Eduardo Porter of the New York Times has written an
interesting article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/06/business/economy/a-dilemma-for-humanity-stark-inequality-or-total-war.html
“History — from Ancient Rome through the Gilded Age; from the Russian Revolution to the Great Compression of incomes across the West in the middle of the 20th century — suggests that reversing the trend toward greater concentrations of income, in the United States and across the world, might be, in fact, nearly impossible.
“History — from Ancient Rome through the Gilded Age; from the Russian Revolution to the Great Compression of incomes across the West in the middle of the 20th century — suggests that reversing the trend toward greater concentrations of income, in the United States and across the world, might be, in fact, nearly impossible.
That’s the bleak argument
of Walter Scheidel, a professor of history at Stanford, whose new book, “The
Great Leveler” (Princeton University Press), is due out next month. He goes so
far as to state that “only all-out thermonuclear war might fundamentally reset
the existing distribution of resources.” If history is anything to go by, he
writes, “peaceful policy reform may well prove unequal to the growing
challenges ahead""