The Great Leveler

Across thousands of years of history, Walter Scheidel finds that only mass violence and catastrophe have seriously reduced economic inequality. Tracing the record from the Stone Age to the present, he shows that economic inequality has marked civilization ever since people began farming, herding animals and passing assets to their heirs. It falls when disaster strikes and rises again with peace and stability. Scheidel names four horsemen of leveling, transformative revolutions, catastrophic plagues, state collapse and mass-mobilization warfare, and follows them from the earliest civilizations' crises through the communist revolutions and world wars of the 1900s. Because such violence seems to have diminished, he doubts that a more equal future is near.

Marvin Liao of 500 Startups named it among the books he was reading at the time of a Book-Talk interview, a list he said reflected his eclectic interests.