The Great Leveler

1. Civilization's Inherent Drive Towards Inequality

For thousands of years, civilization did not lend itself to peaceful equalization.

The Great Disequalization. The advent of food production through farming and herding, following the last Ice Age, marked a fundamental shift from the relative egalitarianism of hunter-gatherer societies. This "Great Disequalization" created wealth on an entirely new scale, enabling the accumulation and preservation of productive resources like land and livestock. Social norms evolved to define hereditary property rights, allowing wealth to be passed across generations, a critical factor in the persistence of inequality.

States amplify disparities. The formation of states further exacerbated these emerging disparities. States established steep hierarchies of power and coercive force, skewing access to income and wealth. For most of the agrarian period, the state enriched the few at the expense of the many, with gains from public service often overshadowed by corruption, extortion, and plunder. This led many premodern societies to become as unequal as possible, pushing the limits of surplus appropriation by small elites under conditions of low per capita output.

Persistent concentration. Even when more benign institutions promoted economic development, such as in the emergent West, high inequality persisted or found new ways to grow. Urbanization, commercialization, financial innovation, global trade, and industrialization generated rich returns for capital holders. As direct power rents declined, secure property rights and state commitments strengthened the protection of hereditary private wealth, ensuring that income and wealth inequality remained a defining feature of human social existence.

2. The Four Horsemen: Violence as the Great Leveler

Throughout recorded history, the most powerful leveling invariably resulted from the most powerful shocks.

Violence as a disruptor. For millennia, stability favored economic inequality, making violent shocks paramount in disrupting the established order and compressing the distribution of income and wealth. These shocks narrowed the gap between rich and poor, often dramatically. The book identifies four distinct types of violent ruptures that have consistently flattened inequality: mass mobilization warfare, transformative revolution, state failure, and lethal pandemics.

Apocalyptic outcomes. These "Four Horsemen of Leveling," much like their biblical counterparts, brought immense suffering and death, with hundreds of millions perishing in their wake. Yet, by the time the dust settled, the material disparities within societies had shrunk. This grim reality underscores a central, often uncomfortable, truth: large-scale equalization has historically been a byproduct of catastrophic violence, not peaceful reform.

Specific types of violence. Not all forms of violence led to leveling. Archaic conflicts focused on conquest and plunder often enriched victorious elites and impoverished the defeated, thus increasing inequality. For war to level, it needed to penetrate society deeply, mobilizing people and resources on a scale typically only feasible in modern nation-states. This distinction is crucial for understanding why certain historical periods saw significant leveling while others did not.

3. Total War: The Twentieth Century's Unprecedented Equalizer

To a large extent, it was the chaos of war, with its attendant economic and political shocks, that reduced inequality in the twentieth century.

The Great Compression. The period from 1914 to 1945, encompassing the two world wars, stands out as an era of unprecedented leveling, dubbed the "Great Compression." Countries like Japan, France, the United States, and the United Kingdom experienced dramatic reductions in top income and wealth shares, often by more than half. This was a direct consequence of the total nature of these conflicts, which demanded full demographic and economic mobilization.

Mechanisms of leveling:

• Physical destruction: Industrial-scale warfare wiped out capital.
• Confiscatory taxation: Top marginal income tax rates soared, and new taxes on war profits and inheritances were introduced.
• Government intervention: States imposed price, wage, and rent controls, and nationalized industries.
• Inflation: Rapid inflation eroded the value of bonds, deposits, and fixed incomes, disproportionately affecting rentiers.
• Disruption of global flows: War disrupted trade and capital flows, further isolating national economies.

Post-war persistence. The leveling effects often continued for decades after the wars, sustained by policies rooted in wartime exigencies. Progressive taxation, expanded welfare states, and increased unionization, all catalyzed by the shared sacrifices and demands for fairness during the wars, prevented a rapid return to pre-war inequality levels. This demonstrates how total war not only leveled during the conflict but also laid the groundwork for more egalitarian societies for a generation or more.

4. Transformative Revolutions: Blood-Drenched Paths to Equality

This is the most hideous class war between peasants and landlords. It is a battle to the death.

