LSE Events | The Great Leveler: violence and the history of inequality

good evening everyone it is my great pleasure to welcome you to the LSE this evening my name is Aaron Reeves I'm an associate professor really search fellow in the international inequalities Institute here at the LSE and it's my great pleasure to be able to introduce tonight's public lecture at this event is sponsored by both the International inequalities Institute and a very generous donation from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation it's a the Joseph Rowntree Foundation has funded a program of work around the relationship between poverty and inequality and part of that work is actually now available online as part of the case website so if you're interested in those questions there are a number of compelling and interesting working papers up available but the money that the Joseph Rowntree Foundation of offered also sponsors a series of lectures and events and this is the latest in that series were therefore thrilled this evening to have with us professor water shy del who is Dickerson professor in the humanities and professor of classics and history in the department of classics at Stanford University and he is also this year currently a fellow on the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation this evening professor idelle will be talking about his latest book the great leveler violence and the history of inequality from the Stone Age to the 21st century and also with the title this evening into the future as well the hashtag for this evening's lecture is LSE shy del and it is tonight's lecture is being recorded and so if you are tweeting we would love that but also would ask you to put your phone on silent so that we can avoid any embarrassing ringtones that might be emitting from your phone at some point during the evening we're going to have lots of time for questions later on in the evening and there are also copies of the book available to buy afterwards and if you haven't done so already I would really highly recommend you take the opportunity to buy it and perhaps maybe even ask professor ideal to sign it for you as well so late last year I was fortunate enough to read an early version of the book a pre publication version and it struck me immediately as a brilliant provocative and indispensable contribution to our understanding of of inequality over the long and the short run and despite being grounded in economic history a discipline that's not my own it is a book there are serious questions about the future of inequality and the shape and structure of our societies so it gives me great pleasure to welcome Professor Seidel to the LSE this evening and hope that you'll join me in welcoming him as he gives his lecture [Applause] well thank you very much for this kind invitation in case you don't want to buy the book you will get a 45 minute summary but maybe that will whet your appetite it's displayed here so what I'm going to do is give you a very short digest of some of the principal dynamics of the evolution of economic inequality there are obviously many different types of inequality we could talk about but I'm going to limit myself to income and wealth inequality and in particular to one question which is have there been factors across the full sweep of history but have reliably reduced economic inequality and how do they compare to other variables my argument on a single slide is that regardless of where you look the 20th century the more distant past Europe Asia you name it violence violent upheavals have been the single most important means of levelling wealth and income inequality in human history doesn't mean that there aren't any that aren't alternative factors available and I will look at that in about half an hour but very broadly speaking violent disturbances are often associated with the death of tens of millions of people have been by far the most effective means of reducing economic inequality those leveling forces have come in four different flavors this is why I used the the simile of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse of the revelation of John on the cover of the book which you can't really quite see they just happened to before that's why I picked this image they are listed here mass mobilization warfare transformative revolution state collapse and very severe epidemics now of those four the last two are the ones that have that used to be the most common ones historically so for most of human history prior to the 20th century it was really stage collapse and epidemics that drove down inequality now before I get to this I should probably spend one minute on a cognate question why is there economic inequality to begin with the very short version of course is that if you go back far enough in time to a hunter-gatherer ancestors there wasn't a great deal of economic inequality at the time for any number of reasons output is very limited there are simply aren't all that many material goods that could have been a starkly unevenly distributed hunter-gatherers are often migratory they're not sedentary so if they had accumulated lots of possessions they would have had to carry them around with them which would have been rather difficult because they weren't oh basically the animals either to help them do it and if you look at contemporary surviving foraging populations in some remotes part of parts of the world you see Dells or you see the lack of institutions that would support artists equalization and it's really with the big transition about 10,000 years ago depending on which part of the world you're looking at - the domestication of crops of livestock and of people in a sense or sedentism the development of the notion of property rights and eventually off of political institutions that you see not just the potential but the realized potential of ever growing a inequality so in that sense we can treat income and wealth inequality essentially as a giver as a default condition of human history and then the big question becomes well if this is something to observe in all societies we have records for to varying degrees what are the forces that could reduce high levels of inequality and as I said just a minute ago for most of history through the state collapse and pandemics that used to be the most effective means of