The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality 

         Walter Scheidel

Violence is the only effective tool in human interaction. The author provides ample evidence to support his argument. This is a great book with many well researched examples.

The following are some quotes. 

Get rid of the rich and you will find no poor.” De Divitiis

Chapter 1

Violent shocks were of paramount importance in disrupting the established order, in compressing the distribution of income and wealth, in narrowing the gap between rich and poor. Throughout recorded history, the most powerful leveling invariably resulted from the most powerful shocks. Four different kinds of violent ruptures have flattened inequality: mass mobilization warfare, transformative revolution, state failure, and lethal pandemics. I call these the Four Horsemen of Leveling. Just like their biblical counterparts, they went forth to “take peace from the earth” and “kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.” Sometimes acting individually and sometimes in concert with one another, they produced outcomes that to contemporaries often seemed nothing short of apocalyptic. Hundreds of millions perished in their wake. And by the time the dust had settled, the gap between the haves and the have-nots had shrunk, sometimes dramatically. (Introduction)

Yet shocks abate. When states failed, others sooner or later took their place. Demographic contractions were reversed after plagues subsided, and renewed population growth gradually returned the balance of labor and capital to previous levels. The world wars were relatively short, and their aftereffects have faded over time: top tax rates and union density are down, globalization is up, communism is gone, the Cold War is over, and the risk of World War III has receded. All of this makes the recent resurgence of inequality easier to understand. The traditional violent levelers currently lie dormant and are unlikely to return in the foreseeable future. No similarly potent alternative mechanisms of equalization have emerged. 

Some societies that underwent violent ruptures were not particularly unequal: prerevolutionary China is one example. 

Chapter 6

 It is striking that the wealthiest members of the citizenry were not taxed proportionate to the size of their fortunes, let alone in a straightforwardly progressive manner. The scheme placed the heaviest burden on the upper reaches of the commoner population instead of on the wealth elite. 

Comment: It is the same today. The middle class is taxed most heavily.

Chapter 7

  Whereas the redistributive measures in Central America and even Vietnam were relatively nonviolent by the horrific standards set by Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, the opposite was true of Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. Even in the absence of conventional metrics there can be no doubt that violent government intervention led to massive leveling across the country. The hasty evacuation of the cities within a week of the communists’ victory in 1975 displaced up to half of the Cambodian population, including all residents of the capital Phnom Penh. Considering that urban– rural income variation tends to be an important element of national inequality, this was bound to have a significant compression effect. Urban residents were counted among the “New People,” who were treated as class enemies and deported, often several times. The regime sought to “proletarianize” them by seizing their possessions: they lost their assets in stages, first during evacuation and then when stripped by peasants and cadres at their destinations. After they settled in the countryside, the state tried to keep them from consuming the crops they struggled to grow. Loss of life was enormous—probably close to 2 million people, or a quarter of Cambodia’s entire population. Attrition was disproportionately concentrated among city dwellers: some 40 percent of Phnom Penh’s inhabitants were dead four years later. Former officials and high-ranking soldiers were singled out for particularly harsh treatment. At the same time, the emergence of a new elite was curtailed by ever-expanding purges of party cadres. For example, 16,000 members of the Communist Party of Kampuchea were killed at the infamous Tuol Sleng prison alone, a tally all the more remarkable when considering that party membership had reached no more than 14,000 in 1975. Among the general population, the causes of excess deaths were fairly evenly split among ruralization, executions, imprisonment, and hunger and disease. Hundreds of thousands were murdered hidden from public view, most often beaten to death with blows to the head by iron bars, ax handles, or farm tools. Some of the corpses of the killed were used as fertilizer.

Chapter 9

Indicators of physical well-being such as body height and the incidence of dental and bone lesions did indeed improve with the fall of the western Roman Empire. This suggests that ordinary people were in better shape than they had been under imperial rule.   

