Reseña de The Great Leveler por Josh

The Great Leveler invites comparison with two other books: Capital in the 21st Century by Thomas Piketty, and Rising Up and Rising Down by William Vollmann.

All three books make the point that violent shocks to the established order can result in large scale redistribution of wealth that would otherwise become ever more concentrated. However, all three also note that this effect is not consistent and many violent shocks make the poor even worse off than they were before (what Vollman calls "rising down").

Of the three books Vollman's is the least structured and academically rigorous. He's interested in violence as a moral question - he wants to know when it's morally justifiable.

By contrast, Scheidel and Piketty both treat violence from a more anthropological perspective. They're interested in ultimate outcomes, not as much in the motives or beliefs of individual historical actors.

The greatest levelling event in human history was probably the black plague in the 14th century, which fundamentally changed the balance of power between labor and capital in Europe by massively reducing the supply of labor while leaving capital largely untouched.

The mass mortality of indigenous Americans after the arrival of Europeans arguably had a similar redistributive effect, but rather than redistributing the wealth of the indigenous elite to the local population it was seized by outside actors.

In the last century, Scheidel and Picketty agree, the greatest causes of leveling were the world wars, and communist revolutions. The wars leveled by literally leveling much of world, destroying dynastic wealth accumulated over generations. The communist revolutions leveled by seizing and redistributing the assets of the elite.

Scheidel stretches his thesis a bit by arguing that in certain cases leveling was driven by the implied threat of violence, rather than violence itself. E.g. the social welfare reforms, progressive taxation abolition of child labor, etc. that largely took place in the interwar years can all be plausibly counted as elite responses to the perceived threat of socialist or communist revolution.

The leveling effects of the communist revolutions are significantly more ambivalent, IMO. Part of this is because wealth in communist societies can be opaque; many perquisites of Soviet and Chinese elites constituted significant effective inequality, even if they officially owned nothing. True such wealth could not be passed down directly, but the Soviets and Chinese communists both found alternative methods of passing along privilege to their children (c.f. the CCP "princelings.")

As Scheidel notes, the forms of leveling violence that he discusses are now, almost entirely, a thing of the past. COVID killed under 0.1% of the global population, and while it's certainly possible to imagine a far more lethal virus, it's difficult to imagine anything that would cause mortality on anything close to the scale of the black death. Large scale nuclear war could potentially have similar effects, but Scheidel things that is unlikely (because the logic that has prevented it thus far seems to still hold).

As Scheidel notes, no one in their right mind would want to bring back violent leveling, but if he is correct that it's the only source of mass leveling that seems to put us (humans) in the worrying situation described by Piketty, in which dynastic wealth will continue to become ever more concentrated.

Scheidel closes the book by discussing a few more optimistic scenarios - way in which economic inequality could be diminished without mass violence. These seem to have been added as something of an afterthought though (as he notes the book to that point is fairly unremittingly dismal in it's predictions).

I found the book interesting, I think the main question for me is how relevant history truly is to our current situation. Are violent shocks that occured in the bronze age really relevant to the potential for leveling in the 21st century? The dynamics of wealth accumulation have changed enormously in the last century, thanks to technology and much of the concentration that has occured in the last 20 years in the U.S. has been due to the rise of big tech.

The next few decades seem likely to experience massive shocks and disruptions that will result in enormous changes in the distribution of wealth, but seem fairly unlikely to involve mass violence on anything like the scale of prior centuries. The Trump administration's economic policies are a clear case in point. If the president actually succeeds to in his efforts to reshape the global economic order and massively reduce international trade it will, almost certainly, significantly reduce global economic growth, but it's not clear to me if the effects will be to reduce or increase inequality. Along the same lines, the U.S. appears to be moving gradually towards government default, which could have an enormous leveling effect. While this is surely not his intent, t