leveling and in both cases that is I think quite easy to understand state collapse is simply the flipside of state formation if you look at thousands of years of human history most people lived in societies that were governed by States and were more or less openly predatory a hierarchical stratified unfair exploitative existed to a large extent for the benefit of a small ruling class at the expense of pretty much everybody else and so the longer these states lasted the bigger they became in the form of pre-modern empires in particular the more potential there was for the concentration of income and especially wealth among a small ruling class now if that is the case and that can be well-established as far back as the Roman Empire and for instance show that in the Roman period the rich got richer much faster than the Roman Empire grew in terms of the size of its economy or a number of people who can actually witness this process of concentration all in two thousand years ago and the same is true of Chinese dynasties any number of later societies if that is the case then if state formation is reversed that opens up an opportunity for equalization because in this case what happens is that if state structures are dismantled everybody is going to suffer on these occasions state collapse is not fun for anybody but the rich simply have more to lose if you're subsistence and you lose more than a small fraction of your income you're probably going to starve to death unless you find some way of moving away if you're very rich you can lose ninety nine percent of your income of your wealth and you're still going to be around so for purely mathematical reasons there is greater potential at the very top for compression and so overall everybody may have ended up being poorer as a result of state collapse in history but the rich simply had much more to lose there are many examples I don't want to take you through if you think of the end of a Bronze Age Greeks 32,000 thirty-two hundred years ago the fall of the Roman Empire the end of the Classic Maya civilization there is Chinese dynasties the fall of Angkor if you go to Cambodia now you can see a very dramatic events that effectively destroyed societies but in the process leveled as a side effect the most recently example in fact happens to be Somalia Somalia effectively fell apart about a generation ago and while we always think of Somalia and rightly so of the anarchic conditions there as being very disadvantageous it seems that the previous kleptocratic regime was so bad that at least in accord in Somalia has gone down as a result of a dismantling of centralized government it's a very unappealing situation but it tends to have this particular effect I just wanted to show you one example because I often get the question well how is it even possible to talk about economic inequality prior to the modern period what kind of evidence is there what kind of data do we have in order to draw conclusions and off we have to rely on proxy data there are no modern style statistics available but there is material out there that can be quantified that can be interpreted in a meaningful way this is an example since we are in fact in Britain I guess I picked this one here for the the Gini coefficient a standard metric of inequality in this case not for personal fortunes because we don't know what they were like but for houses for houses that were private dwellings you can compare the degree of inequality the degree of variation in house size in Britain before during and after the Roman occupation if what a Romans showed up everybody in in Celtic Britain seems to have lived in dwellings that were more or less the same there are quite modest in size and there wasn't a great deal of variation well the Romans come in you get a much bigger spread all of a sudden there are a few people who have large mansions and villas who as other people live in hovels and when the Romans retreat in the 5th century AD you go back to pretty much the way it was before with the Angles and Saxons and so on everybody's poorer than before on average but as also less inequality and I could show you many more examples drawn especially from the archaeological record as for the second our main pre-modern leveling force that is pandemics very severe outbreaks of epidemic disease a few times in history most famously of course the black death that killed about half of all people in Britain in the late Middle Ages maybe a third of all people in Europe the pandemics in a new world introduced by the Europeans after 1492 that introduced smallpox and measles and influenza and other new diseases to the new world decimating a local population and there was an early appearance of people on each plague as well at the end of antiquity and what happens on all these occasions is that inequality goes down and again this is quite easy to understand as for the Black Death the best data by far come from from Britain from England in fact this shows it a distribution of rural real incomes are the wages or effectively it's a proxy of living standards of farm laborers in England before during and after the Black Death and what happens is that so many people die that the value of Labor goes up quite dramatically if you remove half of the population without destroying the physical infrastructure you still have the same amount of land the same amount of capital stock but only half as many more as before well that is going to drive up the price of labor workers will be better able able to bargain with employers and at the same time returns on capital on land and other forms of capital are going to go down so in this case the poor are going to be less poor and the rich are going to be less rich and in overall you observe a massive compression this makes a real difference if you live at bare subsistence level as people did in the high middle ages and your real income goes up about 150 percent that is really going to change the way you live and we can see people who just make more money they would have a better diet by the clothing better housing they were generally much better off than before whereas people in the nobility the Lords actually had to cut back because their income streams were negatively affected by this and of course eventually around 50 hunter plate goes away population recovers it's a