Is increasing economic inequality inevitable without catastrophe?

ucbalumnus
Tue, 09 May 2017 00:02:39 +0000

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/02/scheidel-great-leveler-inequality-violence/517164/
http://press.princeton.edu/titles/10921.html

Walter Scheidel:

Inequality has been written into the DNA of civilization ever since humans first settled down to farm the land. Throughout history, only massive, violent shocks that upended the established order proved powerful enough to flatten disparities in income and wealth. They appeared in four different guises: mass-mobilization warfare, violent and transformative revolutions, state collapse, and catastrophic epidemics. Hundreds of millions perished in their wake, and by the time these crises had passed, the gap between rich and poor had shrunk.

[…]

History cannot predict the future, but its message is as unpalatable as it is clear: With the rarest of exceptions, great reductions in inequality were only ever brought forth in sorrow.

Of course, the extreme levels of inequality as found in Latin America and pre-communist Russia do not seem to be all that great even for the wealthy (and induce the despondent everyone else to follow revolutionary demogogues who may not necessarily be selling anything better). But, if Scheidel’s argument is correct, only catastrophic events where everyone suffers and becomes poorer significantly reduce economic inequality (because many of the wealthy end up as poor or dead as everyone else). Peaceful political policy making may only be able to somewhat slow down or speed up the increase in economic inequality in this case.

Some of the anxiety of the middle and upper middle class that seems to be expressed on these forums may be in implicit recognition of the trend toward greater economic inequality – i.e. the idea that the middle and upper middle class and their descendents will mostly fall into the lower classes of an increasingly unequal economy, with only a few being able to move into the ruling class.