Radical restructuring. Transformative revolutions, particularly the communist movements of the twentieth century, represent another powerful force of leveling. Unlike most historical uprisings that sought limited redress, these revolutions aimed for comprehensive societal restructuring, often through extreme violence. The Russian and Chinese revolutions are prime examples, where radical ideologies were translated into policies of mass expropriation and redistribution.

Communist leveling tactics:

• Land redistribution: Land owned by nobles, the church, and wealthy peasants ("kulaks" in Russia, "landlords" in China) was confiscated and reallocated to the poor.
• Collectivization: Private land ownership was abolished, and agriculture was forcibly collectivized, eliminating economic differentiation.
• Nationalization: Banks, factories, and private businesses were seized by the state.
• Persecution of elites: "Former people," "bourgeoisie," and "class enemies" were targeted for execution, deportation, imprisonment, or forced labor.
• Wage compression: State-controlled economies often implemented policies to narrow wage differentials and raise lower incomes.

Immense human cost. These revolutions came at an staggering human cost, with tens of millions perishing in famines, purges, and forced labor camps. The brutality was an integral part of enforcing radical equalization. However, even this extreme violence could not permanently suppress differentiation; as economic performance improved, or as market reforms were introduced, inequality often began to creep back up, demonstrating the inherent challenges of maintaining forced equality.

5. State Failure and Systems Collapse: Ancient Levelers of Elite Wealth

Foxes and hares cross where the grandees of state resided but recently.

Ozymandian collapse. The disintegration of states and entire civilizations has historically been a potent and reliable leveler, particularly in the premodern era. When states failed, the hierarchies of power and wealth they sustained crumbled. This process undermined formal elite structures, destroyed opportunities for enrichment through state service and connections, and threatened existing property holdings. The rich, having vastly more to lose, suffered disproportionately.

Examples from antiquity:

• Tang Dynasty China (9th century CE): The collapse of the central Tang state led to the sacking of capital cities, massacres of officials and aristocrats, and the widespread destruction of elite urban residences and suburban estates. This effectively wiped out the metropolitan elite and their accumulated wealth.
• Western Roman Empire (5th-7th centuries CE): The fall of Rome dismantled transregional elite networks, localized aristocracies, and led to the impoverishment of formerly wealthy families, some reduced to relying on papal charity. Archaeological evidence from Britain shows a dramatic reduction in house size inequality after Roman rule ended.
• Mycenaean Greece (12th century BCE): The collapse of the palace system led to the disappearance of ruling elites, monumental architecture, writing, and luxury goods, resulting in a period of widespread impoverishment and reduced social stratification.
• Classic Maya Civilization (9th century CE): The abandonment of major urban centers and the disappearance of elite institutions and cultural practices led to the "ruling class gone with the wind," with evidence of dietary equalization between former elites and commoners.

Dark matter of inequality. While direct quantitative data on income and wealth inequality are often scarce for these periods, the archaeological and textual evidence consistently points to a dramatic reduction in elite wealth and power, leading to a more flattened social landscape. This form of leveling, though brutal, was a recurrent feature of premodern history, often paving the way for new, albeit initially less stratified, social orders.

6. Lethal Pandemics: Microbes as Malthusian Equalizers

The dead outnumbered the living.

Malthusian dynamics. Major epidemics, such as the Black Death (14th century) and the Justinianic Plague (6th-8th centuries), acted as powerful levelers by drastically reducing population numbers. In agrarian societies, this mass mortality altered the land-to-labor ratio, making labor scarce and more valuable while depressing the value of land and agricultural products. This shift disproportionately benefited workers and impoverished landowners and employers.

Economic consequences:

• Rising real wages: Workers, now in high demand, could command significantly higher real wages, often doubling or tripling their incomes.
• Falling rents and land prices: Landowners faced declining revenues as tenants were scarce and could negotiate better terms.
• Improved diets and living standards: Workers gained access to better food (e.g., more meat and beer) and luxury goods previously reserved for the wealthy.
• Reduced wealth concentration: Tax records from Italian cities after the Black Death show dramatic drops in wealth inequality, with Gini coefficients falling by over 10 points.