simple Malthusian mode law and everything eventually goes back to normal at least before the Industrial Revolution set in now this technically is not a measure this is an indirect measure of inequality it's only been very recently in very recent years that researchers in Italy in particular have started looking at city archives we have our tax archives in cities in Tuscany in p.m. on the in Venice in Naples all away today at this point going back in some cases to the Middle Ages high late Middle Ages were people citizens of individual cities were assessed their private wealth or success so it could be taxed accordingly and if you look at these records systematically what you see is a major reduction in wealth inequality concentration in private wealth Holdings at exactly the same time during the Black Death so in this case it's the Gini coefficient or the the share of all wealth owned by the richest 5% in this particular population these metrics are very high before the Black Death appears they plummet quite cool Sidra bleah you're in the Black Death and when a play goes away and the population recovers inequality recovers also this is work in progress but the more these researchers look at these datasets the more supporting evidence they discover in favor of this model this is also their recent something published only five years ago the first data set we have regarding real incomes in the new world in the Mexico City area in central Mexico what happened when so many people died after the Spanish conquest what happened was that real wages went up several hundred percent if these data can be trusted in response to extreme labor scarcity initially in the sixteenth century the conquistadores tried to force people to work for low wages but eventually it just doesn't really work there's a limit to what you can do if there's a profound shortage of flame eventually have to pay people according to what the market will bear and that's what you see in the 17th century so the same effect you get in Britain in other parts of Europe after the Black Death you can observe in the new world a couple centuries later and one more example the earliest one we have are tracks real incomes again of unskilled workers in Egypt where we have documents going back into the pre-christian period and well for about a thousand years if you're an unskilled farm work you get paid just enough to get by so you don't starve to death you can work a certain number of hours a day but that's about it and then bubonic plague shows up for the first time in the 6th century kills lots and lots of people and as a result real incomes of these workers they go up about 150% so just like during the black definitely middle ages and the play goes away and we'll wages go back down so this is obviously not a very appealing kind of mechanism because tens of millions of people lose their lives in those epidemics but for the survivors they happen to be better off but only for as long as these plagues are active and once there are after-effects begin to wear of you go back to normal which in this case is pretty high levels of economic inequality now all this has changed only with the onset of modernity once you get industrialized economies and modern nation-states to other very closely related violent leveling factors take over in a way state collapse and pandemics recede and what you get instead in the first half of the 20th century a mass mobilization warfare world war one world war two and closely related transformative revolution I Lenin and Stalin in the Soviet Union Mao in China which of course are direct products in a way of World War one and World War two here of course we have an abundance of statistical evidence only show you a few examples this chart shows the other share of all of total national income in four different countries America France Canada and Japan earned by the highest earning 1% of the population you can see that even during the Great Depression in the mid 1930s the famous 1 percent earned close to 20 percent of all income in those different countries and then it was exactly during World War two a very short period of time just a few years but their share in overall income collapses in some cases by 2/3 as was the case in Japan and then from the end of World War 2 onwards for about a generation you get a remarkable degree of stability a new equilibrium where the top income share is much much lower than it used to be before these locations of World War two there are other countries were similar kind of data sets sometimes it works better for World War one is in the case of Britain one of the effect of World War one is much more powerful it was in many other countries but regardless of which countries you look at you see this effect quite clearly in the data this is also true if you look at the concentration of wealth rather than income in this case we have data sets in some cases go back several hard years because assessing and taxing wealth was much easier in the past than assessing and taxing income which is for the most part of fairly modern phenomenon and what you see here many countries this is the the share of total private wealth in different countries owned by the richest 1% of the population and you can see that in the 17th 18th 19th century where we have data that the richest 1% or the large share of all our private wealth most famously or infamously in England right before World War one the richest 1% owns 70% of all private wealth so there was a lot much wealth left for anybody else what you also see of course is a dramatic compression right after the beginning of World War one for a couple of generations between the 1910s and 1970s a major D concentration of private wealth for all the countries we have data for and then more recently are the last three or four decades a slight reversal and recovery of private wealth concentration now the question is how was this affected by the dislocation of the world wars short answer is many different factors many different variables came together in different configurations depending on which country and looking at but by and large this is a sort of a generic summary as s Piketty has shown in his book a capital for in the 21st century to a large extent this compression was a capital phenomenon that capital holdings are lost valued returns on capital