The only conquerors of inequality are the Four Horsemen
of the Apocalypse by WALTER SCHEIDEL
Scheidel (author of The Great Leveler) notes:
“The thesis of my
book is that if you look at the very long run of history over hundreds of
thousands of years, wherever there is documentation, you see that pretty high
levels of income and wealth inequality used to be a default condition. For long
periods of time, inequality tends to either go up or be stable at pretty high
levels. But every single time we observe a major reduction in economic
inequality, it is linked to some massive, violent shock — an upending of the
established order. And that’s true across history.
The levelers come
in four flavors. For most of history, two predominated. One was the collapse of
states. That wiped out elites — the rich and powerful — and narrowed the gap
between rich and poor. The second was disease: massive epidemics that killed so
many people that a scarcity of labor resulted.”