The Great Leveler

Why has inequality persisted across millennia except in rare, catastrophic moments? Walter Scheidel’s The Great Leveler proposes a stark historical answer: only violence has ever produced deep and enduring reductions in inequality. Across ancient empires and modern nations, peaceful reform—education, democracy, land reform—has seldom sufficed. The book argues that inequality is humanity’s default condition, and leveling comes only through what Scheidel calls the Four Horsemen of Leveling: mass mobilization warfare, transformative revolution, state collapse, and lethal pandemics.

The overarching thesis

Scheidel’s thesis turns on comparative evidence from archaeology, history, and economics. He traces inequality in ‘deep time,’ from Paleolithic burial sites to twenty-first-century tax data, showing that durable compression of wealth occurs chiefly when violent forces destroy the institutional or physical bases of elite privilege. You learn that pandemics shift wages and rents, revolutions confiscate property, wars level capital through taxation and destruction, and collapses erase entire elite networks. This violent pattern repeats because concentrated wealth and entrenched elites resist peaceful redistribution.

Measuring inequality across eras

Scheidel devotes considerable effort to explaining how to measure inequality over millennia. Without modern surveys, you rely on proxies—house sizes, grave goods, tax rolls, or relative prices—to estimate Ginis or top wealth shares. Even these values must be adjusted by an ‘extraction rate,’ comparing realized inequality against the theoretical maximum possible at that society’s productivity level. Archaeological data show that inequality rose sharply with agriculture and urbanization long before written records, while only collapse or depopulation produced declines.

From foragers to farmers and states

Hunter-gatherers were relatively egalitarian not because of virtue but because mobile resources prevented wealth accumulation. Agriculture introduced defensible, storable, and inheritable assets: land, livestock, irrigation. This shift enabled the first durable inequality. State formation amplified it: elites captured rents from taxation, tribute, and officeholding. In Mesopotamia and Rome, rulers and governors accumulated vast estates. Scheidel calls these the ‘original 1%.’ Whether through Sumerian temple managers or Roman senators, political coercion produced material concentration. (Note: similar dynamics appear in modern kleptocratic regimes.)

Empires and their convergent logic

Scheidel compares Han China and Rome to show the universal imperial pattern: different institutions but identical results. In both, officeholders used coercive power to amass land and wealth, while rulers occasionally confiscated fortunes to fund armies or reward allies. Yet such redistributions rarely touched inequality at large—they simply replaced one elite with another. Only systemic breakdown (Han’s collapse, Rome’s fall) temporarily flattened hierarchies.

The rhythm of rise and fall

Over centuries, inequality follows a pulse: long periods of accumulation punctuated by devastating leveling. Rome’s collapse, the Black Death, communist revolutions, and the world wars all mark these troughs. The twentieth century’s ‘Great Compression’—1914–1945—shows the four horsemen operating in concert: war-driven destruction, revolution, and postwar reform compressing incomes dramatically. Scheidel’s data show top shares plunging by half or more in many nations. Yet afterward, inequality resurged with globalization, financialization, and the weakening of progressive institutions.

Scheidel’s radical claim

Deep leveling is never peaceful. You can educate, democratize, and reform—but without obligatory shocks that dismantle elite wealth, the historical record shows only modest moderation, not wholesale redistribution.

The policy dilemma and future frontier

Scheidel ends with what he calls the ‘inequality frontier’: a theoretical ceiling bounded by subsistence and productivity. Modern societies operate far below their maximum extractive inequality, yet peaceful compression at scale appears politically elusive. Demographic aging, global capitalism, and technology may amplify disparities. Proposed remedies—progressive taxation, wealth levies, global registers—face resistance absent crisis. His conclusion is sobering: without shock or coercion, inequality remains structurally stable.

Across five thousand years, Scheidel’s evidence converges: the only enduring equalizers are catastrophes. Human societies rebuild inequality once peace returns. If you want to understand why the modern world’s inequality resembles Rome more than Plato’s Athens, Scheidel gives the uncomfortable answer—because history’s great levelers have always ridden out of apocalypse, not reform.

Scheidel begins his journey with humanity’s transition from foragers to farmers, arguing that inequality’s origins lie in resource defensibility and inheritance, not innate greed. Hunter-gatherer societies such as the Hadza or San practiced ‘reverse dominance’—where cooperation, gossip, and ostracism suppressed would-be despots. Their mobility and inability to store wealth kept inequality low (wealth Gini ≈ 0.25). But once agriculture emerged, the calculus changed.