went down dramatically as a result of state intervention in the private sector associated with the war effort disruption of international flows of capital trade investment and so on any number of war lated effects that really are contain capital income returns on capital at the same time the belligerent states had to raise taxes on income and wealth to very high levels in order to pay for the war effort you get tax rates marginal rates for high earners and very rich people extremely high in excess of 90% for income 70% for large estates in the US and similar rates in Britain in France in Japan all over the place this effectively results in a redistribution of resources from the rich to workers you get full employment because of conscription war industry and so on the money ends up in the primarily in the pockets of the working population you also see where we have data decline in what is known as the skilled premium the return on higher are more advanced forms of education relative to those with only basic schooling high school degrees University diplomas that sort of thing but also happens during World War one and World War two because all of a sudden there's much more disproportionately more demand for unskilled labor in many countries not in brief in the US but in pretty much all other countries that are involved in these wars there's massive inflation already doing especially right after the wars because governments print a lot of money to pay for the war that wipes out deposits all kinds of assets and again in many countries there is obviously massive physical destruction that kills lots of people but in terms of capital it disproportionately affects the rich because they're the ones most likely to own housing stock factories ships all kinds of things that get destroyed and usually without compensation so it depends on what country you are in some combination of these factors is going to apply pretty much regardless where you are in Europe in North America in East Asia in this period just to illustrate some of the things that are talked about that just won't show you two slides this is the evolution of top tax rates on income in blue and on inheritances on estates in orange in 20 different developed countries over the course of 200 years you can see the 19th century top tax rates are so small by modern standards you can barely see them they barely rise above the x-axis the a huge up term during World War one a slump partially in the interwar period and another peak around in early 1940s st. until 1945 but ever since 1945 if you ever a child top marginal tax rates across different countries they have been sliding down continuously ever since so this is not just a phenomenon of you know regular infection in 1980s although it accelerates in this period it already starts right when the war is over as you can see very clear just by eyeballing this just how crucial work-related dislocations were in this case but in addition you get second-order effects that are rooted meaningfully into these locations of World War one and especially World War two as a big push for formal democratization extension of voting rights right after World War one the case of Britain after World War Two in many other countries and no was increase in labor union density of course there had been trade unions already the late nineteenth century but are just not very important in terms of the percentage of the workforce organized in this way this changes dramatically as a result again after all 100 were to hear and in red you see the the percentage of the workforce organized in labor unions averaged across ten osed countries very low at the beginning of the 20th century an enormous increase right during a draft right after World War one apart a partial retreat in the interwar periods and then another massive increase during the Great Depression and in World War two so on average union density in fact in those countries Peaks around 1945 and has been going down pretty much ever since the very few exceptions some Scandinavian countries where you get sustained increases in the more recent past and then of course the welfare state welfare state is rooted in a great many different developments but it is meaningfully based of course also on the wartime experience for the first time states are capable of taxing on a larger-scale and when the war is over the government spending shifts from paying for the war effort to what we now I would define as the welfare state again famously in Britain but really all over of the globe in all those countries that had been involved in the war and the last fact this is much more difficult to measure but there is again a growing body of research on this the war experience does affect people's attitudes and preferences and it seems to have engendered a greater amount of social solidarity that didn't necessarily last forever but was certainly quite powerful during the post-war decades so you would take all these various things together it's actually very easy to understand why you would observe a major compression in the economic inequality in exactly this period now as a pre-modern historian have to ask are there earlier instances of leveling associated with mass mobilization warfare very short answer is hardly ever because mass mobilization warfare is primarily a phenomenon of the 20th century that wasn't really possible in quite the same way in pre-industrial societies in society is not yet organized as nation-states what about civil wars luckily civil wars a very rare in developed countries most recent example in Europe other than Yugoslavia is the Spanish Civil War 1930's we can in fact see leveling a reduction economic equality both during the war and in the aftermath of that war despite the fact that Frank and the fascists won even so you see these leveling effects now more recently civil wars of course are primarily confined to developing countries there's an abundance of evidence and here we see at least on average there's a great deal of variation but if you average it out over a large number of developing countries over the last 50 60 years you see that civil war tends to have the opposite effect if anything it would increase rather than reduce inequality for the reasons that our list here of civil wars often benefit a small group of well positioned people who