The Great Leveler
Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century

Update 8.4.2020 - article by Walter Scheidel on covid-19: Why the Wealthy Fear Pandemics Some books on insoluble global problems - climate change, water shortages, environmental degradation - add a chapter with a couple of impractical policy solutions that everyone knows could never work in the real......more

How did the concentration of wealth make it into so few hands? Scheidel traced the origins of power back to before recorded time. Using evidence from burial sites and other anthropological finds, he was able to construct a story about the concentration of power in the hands of the leaders of each so......more

The Great Leveler was a natural extension of the work done by Thomas Piketty in Capital in the Twenty-First Century and because of this takes a profoundly dismal view of the present and the future. The central notion, difficult to refer to it as a thesis, is the only way to make society more just/eq......more

This is a richly rewarding study of inequality that brings together much of the recent literature on the topic, from Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century to the late Tony Atkinson's Inequality: What Can Be Done?. However, as the author makes explicit at the end, the aim of the book is essen......more

Inequality that would make robber barons blush Walter Scheidel, author of The Great Leveler, provides a scientifically rigorous, excruciatingly detailed and politically agnostic survey of wealth inequality from pre-history to the present. The focus is on factors that reduce, or level, that inequality......more