Michael: In 2015, just 62 billionaires owned as much wealth as the bottom half of humanity. That's 3.5 billion people. We all think progress and policy can fix this. Today's book argues that, historically, only one thing has ever worked: catastrophic violence. Kevin: Whoa. Okay, that's an insane opening. So we're basically doomed to either extreme inequality or some kind of apocalypse? That's our choice? What a way to start the day. Michael: It's a brutal premise, and it comes from an equally formidable book. Today we are diving into The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century by Walter Scheidel. Kevin: The Great Leveler. Even the title sounds ominous. Michael: It is. And this isn't some light pop-history book. The author, Walter Scheidel, is a distinguished historian at Stanford, specializing in ancient history. He spent years compiling a staggering amount of data, spanning millennia, to build his case. The book has been called both 'essential' and 'deeply pessimistic' by critics, and it’s one of those reads that is genuinely hard to forget, for better or for worse. Kevin: I can already tell this is going to be a cheerful one. So, he’s basically a historical detective who’s uncovered a very, very dark pattern in how human societies work. Michael: That's the perfect way to put it. He argues that for all of recorded history, there has been an iron law at play. And before we even get to the violence, we have to understand that law, because it’s the engine that creates the problem in the first place.

Kevin: An iron law. That sounds unbreakable. What is it? Michael: The law is simple: in times of peace and stability, inequality almost always rises. The very things we strive for—stable governments, economic growth, social order—are the conditions that allow wealth to concentrate at the top. Kevin: Okay, hold on. That feels completely backwards. Aren't peace and prosperity supposed to lift everyone up? That’s the whole story we tell ourselves about progress. Michael: That’s the hope, but it's not what the historical record shows. Scheidel argues that when societies are stable, elites get very good at rigging the system in their favor. They use their political connections, their existing wealth, and the power of the state to protect and grow their assets, while everyone else’s share stagnates or shrinks. He provides so many examples, but a couple really stand out. Kevin: Give me one. I need to see how this works in practice. Michael: Let's go to early modern France, around the 16th and 17th centuries. The state was becoming more powerful and centralized. If you were a top minister with the king's ear, you could leverage that position into an unimaginable fortune. Kevin: I feel like I've seen this movie before. This sounds like a political scandal waiting to happen. Michael: Oh, it's way beyond a scandal. Take Cardinal Mazarin, who was the chief minister of France in the mid-1600s. When he died, he left behind a fortune of 37 million livres. Kevin: Which sounds like a lot, but I have no frame of reference. How much is that in real terms? Michael: Scheidel does the math. It was equivalent to the annual income of 164,000 unskilled Parisian laborers at the time. One man held the wealth of a small city's entire workforce for a year. He accumulated this through his political office, controlling finances, granting favors, and just being plugged into the state apparatus. Kevin: One hundred and sixty-four thousand years of wages. That's not just wealth; that's a gravitational force. It's a number so large it's almost meaningless. So the stability of the French monarchy basically created a system where one guy could legally, or quasi-legally, extract that much value from society. Michael: Exactly. And he wasn't alone. His predecessor, Cardinal Richelieu, did the same, just on a slightly smaller scale. The point is, a strong, stable state, without any major disruptions, became a machine for elite enrichment. The rules of the game were set by those who were already winning. Kevin: It's a chilling thought. We build states and institutions for security and order, but in doing so, we might also be building the perfect greenhouse for inequality to flourish. What's another example? Michael: Let's go even further back, to the Roman Empire. For centuries, Rome was the definition of stability in the Western world. And during that long peace, the Roman aristocracy accumulated vast estates, or latifundia. They owned enormous tracts of land, worked by slaves or poor tenant farmers. Their wealth was staggering and grew generation after generation. Kevin: So, same pattern. A stable empire allows the rich to just keep getting richer. What happened to them? Michael: Well, this is where we get a little foreshadowing of the book's main thesis. For centuries, they were on top of the world. But by around 600 CE, the Western Roman Empire had collapsed. The state was gone. The legions that