Agriculture and durable assets

Crops, plow animals, and irrigation allow surpluses to be stored and transmitted. That capacity for inheritance, not farming per se, ignites durable hierarchy. Archaeological signals from Varna and Sungir show rich burials—gold and beads implying concentrated status by 5000 BCE. After domestication, elites solidify position through control of land and labor, as seen in the Near East, China, and Mesoamerica. The heritability of wealth drives the leap: hunters average 0.25 wealth Gini; agriculturalists, ≈0.48.

Early communities and maritime exceptions

Even societies without farming (Pacific Northwest salmon cultures) produced sharp inequality through resource monopolization. Comanche horse economies did likewise, proving that defensibility and transmission matter more than the resource itself. Once human groups could fence, store, or pass wealth to heirs, inequality became structural.

Key takeaway

Inequality’s roots lie in how resources can be monopolized and inherited. Agriculture merely multiplies the means.

The evolutionary anthropology Scheidel presents reminds you that hierarchy is a social technology sustained by property transfer. To alter it, later societies would need shocks strong enough to sever those inherited links—a pattern repeated throughout the remainder of history.

Once agriculture produces surpluses, states and empires arise, and inequality escalates. Scheidel calls ruling elites the ‘original one percent,’ tracing how coercion and political office convert power into wealth. From Mesopotamia’s temple managers to Rome’s senatorial class, elites institutionalize extraction, creating a feedback loop: wealth generates authority, which generates further wealth.

State formation and coercive rents

States concentrate physical force and legitimize predation as taxation or tribute. In Sumer and Akkad, kings parcel out estates to governors; in Rome, officeholders enrich themselves through tax farming and conquest. Scheidel distinguishes ‘making’ (creating capital through production) from ‘taking’ (appropriation through power). In premodern systems, taking dominates. The state thus becomes a rent-extraction machine rather than a redistributive one.

Parallel imperial logics: Han and Rome

Scheidel’s comparison of Han China and Rome demonstrates institutional convergence. Han officials and landlords accumulated fiefs and absorbed free farmers. Rome’s senators expanded estates through conquest and confiscation. In both, emperors or rulers occasionally seized or redistributed elite fortunes (Wang Mang’s edicts; Roman proscriptions), but those actions reshuffled elites rather than leveling society. The class structure endured even through regimes.

(Note: historians of comparative empire—like Ian Morris and Victor Lieberman—observe the same pattern: coercive extraction and patronage define empire more than productivity.)

Institutional inertia

Once states entwine political and economic privilege, feedback cycles trap societies in inequality. Only collapse—loss of administrative cohesion—can reset distributions. Tang China’s ruin, Rome’s fall, and later Bronze Age collapses all show elite disappearance when state apparatus fails. But such leveling exacts enormous human cost.

Through these cases, Scheidel makes clear: inequality thrives on institutional structure, not cultural idiosyncrasy. State creation formalized privilege; its destruction occasionally erased it.

Scheidel’s most memorable concept is the ‘Four Horsemen of Leveling’—the mechanisms that radically flatten inequality across history: mass mobilization warfare, transformative revolution, state failure and system collapse, and lethal pandemics. Each operates through violence, mortality, or destruction, breaking elite control over resources. No peaceful alternative has proven comparably effective.

Mass mobilization warfare

Wars that enlist entire societies—World Wars I and II—force taxation, inflation, and destruction that crush capital values. During WWII, Japan’s top 1% income share fell from ~20% to ~6%. Scheidel emphasizes the social bargain of wartime: the state demands universal sacrifice, legitimizing progressive taxation and welfare expansion. Classical Athens presents a premodern analogy where naval participation fueled democracy and constrained elite wealth.

Revolutions

Twentieth-century communist revolutions epitomize violent redistribution. Lenin’s decrees abolished private land; Stalin’s collectivization confiscated and terrorized millions; Mao’s campaigns killed tens of millions but yielded near-total compression. Gini coefficients fell below 0.3. Yet Scheidel warns: coercive leveling endures only while repression does—market liberalization later reestablishes inequality.

Collapse

When states fail, elite rents vanish. Mycenaean palatial centers, Tang aristocracy, and Roman senate households all evaporated amid collapse. Material proxies—smaller dwellings, simpler graves—record the leveling. Modern Somalia parallels this dynamic: state destruction halted kleptocratic extraction even as chaos rose.

Pandemics

High mortality from plague raises labor’s price and lowers rents. The Black Death halved Europe’s population and doubled wages; inequality fell sharply. Yet follow-up legislation (Statute of Laborers, Eastern serfdom) shows elites’ counterattack once recovery began. Pandemics level through factor-price effects, not moral change.

Essential insight

These ‘horsemen’ wipe slates violently and indiscriminately, not by justice but by destruction. Yet historically, they mark the few moments when inequality truly fell.