Institutional mediation. The extent and duration of leveling depended on institutional responses. In Western Europe, attempts to suppress wage growth through legislation largely failed, and serfdom declined as peasants gained mobility. However, in regions like Mamluk Egypt, coercive state power and centralized control over land allowed elites to resist worker demands, blunting the leveling effect. The transience of these gains was also common, as demographic recovery eventually led to renewed population pressure and rising inequality.

7. Peaceful Reforms: Historically Insufficient for Major Leveling

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.

Violence as a prerequisite. While land reform, debt relief, and emancipation of slaves theoretically offer peaceful avenues for leveling, historical evidence suggests that significant, sustained equalization through these means has been exceedingly rare without the presence or threat of violence. Land, often the bulk of private wealth in premodern societies, was fiercely defended by elites.

Limitations of peaceful reforms:

• Land reform: Successful large-scale land redistribution, as seen in Mexico, Russia, China, and post-WWII East Asia, was almost invariably driven by revolution, civil war, foreign occupation, or the credible threat of such violence. Peaceful attempts often resulted in limited changes, cronyism, or even increased inequality.
• Debt relief: While ancient Near Eastern rulers periodically decreed debt cancellations, these were often tools in the struggle between state and elites, with no clear long-term impact on overall inequality.
• Emancipation: The abolition of slavery, a major blow to elite wealth, was frequently linked to violent conflicts (e.g., American Civil War, Haitian Revolution) or involved substantial compensation to owners (e.g., British Empire, French colonies), limiting its leveling effect.

Macroeconomic crises. Economic downturns, such as the Great Depression, have shown mixed results. While the Great Depression significantly reduced inequality in the United States by hitting capital incomes hard, its global impact was more modest and often temporary. More recent banking crises and recessions have generally failed to reduce inequality and sometimes even exacerbated it.

Democracy's ambiguous role. The expansion of democratic institutions, while often linked to mass mobilization warfare, has not consistently led to reduced income inequality. Studies show no robust, systematic effect of democracy on market or disposable income inequality, suggesting that political capture by powerful constituencies or the disequalizing effects of economic growth can offset redistributive pressures.

8. The Great Compression: A Violent Anomaly in Inequality's History

For six or seven decades from 1914 to the 1970s or 1980s, both the world’s rich economies and those countries that had fallen to communist regimes experienced some of most intense leveling in recorded history.

A unique historical period. The mid-20th century stands out as an unprecedented era of inequality reduction, a "Great Compression" that dramatically reshaped the distribution of income and wealth across much of the globe. This period, roughly from 1914 to 1980, saw top income shares plummet and wealth concentration significantly diminish in developed Western nations and communist states alike.

Roots in violence. This massive leveling was not a gradual, peaceful evolution but a direct consequence of the two world wars and the communist revolutions they spawned. The sheer scale of violence, destruction, and societal upheaval forced governments to implement radical policies:

• Confiscatory taxation: Top marginal income tax rates reached unprecedented levels (e.g., over 90% in the US).
• Capital destruction: War-related physical destruction, inflation, and nationalization wiped out vast amounts of private capital.
• State intervention: Governments imposed extensive controls on wages, prices, and rents, and expanded welfare provisions.
• Labor empowerment: Unionization rates soared, strengthening workers' bargaining power.

A temporary equilibrium. The Great Compression created a temporary, historically anomalous equilibrium of lower inequality. This equilibrium was maintained for decades by the persistence of wartime policies and the ideological competition of the Cold War, which incentivized Western democracies to maintain social cohesion through redistribution. However, this period of leveling was fundamentally rooted in catastrophic violence, making it an exception rather than a new norm for peaceful development.

9. Resurgent Inequality: The Return to Historical Norms

The widespread resurgence in income and wealth inequality of the last few decades seamlessly continues the narrative laid out in the opening chapters.

Post-1980s reversal. Since the 1980s, the trend of declining inequality has reversed across most of the developed world and many developing economies. Top income shares have grown significantly, and market income inequality has risen almost universally. This resurgence marks an abatement of the equalizing consequences of the violent shocks of the mid-20th century.