protected their property were gone. The trade networks that made their estates profitable were gone. And what happened to the super-rich Roman aristocrats? Kevin: I'm guessing they didn't do so well. Michael: They were wiped out. Scheidel cites letters from Pope Gregory the Great, who was basically handing out food rations to the descendants of these once-mighty families. They had lost everything. The great estates vanished. Inequality in the former Roman territories plummeted, not because the poor got richer, but because the rich were utterly destroyed by the collapse of the state that had protected them. Kevin: Wow. So the very system that made them rich was also their single point of failure. When the state went, their wealth went with it. This is... a very bleak picture of civilization. It suggests that as long as things are running smoothly, the gap between the rich and everyone else just widens. Michael: That is precisely Scheidel's point. He argues that for thousands of years, this has been the default setting. Peaceful correctives—land reform, political representation, economic development—they just don't have the power to reverse this trend in a major way. They might tinker at the edges, but they don't fundamentally change the distribution. Kevin: Which leads me to the terrifying question I asked at the beginning. If peace and stability breed inequality, what on earth could possibly fix it? Michael: And that brings us to the explosive, controversial heart of The Great Leveler. If you want to find the moments in history where inequality was truly, dramatically compressed, you don't look for peace treaties or elections. You look for catastrophes. Scheidel identifies four, and he calls them the Four Horsemen of Leveling.

Kevin: The Four Horsemen. Okay, I'm bracing myself. This is where it gets dark, isn't it? Michael: It does. The Four Horsemen are: Mass-Mobilization Warfare, Transformative Revolution, State Collapse, and Lethal Pandemics. According to Scheidel, every major compression of inequality in recorded history was driven by one or more of these four things. Kevin: War, Revolution, Collapse, and Plague. Good grief. That's basically the Book of Revelation. Let's start with war. How can the most destructive human activity possibly make things more equal? Michael: Scheidel makes a crucial distinction. It's not just any war. It has to be a mass-mobilization war, a total war that involves the entire society. The best examples are World War I and World War II. He calls the period from 1914 to the 1950s "The Great Compression." Kevin: The Great Compression. What does that mean? Michael: It means that in virtually every developed country that fought in those wars, the gap between the rich and the poor shrank dramatically. And it happened for several reasons. First, physical destruction. Bombs don't discriminate. Factories, mansions, and fortunes were literally blown to bits, and the rich had more to lose. Kevin: Okay, that's a grimly logical point. What else? Michael: Second, and more importantly, governments needed to fund these massive wars. So they imposed incredibly high, confiscatory taxes on the wealthy. Top income tax rates in the U.S. and U.K. went above 90%. Governments also intervened heavily in the economy, controlling prices, wages, and production, which limited the ability of capital owners to make huge profits. Kevin: So the state, in order to survive the war, was forced to do things it would never do in peacetime—aggressively tax the rich and control the economy. Michael: Precisely. And after the wars, these changes stuck around for a while. Labor unions were stronger, the welfare state expanded, and the political climate was much less tolerant of extreme wealth. The result was the most equal period in the history of the developed world. But it was forged in the crucible of the deadliest conflicts in human history. Kevin: This is profoundly disturbing. It feels morally wrong to look at something as horrific as World War II and say, "Well, at least it reduced inequality." Michael: And this is the central controversy of the book. Scheidel is very clear that he's not celebrating this. He's a historian making a cold, empirical observation. He's not offering a prescription; he's identifying a historical pattern. And that's what makes the book so unsettling. He's saying, "Look, this is what the data shows, whether we like it or not." Kevin: I get that, but it's a tough pill to swallow. What's the next horseman? Revolution? Michael: Transformative Revolution. Think of the communist revolutions in Russia and China. These weren't just political changes; they were violent, ideological projects aimed at the complete annihilation of the existing elite. The wealthy were expropriated, their assets seized, their land collectivized. Inequality was leveled, and leveled brutally, overnight. The human cost was astronomical, but in terms of pure Gini coefficients, the