  What concerns us here is a more specific question: whether and how the fall of the central government and subsequent fragmentation of the country affected income and wealth inequality. Owing to the shortcomings of the evidence, any answer to this question inevitably involves a great deal of uncertainty and needs to be taken with more than just a grain of salt. That said, there are various indications that when viewed in a broader regional context, stateless Somalia has been doing reasonably well not just in terms of economic development but also in terms of inequality. The reason for this seemingly counterintuitive finding lies in the fact that conditions up to 1991 were extremely unfavorable for much of the country’s inhabitants. Under the rule of Siad Barre from 1969 to 1991, the extraction of resources for the benefit of the dictator and his allies was the single most important purpose of government. Despite his initial avowed policy of clanlessness, Barre came to favor his own clan and others that supported him while treating others with brutality and targeting them for expropriation. Violence on an increasingly large scale was meted out to opposing groups. Land reform benefited politicians and well-connected urban businessmen. State officials and cronies stripped nationalized businesses of their assets and siphoned off much of public spending, 90 percent of which eventually went to administration and the military. Foreign aid, driven up by Cold War rivalries and the manipulation of refugee numbers, was diverted to the regime. Corruption was extreme even by the unenviable standards of the region. Senior officials and the Barre family robbed the reserves of the largest banks, ultimately driving them into bankruptcy. A single nationalized bank catered to a politically connected elite, and the deliberate overvaluation of the Somali currency benefited affluent consumers of imports at the expense of exports by the poor, such as meat. Operating a “gatekeeper state,” the Barre regime controlled the flow of wealth in and out of the country. In the aggregate, these nefarious interventions created inequality both within Mogadishu and between the capital and the rest of the country. Spending on social services was minimal. Thus even though a centralized government was in place, public goods were mostly provided by the informal sector and local bodies or groups, such as clan networks. Pastoralists, the majority of the labor force, were at best ignored and at worst exploited by the regime; they received hardly any public funds. 39 Under these circumstances, the loss of state structures had no major effect on the provision of public goods. Fission even reduced violence, especially in the period between the withdrawal of foreign forces in 1995 and the Ethiopian invasion of 2006: violent conflict was concentrated in the years when the state actually fell apart, from 1990 to 1995, and when efforts to rebuild it first gathered momentum, from 2006 to 2009. Although warlords and militias extracted rents from civilians, constrained by scale and competition they did so to a lesser degree than the previous dictatorship, and taxation and obstacles to trade and business activity were much lower than before. As a result, Somalia has repeatedly outperformed or tied both its immediate neighbors as well as a comparison set of West African countries on various measures of living standards. Most development indicators improved after the collapse of the state, and the only main exceptions, school enrollment and adult literacy, were more affected by the decline in foreign aid than by any changes in state services. A comparison between Somalia and forty-one other sub-Saharan countries for thirteen measures of development shows that although Somalia ranked poorly on all documented indicators in the final years of statehood, it has since made progress not only in absolute terms but also, and more remarkably, relative to many of these other states. This is true in comparison both with countries that had been at peace and those that experienced wars at approximately the same time as Somalia. 40 Two factors can be expected to have depressed Somali inequality after state collapse: (1) the disappearance of a relatively unified national wealth and power elite that had greatly benefited from rent extraction and (2) the cessation of systematic policies of discrimination against the rural majority in favor of urban businesses and state officials. For what it is worth, the tiny amount of empirical information that exists is consistent with this prediction. Somalia’s Gini coefficient of income for 1997 of 0.4 was lower than in neighboring countries (0.47) and in West Africa (0.45) at the time. The Standardized World Income Inequality Database registers a drop in Somalia’s income inequality in the early 2000s, even though the margins of uncertainty are very considerable. It is hard to know how much weight to give the observation that the income Gini coefficient of 0.43 to 0.46 currently estimated for Somaliland, which is somewhat less bereft of central governance than Somalia was in 1997, is higher as well. Considering the nature of the evidence, we are on firmer ground in relating improvements in other welfare indicators to the demise of a kleptocratic and brutal state: in Barre’s Somalia, government was indeed the problem and not the solution. Leveling through state collapse remains a more elusive issue. Even so, the case of Somalia lends at least a measure of support to the overall argument developed in this chapter.

Chapter 12

For all we can tell, land reform that was not associated with violence one way or another has rarely, if ever, been a potent means of combating inequalities of income and wealth.