Akane's that can't be taxed because of the weakening of state institution state authority the poor may suffer disproportionately and generally in history there are lots of men history consists mostly of wars if you open any history textbook it's all about some war or another 99 plus percent of wars in history do not have a compressive effect on economic inequality it really took they're very special circumstances of the 20th century to make this happen in the context of mass mobilization warfare as for transformative revolution I don't have to go into detail this is perfectly well known once you have a communist takeover in Russia in China in Vietnam in Cuba a number of places a lot of violence is going to be exercised and as a consequence there will be massive leveling of inequality once you expropriate the rich often killing them in the process once you nationalize all land all industry you have a planned economy where the government sets all prices and wages well there won't be a great deal of wealth inequality left and income inequality is going to be a function of government policies and I tasted rates in the Soviet Union in Maoist China we're really very very low the same is true of the various satellite regimes that we have data for of course that's a phenomenal lasts only for as long as these regimes are effectively in place income inequality in Russia doubled if you look at the Gini coefficient doubled during in a matter of just a few years after 1991 in China the process to go along Gini coefficient for income doubles in the course of about 20 30 years following the liberalizing reforms of the 1980s and 90s so you need hardcore communist regimes in place in order to contain inequality in this particularly striking way the earlier cases of leveling by means of revolution once again the answers there were a lot really because pre 1917 revolutions are not nearly as dramatic not as a penetrating if you will than communist revolutions you get in a 20th century French Revolution of course is quite famous in the late 18th century there is a certain amount of expropriation going on Nobles lose their heads and their estates the church's being expropriated there are some land redistribution programs in the Revolutionary periods but everything happens on a much less dramatic scale and what you see in Russia in China in a 20th century there is arguably some measurable effect if you compare income shares in France before and after the revolutionary Napoleonic periods the rich a little less rich the poor a little less poor than they were before so there is some equalizing impact but it's nothing like what you see in communist regimes and if you go back even farther in time there aren't really any successful revolutionary movements that would have suppressed economic inequality because usually the rich and powerful would win and maintain the status quo now at this point the big question of course is are there peaceful alternatives factors that are not rooted in massive violent dislocations that had historically speaking a similar effect on economic inequality so even if you buy I think we have to at this point by the argument there's so much evidence for of maximization warfare of revolutions playing state collapse they really did greatly reduce economic inequality but doesn't automatically mean there are no alternatives out there or the very least in order to make my case I had to look at to really search for our potential peaceful alternatives now historically speaking if you look at history in the long run looking and pre-modern societies in particular one of the key variables that determines the extent of inequality in a given society is who controls the land right if most people live on the land farm the land who is in control of the land is a very important determinant as a set of inequality and there are many many I mean I couldn't count them probably hundreds of more or less peaceful land reform schemes programs in history but if you look at them systematically what you see is the more orderly they are the more peaceful they are the less violent they are the less well they work in terms of producing equalizing outcomes there are great many ways in which entrenched wealth elites can manipulate land reforms and after a while end up being in the same position as they were before a very popular a means is to hand out land to poor farmers who are not necessarily prepared to farm on their own they go into debt and the rich swoop in buy off the land in order to get the peasants out of their debt and end up of the land they already owned before if you have schemes where the rich are being compensated in the process of land reform sometimes they get richer than they were before because they make good use of these compensation schemes on the other side the more violent land reforms were historically and this goes back all the way to antiquity the more equalizing they tend to be it doesn't necessarily have to be actual violence that's being exercised as long as there's a credible threat of violence that by itself can have an equalizing effect if you think of latin-american land reforms after Fidel took over Cuba in the 60s and 70s all of a sudden regimes all over Latin America felt well maybe this could happen here too maybe we should do something about this and there was American support for this funding know how infrastructure and so on so there are cases where also the credible threat of violence leads to equalizing outcomes but the more you take violent out of this story the more peaceful these land reforms are the less well they work what about financial crises you have now look at over a hundred macroeconomic and financial crises in different countries going back over a hundred years seeing trying to figure out whether they had a systemic effect on economic inequality on a distribution of income and wealth and the answer is not really there's a great deal of variation there is no consistently equalizing effect of economic crisis if you think back a decade to the great financial crisis of 2007-2008 in the u.s. in the UK many developed countries for a few years the richest were less rich relative to the rest of the population than they had been before because they were exposed to the investments to markets that really took a dive within three four or five years their