troy_s 's review for:

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

4.25

challenging dark informative slow-paced

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This is a very frightening book. I'm equally impressed and scared by the amount of research that Dr. Scheidel conducted regarding income and wealth inequality throughout recorded history. Measuring Gini coefficients from things that I'd never even consider (e.g., size and amount of gold/precious materials at gravesites), Scheidel essentially lays out that there are four horsemen for bringing about greater wealth equality since the Stone Age: war, revolution, societal collapse, and plague.

Essentially, for any type of society that develops past subsistence farming, you have inequality and this is the case across all time and cultures. It is only through massive amount of upheaval and death by which humans have "leveled the playing field" with regards to wealth. Scheidel provides dozens of examples for this and the list is truly exceptional. That said, this book was difficult to read at times, it's more of a university textbook than a simple book one picks up on the weekend for lazy reading.

Ultimately, I would recommend this to others that are interested in loads of empirical data and also income/wealth inequality. I think that if thousands of years of history is anything to judge from, we are in for a very rough future.