Drivers of disequalization:

• Globalization: Increased international trade and financial liberalization have disproportionately benefited elites and skilled labor, while putting downward pressure on low-skilled wages in developed countries.
• Technological change: Automation and computerization have boosted demand for highly skilled labor, increasing skill premiums and polarizing labor markets.
• Institutional shifts: Declining union membership, stagnant minimum wages, and reduced tax progressivity (lower top marginal income and inheritance tax rates) have weakened redistributive mechanisms.
• Political factors: Political polarization, increased influence of wealthy donors, and a shift towards free-market ideologies have favored policies that exacerbate inequality.
• Capital accumulation: The recovery of the ratio of national wealth to national income, coupled with high returns on capital, has put upward pressure on wealth and income concentration.

Global phenomenon. This trend is not confined to specific regions or economic systems. Post-communist countries like China and Russia have seen dramatic increases in inequality following market liberalization, while major developing economies like India and Pakistan also show rising disparities. This widespread pattern suggests a return to the historical norm of increasing inequality in the absence of major violent disruptions.

10. The Limits of Inequality: Understanding "Effective" Disparities

Unadjusted estimates of historical income distributions may cloud our understanding of how what I call “effective inequality”—defined in relation to the degree of inequality that was theoretically feasible—changed over time.

The Inequality Possibility Frontier (IPF). Inequality is not limitless; it is constrained by the average per capita output of a society. The "Inequality Possibility Frontier" (IPF) defines the highest theoretically possible degree of income inequality at a given level of average per capita GDP, accounting for the minimum income required for survival. In very poor societies, the IPF is low because there's little surplus to distribute unequally.

"Extraction Rate" reveals true disparities. By comparing observed Gini coefficients to the IPF, we derive an "extraction rate," which measures the proportion of theoretically possible inequality that is actually realized. This metric reveals that premodern societies, despite often having lower nominal Gini coefficients than modern ones, were frequently "as unequal as they could possibly be," with very high extraction rates (e.g., 77% average for 28 preindustrial societies).

The development paradox. As economies grow richer, the nominal IPF rises, but the "effective" IPF (adjusted for socially determined minimums and economic complexity) may not increase proportionally. This "development paradox of inequality" suggests that while modern societies are wealthier, their capacity to sustain extreme inequality might be lower than in the past due to factors like:

• Higher social minimums (e.g., Adam Smith's "linen shirt and leather shoes").
• The need for broad human capital and domestic consumption to sustain complex economies.
• Political and social institutions that, even in less egalitarian modern states, prevent the most extreme forms of exploitation.

This framework highlights that simply comparing raw Gini coefficients across vastly different historical periods can be misleading, as the underlying potential for inequality changes with economic development.

11. The Bleak Future of Leveling: A World Without Horsemen

The four traditional levelers are gone for now and are unlikely to return any time soon. This casts serious doubt on the feasibility of future leveling.

The absence of violent shocks. The most effective mechanisms of leveling—mass mobilization warfare, transformative revolution, state failure, and lethal pandemics—are largely absent from the contemporary global landscape. This absence is the primary reason for the current resurgence of inequality and casts a bleak shadow on the prospects for future leveling.

Why the Horsemen are dormant:

• Mass mobilization warfare: Modern military technology favors specialized, high-tech forces over mass conscription, reducing the "mobilization effect" that historically led to redistributive policies. Nuclear deterrence also makes large-scale conventional wars between major powers less likely.
• Transformative revolutions: Communist revolutions, the only historical examples of radical leveling through internal conflict, have largely fizzled out or embraced market reforms, eroding their egalitarian underpinnings. No comparable movement with the potential for widespread violent leveling is on the horizon.
• State failure: While state fragility persists in some developing regions, the robust institutions and economic complexity of developed nations make wholesale state collapse and the associated destruction of elite wealth highly improbable.
• Lethal pandemics: Despite the risk of new outbreaks, modern medical advancements and global monitoring capabilities make pandemics on the scale of the Black Death, capable of killing hundreds of millions and fundamentally altering labor markets, unlikely to occur in developed countries.

Peaceful reforms' limitations. While policy proposals for progressive taxation, education, and labor market reforms abound, history suggests that such measures, in the absence of severe shocks, have rarely achieved substantial, sustained leveling. The demographic challenges of aging populations and large-scale immigration in many developed countries may further strain welfare systems and exacerbate existing disparities. Without the "Big Reasons" of violent disruption, the world appears to be on a trajectory towards persistent or increasing inequality.

Last updated: January 1, 2026