position had been restored so these are economic crises that are not violent in nature don't usually have a substantially equalizing effect on distribution of income and wealth a partial exception is the Great Depression in the u.s. there was unusually severe doesn't didn't really play out in quite the same way in other industrialized nations where you have 25 percent unemployment and coupled with the New Deal legislation of Roosevelt you can see some mitigating effect on income and wealth equality but not on a really large scale as even the u.s. is mostly world war two that made the biggest difference what about democracy you might think that the more democratic societies become the more democratic their political systems become the less inequality there should be well it turns out if you look at the effects of democracy on economic inequality globally across a really large sample of countries over a long a period of time you will not find a consistent effect which may come as a bit of a surprise the reason is there are so many different types of democracy two-party system multiple systems captured democracies any number of things any number of confounding variables but that's true not just in the recent past if you go back in in Western countries a hundred years democratizing formally democratizing reforms do not in and of themselves reduce economic inequality so that unfortunately is not really an all-purpose solution EDA it is true that union labor union density the percentage of the workforce organized in in trade unions that is meaningfully related to economic inequality the larger the share of the workforce in unions the lower inequality is going to be if you control for other variables that's certainly true but as I tried to show you earlier unionization is not a genuinely peaceful alternative force because it was very heavily mediated by the violent shocks of World War one and World War two is we currently treated as a genuinely independent factor that leaves us with two other possible candidates for peaceful Equalization well of course famously is the idea that economic development will own its own if you just wait long enough make societies more equal as our societies develop as the matures people move from the agrarian sector in an industrial and urban sector initially Nicola is going to go up and then as everybody ends up or most people end up in highest skilled higher-paying herb jobs industry service sector that is going to reduce inequality overall an idea famously of course associated with our Simon whose Nets who came up of this first in 1950s are Nobel Prize for the 1970s and certainly fit what people could observe in a 56 to the 70s there was strong economic growth all over Western Europe North America East Asia and inequality was in a low or going down at the same time well always really stopped about 40 years ago we now know empirically that's just unfortunately not true you can have ongoing economic growth in inequality can move either way and it has been going up in most developed countries in the last 30 or 40 years even as economies have matured further so it doesn't really seem to work either last kind of course is the provision of education the idea being as a race between education and technology technology changes all the time and provision of education of training of skills has to keep up in order to prevent some people who just happen to have the right skills of benefiting disproportionately which then in turn drives up wage inequality in particular and it's certainly true broadly speaking that there is a meaningful connection between how well societies are doing in terms of training educating people and overall levels of inequality it's certainly true that if our education systems were less inclusive than they are in a court it would be higher still but if you look at the actual data it is striking that even this is very heavily mediated by these violent shocks if you look at the data for the United States 100% of the reduction in skill premiums in the u.s. from 1900s to the present day took place during World War one and World War two so the compression between an income between people who had a basic education and who had high school degrees or university college degrees whenever this this this gap was reduced this took place at times of massive violent conflict zero percent of the reduction took place before World War one during the interwar period or since World War two so even these effects are very strongly mediated as I said by violent conflict so unfortunately it seems that maybe there are other peaceful alternatives out there that I haven't thought of but if you look at all these much discussed effectors they don't really work quite as well if their work at all consistently as violent leveling mechanisms and in as much as they do work they work because there is actually some form of Island dislocation sort of lurking in the background driving of these various development so they are not generally peaceful in that sense so it seems that we can if you want to be a little reductive we can say that by and large if you look at world history in general there has been an interplay over hundreds and thousands of years between different processes of wealth and income concentrations and the sources of inequality I should say have changed quite a lot over time if you go back thousands of years openly predatory behavior would have been much more important being able to coerce people doing things they don't really want to do and that would create inequalities more recently last few hundred years especially in in the Western world commercial development financial development market forces broadly defined would have played a much bigger role in creating economic inequality so the sources of inequality are change over time but the the end result tends to be the same that in the absence of violent shocks inequality would be either rising or fairly stable at relatively high levels and in as much as these violent shocks make a difference they really shape the overall distribution of inequality in a very long run we can track this reasonably well in fact especially in the case of Europe because here we have not necessarily the most data but certainly the most scholarship and if you wanted to see how inequality economic inequality has changed in