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)
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Last annotated on February 22, 2017
In 2015, the richest sixty-two persons on the planet owned as much private net wealth as the poorer half of humanity, more than 3.5 billion people.Read more at location 236
The previous year, eighty-five billionaires were needed to clear that threshold,Read more at location 237
in 2010, no fewer 388 of them had to pool their resources to offset the assets of the global other half,Read more at location 238
The wealthiest twenty Americans currently own as much as the bottom half of their country’s households taken together, and the top 1 percent of incomes account for about a fifth of the national total.Read more at location 244
in the United States, the best-earning 1 percent of the top 1 percent (those in the highest 0.01 percent income bracket) raised their share to almost six times what it had been in the 1970s even as the top tenth of that group (the top 0.1 percent) quadrupled it.Read more at location 247
In the 1850s, Nathaniel Parker Willis coined the term “Upper Ten Thousand” to describe New York high society.Read more at location 252
The largest American fortune currently equals about 1 million times the average annual household income, a multiple twenty times larger than it was in 1982.Read more at location 254
President Barack Obama elevated rising inequality to a “defining challenge”: And that is a dangerous and growing inequality and lack of upward mobility that has jeopardized middle-class America’s basic bargain—that if you work hard, you have a chance to get ahead. I believe this is the defining challenge of our time: Making sure our economy works for every working American.Read more at location 257
Warren Buffett had complained that he and his “mega-rich friends” did not pay enough taxes.Read more at location 262
Within eighteen months of its publication in 2013, a 700-page academic tome on capitalist inequality had sold 1.5 million copies and risen to the top of the New York Times nonfiction hardcover bestseller list.Read more at location 263
Even the leadership of the People’s Republic of China has publicly acknowledgedRead more at location 266
top income shares only very recently caught up with those reached back in 1929, andRead more at location 276
England on the eve of the First World War, the richest tenth of households held a staggering 92 percent of all private wealth, crowding out pretty much everybody else; today their share is a little more than half. HighRead more at location 277
largest Roman private fortunes equaled about 1.5 million times the average annual per capita income in the empire, roughly the same ratio as for Bill Gates and the average American today. For all we can tell, even the overall degree of Roman income inequality was not very different from that in the United States. YetRead more at location 279
by the time of Pope Gregory the Great, around 600 CE, great estates had disappeared, and what little was left of the Roman aristocracy relied on papal handouts to keep them afloat. Sometimes,Read more at location 281
declined because although many became poorer, the rich simply had more to lose. InRead more at location 283
other cases, workers became better off while returns on capital fell: westernRead more at location 283
Europe after the Black Death, where real wages doubled or tripled and laborers dined on meat and beer while landlords struggled to keep up appearances, is a famous example.Read more at location 284
has the distribution of income and wealth developed over time, andRead more at location 286
in the last Ice Age, hunter-gatherers found the time and means to bury some individuals much more lavishly than others. But it was food production—farming and herding—that created wealth on an entirely novel scale. GrowingRead more at location 296
and persistent inequality became a defining feature of the Holocene. TheRead more at location 298
marital strategies and reproductive success, consumption and investment choices, bumper harvests, and plagues of locusts and rinderpest determined fortunes from one generation to the next.Read more at location 301
In practice, however, social evolution commonly had the opposite effect.Read more at location 305
Domestication of food sources also domesticated people.Read more at location 305
Political inequality reinforced and amplified economic inequality.Read more at location 307
many premodern societies grew to be as unequal as they could possibly be,Read more at location 308
And when more benign institutions promoted more vigorous economic development, most notably in the emergent West, they continued to sustain high inequality. Urbanization, commercialization, financial sector innovation, trade on an increasingly global scale, and, finally, industrialization generated rich returns for holders of capital. As rents from the naked exercise of power declined, choking off a traditional source of elite enrichment, more secure property rights and state commitments strengthened the protection of hereditary private wealth.Read more at location 310
For thousands of years, civilization did not lend itself to peaceful equalization. Across a wide range of societies and different levels of development, stability favored economic inequality.Read more at location 315
Violent shocks were of paramount importance in disrupting the established order, in compressing the distribution of income and wealth, in narrowing the gap between rich and poor.Read more at location 317
Four different kinds of violent ruptures have flattened inequality: mass mobilization warfare, transformative revolution, state failure, and lethal pandemics.Read more at location 319
they went forth to “take peace from the earth” and “kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.”Read more at location 321
Only specific types of violence have consistently forced down inequality. Most wars did notRead more at location 325
For war to level disparities in income and wealth, it needed to penetrate society as a whole, to mobilize people and resources on a scale that was often only feasible in modern nation-states. This explains why the two world wars were among the greatest levelers in history.Read more at location 327
Mostly concentrated in the period from 1914 to 1945, it generally took several more decades fully to run its course.Read more at location 333
wars of the Napoleonic era or the American Civil War had produced mixed distributional outcomes,Read more at location 335
The ancient Greek city-state culture, represented by Athens and Sparta, arguably provides us with earliest examples of how intense popular military mobilization and egalitarian institutions helped constrain material inequality, albeit with mixed success.Read more at location 336
Internal conflicts have not normally reduced inequality: peasant revolts and urban risingsRead more at location 339
civil war in developing countries tends to render the income distribution more unequalRead more at location 340
Violent societal restructuring needs to be exceptionally intenseRead more at location 340
Communists who expropriated, redistributed, and then often collectivized leveled inequality on a dramatic scale.Read more at location 342
The most transformative of these revolutions were accompanied by extraordinary violence,Read more at location 343
Far less bloody ruptures such as the French Revolution leveled on a correspondingly smaller scale.Read more at location 344
states provided a measure of protection, however modest by modern standards, for economic activityRead more at location 347
When states unraveled, these positions, connections, and protections came under pressureRead more at location 347
everybody might suffer when states unraveled, the rich simply had much more to lose:Read more at location 348
The earliest known examples reach back 4,000 years to the end of Old Kingdom Egypt and the Akkadian empire in Mesopotamia.Read more at location 350
were there also other, more peaceful mechanisms of lowering inequality?Read more at location 363
If we think of leveling on a large scale, the answer must be no.Read more at location 363
mass wars and revolutions did not merely act on those societies that were directly involved in these events: the world wars and exposure to communist challengers also influenced economic conditions, social expectations, and policymaking among bystanders. These ripple effects further broadened the effects of leveling rooted in violent conflict. This makes it difficult to disentangle developments after 1945 in much of the world from the preceding shocks and their continuing reverberations.Read more at location 365
falling income inequality in Latin America in the early 2000sRead more at location 368
there is no compelling empirical evidence to support the view that modern economic development, as such, narrows inequalities.Read more at location 374
There is no repertoire of benign means of compression that has ever achieved results that are even remotely comparable to those produced by the Four Horsemen.Read more at location 375
top tax rates and union density are down, globalization is up, communism is gone, the Cold War is over, and the risk of World War III has receded. All of this makes the recent resurgence of inequality easier to understand. The traditional violent levelers currently lie dormantRead more at location 379
redistribution and education are already unable fully to absorb the pressure of widening income inequalityRead more at location 382
inequalities that are rooted in gender and sexual orientation; in race and ethnicity; and in age, ability, and beliefs,Read more at location 388
More sophisticated indices of inequality exist but cannot normally be applied to long-term studiesRead more at location 440
