topic “Recipes” for a sample of Scheidel’s remedy-per-sentence treatment of this topic. Scheidel does treat the “political feasibility” of remedies, a necessary thought process, but this discussion, too, is handled by offering cliché-like ideas … no respectable attention to ideas needing genuine description as a replacement for the coffee-table chatter the author presents. Big Gap #4. Scheidel has no workable, sorrow-unburdened route to stable and reasonable Gini-coefficient land. Describing a thoughtful, workable, peace-compatible solution to the inequality problem is the most serious shortcoming of Scheidel’s work and its predecessors. Let me try to open the door to a solution that fills the Big Gap #4 in as short a statement as one paragraph … inadequate, but as much detail as can be tolerated in this setting. When the super rich appear often to have won their luxury by no individual merit (by inheritance, having been born to the ‘right’ parents or, worse, by monopoly, graft, and crime), the “have-nots” have reason to feel the world is unjust and to look for opportunities to “correct” the injustice. Frustration too often is the seedbed for violence. If organizational life everywhere included accurate perception of each individual’s contributions to the organization’s objectives and respect for all participants, then passed out material rewards and opportunities to lead responsibly to those whose past performance justifies both rewards and new responsibilities, “justice” and “equity” would be perceived to be with us. Frustration would be lowered. Most important, productivity would be more than quadrupled … a result learned by statistical simulation of the improved productivity in science following from doing peer review of finished scientific work so that the “good” science, the best work being produced, gets published. Scientific psychology knows how to identify job performance of the greatest value. In a just and equitable society, frustration would be lowered and productivity would be increased to such a degree that society could be generous and thoughtful with respect to supplying goods and services to those who cannot earn their own way. Rewarding those who should be rewarded would lead, step by daily step, to a world in which income inequality would be substantially less than the world experiences today. I have been trying to publish these findings for thirty years and fellow scientists reject the manuscripts I offer for publication, avoiding addressing the evidence that supports what I am saying. Outstanding performers that my peers are, they are discomforted by the notion that their job performance can be measured. They fear that a fairer, more accurate system might not award to them the rewards they have won. Those with today’s power fear what would happen to the good things they enjoy and so “find reason” to keep out of sight the data and insights I present. The inequity we have follows from the “rules” we adopt for running our daily lives, our organizations, our economies, and our governance. Changing society’s rules has been the core contributor to the progress made (the progress recorded by Scheidel), Scheidel attributing the progress to war, system collapse, and plague rather than to the change of rules. One could even perceive the Ten Commandments as society’s suggested rules after having learned a few things about the consequences of certain behaviors.Bellevue, Washington30 April 2017Copyright © 2017 by Paul F. Ross All rights reserved.ReferencesAtkinson, Anthony B. Inequality: What can be done? 2015, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MAKuznets, Simon Modern economic growth 1966, Yale University Press, New Haven CTMilanovic, Branko Global inequality: A new approach for the age of globalization 2016, HarvardUniversity Press, Cambridge MAPiketty, Thomas Capital in the twenty-first century 2014, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press,Cambridge MAScheidel, Walter The great leveler: Violence and the history of inequality from the stone age to the twenty-first century 2017, Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ

⭐Thought provoking in respect of equality issues for societies as a whole. Mentioned by Prof Jirdan Peterson. Im not Academic but still very interesting

⭐An great book, an eye opener to the key factors influencing equality through the ages. Also, a timely read given current trends towards a less equitable society.

⭐I idea that informs this book is delightfully stark. A well-researched book, very stimulating conclusions indeed.

⭐Really dives deep into this immense topic.

⭐Economic inequality is an easy target for abhorrence. It seems blatantly unfair that so few would have so much and so many little or nothing. However, inequality has been with us for most of history, ever since a surplus was created and someone was able to seize it. The exceptions have come at an incredible high cost, as the only effective leveling forces have entailed extraordinary violence. In this book the author makes a very well founded and hardly contestable case that historically the levelers have only been four: pandemics, in the scale of the black death of the fourteenth century; complete state failure, as in the collapse of Middle Eastern and Mediterranean civilizations around 1200 BCE; massive war mobilizations, as in World Wars I and II; and, revolutions, as in Russia and China. And, he adds, none of the resulting decreases in inequality proved sustainable in the long run. So, if that is the price of leveling, short of which there are no remedies, what would be left to do about inequality? Call me naïve, but if the focus is on lifting as many as possible out of poverty, and creating economic growth from which we can all benefit, I would be willing to live with inequality. This is part of a much broader argument though.

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