Europe over the last nine thousand years that's pretty much what it looked like agriculture appears in Europe for the first time about nine thousand years ago people shift from being hunter-gatherers to being farmers the more sedentary to become the more estates there are the more inequality we can observe we can observe this in the archaeological record well there are rich and richer graves of a few leaders bigger houses that sort of thing it culminates certainly in the Roman period Romans rule eighty percent of all people in Europe it's a massive exploitative highly stratified Empire with a super wealthy very small ruling class and everybody else much less well-off this goes on for hundreds of years eventually state collapse roman empire falls apart severe epidemic first appearance of the Black Death right afterwards the combination of two these two shocks makes reduces the population makes everybody less well-off before but really wipes out the well Philippe that had out dominated Europe during the Roman period in the High Middle Ages you get a phase of recovery population growth of more cities more Commerce more money more material goods pretty high levels of inequality where we have data France Italy England around 1300 when the black death comes in our describe this phenomenon raising the value of labour depressing returns on capital poor or less poor richer less rich and then the play goes away for about 1500 to 1914 for about 400 years almost everywhere where we have a statistical quantifiable data you see a gradual increase in income and wealth inequality a process that is reversed after 1914 because of the world wars and the great communist revolutions that lasts into the 1970s 80s depending on which country you're looking at and now in the last few decades we have seen pretty much everywhere every verse of this trend with rising inequality we can perform a similar exercise in a more impressionistic fashion for our Latin America going back only in this case 600 years it was already a great deal of inequality before the Europeans first showed up because there are hierarchical empires in players in Mexico yet stick to Inca in Peru we do know that the Spanish conquistadores were quite generous in appropriating large estates enormous amounts of land tens of thousands of forced laborers so it's quite clear that economic inequality initially goes up in Latin America in the sixteenth century then you have the attenuating effects of population loss which I talked about earlier but then as the indigenous population becomes more used to old world diseases and the in a mature colonial period 18th century Latin America is exceedingly unequal there's a small ruling class that owns large plantations there's slavery and most of the population lives in pretty dire conditions then you get violent disturbances the Wars of Independence as a consequence of the Napoleonic Wars that where we have data there are many data sets but the ones we have indicate inequality actually does go down in this period in the early 19th century and then from about 1860 1870 onwards till about 2004 well over a century during the first age of globalization inequality everywhere in Latin America remember we have data increases are pretty steadily it was only in the first decade of this century between about 2000 to 2010 that you see some degree of peaceful equalization in many Latin American countries for a number of very special reasons I'm happy to talk about in discussion but it seems not quite clear whether this process which is like this little dip here at the very end whether this process is actually sustainable because of economic downturns think Brazil or in Latin American countries it has already stalled in many countries we no longer see continuing reductions in income inequality many Latin American countries it's simply too soon to tell whether this is just a blip where there's a longer secular trend in peaceful equalization or where this is simply not sustainable we just simply don't know at this point last example is the u.s. in the colonial period thanks to benevolent British rule North America was not particularly unequal certainly far less unequal economically than the much more stratified societies of Europe there's a further reduction of war of independence because rich loyalists would get kicked out or lose some of their assets but ever since independence effectively up into the 1920s you have more or less steady increases in wealth and income inequality in the u.s. a process only reversed by the Great Depression and especially World War two into the 1970s and then a very major reversal whereby some tricks the us's today almost as I recall as it had been in 1929 which was the higher the peak of inequality at the end of this process here you see very similar kinds of wave-like changes all over the world we could draw similar charts for China for East Asia where the collapse of various dynasties would coincide of a reduction in equality and powerful mature dynasties with coincide with more inequality and so so of course the question now is well assuming granting for the sake of argument this is all true everything I just told you it's absolutely right this is what history was like what does this mean for the present and especially the future now it is well known that economic inequality by any number of measures has been rising in most virtually all developed countries now for a significant amount of time several decades in many cases it is also true that the traditional effective equalizing mechanisms that I explored over the long run of history are not currently active and that's a very good thing I don't think anybody in this room wants another world war very few people maybe some but few people want another Bolshevik Revolution states in most parts of the world are much more resilient than they used to be you still have state collapse in central in sub-saharan Africa the Middle East but not really anywhere else there is of course over the risk of some massive epidemic event that could be a big pandemic literally tomorrow but we are much better equipped and it will be much better equipped in the foreseeable future to deal with us because of advances in in genetics in particular and if there's going to be another world war it's not going to be a mass mobilization war with tens