leveling was more extreme than anything seen in the West. Kevin: So, another case of leveling through mass violence and suffering. I'm starting to see the pattern. What about the other two? Collapse and Plague. We touched on collapse with Rome. Michael: Right. State collapse is the Roman story writ large. When the state disappears, so do the laws, property rights, and security that underpin elite wealth. Everyone becomes poorer, but the rich have the farthest to fall. And the last horseman is Plague. Kevin: How does a disease level society? Michael: The most famous example is the Black Death in the 14th century. It swept through Europe and killed somewhere between a third and a half of the entire population. It was an unimaginable human tragedy. But it had a dramatic economic consequence. Kevin: Let me guess. With so many people gone, labor suddenly became scarce. Michael: You got it. Suddenly, the surviving peasants and laborers were in a position of power. Landowners were desperate for workers to till their fields. So wages shot up. Workers could demand better pay and better conditions. Meanwhile, with the population decimated, the value of land—the main asset of the wealthy elite—plummeted. Kevin: So the value of labor went up, and the value of capital went down. A massive, involuntary wealth transfer from the rich to the poor, caused by a microbe. Michael: Exactly. Scheidel shows data on real wages for English craftsmen, which more than doubled in the decades after the plague. It was one of the single greatest reductions in inequality in history. But it came at the cost of tens of millions of lives. Kevin: So every single one of these levelers is a horror story. There are no peaceful heroes in this narrative. No story of a wise leader or a progressive social movement that managed to do the same thing without bloodshed. Michael: According to Scheidel's massive historical survey, no. He looked. He tested for the effects of democratization, land reform, education, economic development. And he found that none of them, on their own, have ever produced the kind of major, sustained leveling that the Four Horsemen did. They are, in his words, in a class of their own.

Kevin: Okay, I need to take a breath. This is one of the bleakest historical arguments I've ever heard. It's meticulously researched, it's logical, but it leads to a place that feels like a dead end. So if the Four Horsemen are the only things that work, and they are all thankfully dormant today—we don't have world wars, the Black Death isn't raging—what does the future hold? Are we just stuck on an escalator of rising inequality forever? Michael: That is the terrifying question that hangs over the entire book. Scheidel is quite pessimistic. He notes that the peaceful decades since World War II have seen inequality rebound in many countries, returning towards the high levels of the Gilded Age. The Great Compression is fading in the rearview mirror. We are living in a period of relative peace and stability, and the iron law seems to be reasserting itself. Kevin: So we're in uncharted territory. We've managed to avoid the horrific "cures" for inequality that history has offered, but we haven't found a peaceful replacement. Michael: Exactly. The challenge Scheidel leaves us with is immense. He's not saying we should hope for a war or a plague. He's saying that if we are serious about creating a more equal society, we have to acknowledge the sheer scale of the forces we are up against. The entrenched power of elite interests is not something that gives way to gentle nudges. History shows it only breaks under extreme, violent pressure. Kevin: It's like he's saying we need to invent a "Fifth Horseman." One that's peaceful but has the same transformative power as the other four. Michael: That's a perfect way to frame it. Can we design policies or movements that are powerful enough to fundamentally restructure the distribution of wealth without resorting to violence? Can we achieve the outcome of the Great Compression without the tragedy of a World War? History offers no precedent. Kevin: So the book doesn't give us an answer, it just gives us a diagnosis. And the diagnosis is grim. It basically tells us that our modern, peaceful, liberal-democratic toolkit is like bringing a knife to a gunfight when it comes to tackling inequality. Michael: It's a profound challenge to our modern optimism. It forces you to confront the deep, structural nature of the problem. And it leaves you with a really powerful, open-ended question. It makes you wonder: can we be the first generation in all of human history to prove Scheidel's diagnosis wrong? Can we actually invent a peaceful way to level the playing field, or are we just fated to repeat the patterns of the past? Kevin: That's a heavy thought to end on. It's a book that doesn't offer comfort, but it offers a brutal, and maybe necessary, clarity. Michael: This is Aibrary, signing off.