Walter Scheidel's thesis in his new book, The
Great Leveller: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the 21st Century, is that only violent events have significantly lessened inequality.
"For thousands of years, civilisation did not lend itself to peaceful equalisation. Across a wide range of societies anddifferent levels of development, stability favoured economic inequality. This was as true of Pharaonic Egypt as itwas of Victorian England,
...as true of the Roman Empire as of the United States. 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 levelling invariably resulted from the most powerful shocks. Four different kinds of violent ruptures have flattened inequality: mass mobilisation warfare,
transformative revolution, state failure, and lethal pandemics."
...
The idea that past is prologue; that history repeats itself, is a popular notion, but one that is too simplistic to be believed in and of itself. There are reasons that give rise to the phenomena of repeating patterns of history not to be dismissed.researchonline.lse.ac.uk/.../democratic…
Nicolai Kondratiev did not theorize the reality behind long waves of economic activity lasting between forty-five and sixty years that he observed in capitalist countries, although while serving his eight year prison sentence by the Bolsheviks, he continued his research.
In a letter to his wife near the end of his sentence he claimed to have worked out a two-factor model that explained the long wave. What it is, I'm not sure if anyone knows. Upon his release he was taken to the Moscow jail courtyard and shot to death.
An observation that he did make in his 1927 paper was that during the downside of the long wave, military conflicts tended to be regional in nature.
It was at the beginning of the new long wave that the propensity for global conflict was greatest as major powers competed for resources and new markets.
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