Pun Salad

I put this on my to-be-read list awhile back, and (as usual) I can't remember exactly why. I should keep notes about that. It does have a couple of favorable back-cover blurbs from Steven Pinker and Tyler Cowen, so I may have been influenced that way.

Reader beware: this is a weighty book of serious historical scholarship, and the discussion is highly technical and detailed in spots. I went into "look at every page" mode in a more than a few spots.

The author, Walter Scheidel, has done a diligent job of tracking down the economic history of inequality (both income and wealth varieties). Specifically, his purpose here is to examine the methods by which inequality decreases. And his primary lesson here is that such methods are easily summarized and all unpleasant; he calls them the Four Horsemen.

The first is modern mass-mobilization warfare. It kills a lot of people, inherent to its bloody nature. And destroys property. It needs to be funded, too, and the participating governments need to divert piles of wealth and resources to building war machinery.

The second is violent revolution, which often targets the wealthy. If they're lucky, by mere expropriation; if they're unlucky, by getting killed (and then expropriation). The prime examples are the Communist varieties, of course.

The third horseman: "state failure", where a government simply falls over its own feet. A modern example is Somalia, but Scheidel describes some older examples too: the Roman Empire, ancient Egypt, and "the Akkadian Empire in Mesopotamia".

And finally, the fourth horseman is pandemic. (The book predates Covid, but our recent experience certainly provides context to the discussion.) Pandemics kill a lot of people (duh). But (as a result) labor goes into short supply, and laborers (hence) are able to demand increased wages. (Usually to the consternation of their elite employers; Scheidel provides a number of examples of early, largely ineffective, efforts at wage control by decree.)

Now, past performance is no guarantee of future results. But for those folks who think economic inequality is a Major Problem That Must Be Solved, Scheidel paints a very gloomy picture; effective measures are often violent, increase general immiseration, and there are no examples of them working in the long term.

Scheidel seems sympathetic to the goal of reducing inequality; I'm convinced it's not that worthy. He mentions the work of Thomas Piketty a lot, and seems uncritical. (As a philosophical matter, I'm convinced by Harry Frankfurt's analysis in On Inequarlity.)

So I wish Scheidel had gone more deeply into the mechanisms of increasing inequality just as much as he looked at its decrease. One cause is obvious: the evolution of states out of ancient protection rackets. That's alluded to, but it's pretty superficial. In the modern US, there's plenty of that good old "crony capitalism", but a lot of wealth/income accumulation is due to (horrors) people doing a good job at providing goods and services that a lot of other people want to buy. Today's Sanders/Warren populists want to stir up resentment against that, but I'm OK with it.

On a related note, I'd like very much to have seen reference to Deirdre McCloskey's work on the "Great Enrichment". (I'd also like to see McCloskey's reaction to this book, but if she had one, I can't find it.)