Scheidel’s claim isn’t nostalgia for violence—it’s empirical. From Bronze Age palace ruins to twentieth-century tax data, only catastrophe redistributes wealth profoundly.

Scheidel calls the years 1914–1945 the most dramatic global leveling since the Black Death. The twin world wars annihilated capital, forced vast mobilization, and enabled policy transformations—from confiscatory taxation to welfare states—that equalized incomes in industrial nations. The ‘Great Compression’ combined all four horsemen: war, revolution, collapse, and disease.

Mechanisms of compression

Destruction of physical capital, hyperinflation, progressive taxes, and wage regulation shrank elite fortunes. In the U.S., progressive rates exceeded 90%; in Japan, combined war inflation and occupation reforms collapsed top shares from ~20% to 6%. Unionization surged and labor gained bargaining power. Postwar democratic institutions sustained compression through rebuilding programs like the GI Bill that widened education access.

Institutional aftermath

Scheidel stresses persistence: wartime fiscal structures and social compacts continued into the mid-century welfare era. Yet he insists this endurance flowed from crisis acceptance. Without war’s existential bargain, peaceful policy could not have achieved similar compression in one generation. This period therefore represents an anomaly, not a model easily replicated.

Lessons and reversals

After the 1970s, deregulation, globalization, and declining unionization reversed gains. Technology amplified capital returns; top income shares revived. The postwar equality was temporary—a recovery from catastrophe rather than a steady civil accomplishment.

Historical lesson

The Great Compression reveals how political willingness to redistribute emerges only under crisis. Peaceful times restore elite influence.

Scheidel positions this episode as proof that deep equality demands shocks intertwined with institutional reform. Without both, the effect fades.

If violence drives leveling, can policy do the same? Scheidel’s historical answer is bleak: peaceful redistributive programs rarely scale or endure. Land reform, emancipation, debt relief, and democratization usually deliver partial or compensated outcomes.

Failures of peaceful reform

Without coercion, elites block or capture reforms. British emancipation compensated slaveowners; Mesopotamian debt jubilees temporarily canceled obligations but restored inequality soon after. Even postwar East Asian ‘successes’ depended on external coercion—U.S. occupation or anti-communist threats. Democratization can only help if accompanied by progressive taxation and strong unions, which themselves often expand during war.

Why leveling is temporary

Every compression confronts reversal. Demographic recovery lowers wages after plague; elites reconstitute fortunes through trusts or privatization; liberalization restores market returns after revolutions. Scheidel argues that only enduring institutions—tax progressivity, estate limits, robust unions—can extend leveling beyond crisis years. Without them, inequality rebounds rapidly.

Policy implications

You can reduce poverty peacefully, but not erase structural inequality without massive political coalitions or trauma-sized impetus. Atkinson and Piketty’s proposals—global wealth taxes, progressive rates—face political infeasibility absent crisis. The historical record warns reformers: scale requires pressure equal to destruction.

Key reflection

Shock is necessary but not sufficient; institutions that lock redistribution must accompany it, or leveling dissolves.

Scheidel’s conclusion leaves you with humility: progress can temper inequality, but history’s full resets came through catastrophe.

After the mid‑century leveling, inequality resurged worldwide. Scheidel identifies technology, globalization, financialization, and institutional decay as drivers. Top income shares rose dramatically—U.S. 1% share from ~8% (1980) to >17% (2010); China’s market Gini doubled after liberalization. The same patterns reappear: capital over labor, elites capturing institutions.

Technological and global shifts

Automation and global labor-market expansion raised skill premiums, polarizing incomes. Finance multiplied elite earnings; CEO pay soared nearly ninefold since 1978. Declining unions and lower tax rates reduced equality further. Political influence of wealthy donors entrenched policy bias toward capital.

Demography and political feasibility

Aging populations and migration complicate redistribution; ethnically diverse electorates often resist costly welfare systems (Alesina & Glaeser). Efforts like universal basic income or global wealth taxes encounter massive political resistance without attendant crisis.

The inequality frontier

Scheidel introduces the ‘Inequality Possibility Frontier’: a ceiling of feasible inequality given subsistence constraints. Preindustrial societies approached ~76% extraction of the possible maximum; modern ones less, yet the realized inequality remains high. Unless productivity growth or redistribution reforms shift extraction rates, societies hover near their feasible limits.

Final insight

Absent catastrophic shock, only sustained political mobilization can moderate inequality—an achievement history suggests is difficult without turmoil.

Scheidel closes not cynically but realistically: violence is not desirable, yet understanding its historical role helps you gauge how hard large-scale leveling will remain. Incremental justice—not cosmic balance—may be all modern societies can achieve.