of millions of people serving in large armies so these things are not very likely to happen anytime soon so you have an interesting combination of increasing inequality and a retreat of these traditionally effective violent leveling mechanisms there are flares no shortage if you look at the literature especially in economics of policy recommendations people writing long books telling us what to do how to address economic inequality very famously and it's certainly not the best of the Packers or Atkinson who unfortunately passed away recently working this out very carefully for the UK what would need to be done in order to reduce inequality what the costs would be in terms of higher taxes its impact on economic development and so on it's a in many cases in the u.s. it's much more indiscriminate you get long laundry lists of all kinds of things that would in theory work fiscal intervention more investment in education tracking down offshore wealth providing basic income a political reform to prevent manipulations of the political process to favor a very rich people any number of things and that's oh well the problem is that even though many of these things worked in the past say 50 60 years ago we really need recipes that would work in the world today they wouldn't just work in theory they would actually have a chance of being implemented that would be politically feasible in the world we inhabit today in an environment that's much more globalized much more integrated than it was in the past when some of these reforms did in fact work in an environment where our previous shock-induced equalization effects have begun to fade all these war and post-war policies high taxes state regulation of various sectors of the private economy all these things are hiatus in globalization at lasted in some ways after the 1970s all these things have really begun to fade so the environment today is quite different from the way it was a couple generations ago when we could observe significant reductions in inequality and at the same time on top of everything else there are currently multiple forces active operational around the globe that tend to have a DC : in effect that make it more likely that inequality will go up rather than down in the next 10 20 or 50 years one is globalization which of course is enormously beneficial to many people in developing countries but disadvantageous to certain constituencies in developed countries which we have observed now for some time automation is an ongoing completely open-ended process nobody knows what jobs are actually going to be done by robots by software 10 20 50 years from now there's certainly enormous potential for destruction of certain types of jobs retraining is an answer but not a panacea because you can't just retrain people overnight a lot of friction is bound to occur as a part of this process another development is it's really just beginning in which countries is the aging of the general populations of we already see in Japan in Western Europe in particular and it's going to become much more widespread where we know this or a next generation or two that's going to be a problem because the older population of developed countries is going to be the less public funds will be available for aggressively the distributive programs because more money has to be spent on caring for the elderly for pensions healthcare all these things that are not intrinsically we distributive now of course the flip side now in fact already studies are about Japan indicating that as inequality in Japan has become to go up it has done so as a result of secular aging because Japan had to cut back on certain welfare provisions for the elderly and that's a process that's bound to continue in the future now the flipside of secular aging is of course immigration the idea being well if there are more and more elderly people and enough young people will just have more people coming from other parts of the world in the case of Europe it would have to be the Middle East it would have to be Africa well that in turn creates new challenges with respect to inequality something we haven't really quite seen yet because the processes really just beginning on a large scale but there are lots of servers being dumb where you try and you sort of figure out how people would receive would respond would they still be willing to pay very high taxes if the beneficiary is the recipients of these texts are people who are ethnically culturally religiously very different from themselves and the answer is generally not really so we might expect rising resistance to very highly of a distributive welfare states in the future as the ethnic composition of country changes dramatically so that Europe shifts more direction of the situation you have in the US and it's long been argued that there is greater resistance to redistribution in the u.s. in part because the US has always been more diverse more heterogeneous than European nation-states and it has a dampening effect on political will to engage in redistribution and of course the final frontier which is still science fiction but maybe not for much longer is that so far we have been talking about inequality between people right we are still all Homo sapiens but once you get into the business of genetic enhancement through gene editing which you can already do or cybernetic implants that will benefit some people more than others people who can afford to have these procedures done on themselves on their children once this gets going and there are 200 countries in the world not all of these countries are going to outlaw these techniques as they become available that has enormous potential for future this equalization because you may actually end up with a situation where some people are you know physically different from others cognitively in terms of their health in terms of the capabilities superior for one of a better words to others and that will create inequalities we can't even imagine potentially at this point and of course all these are factors all push sort of in the same direction so we are a very interesting environment where you have these DC collagen forces at war the traditionally effective violent shocks have gone away at least for the time being so it's really very hard to see any kind of potential for a significant peaceful equalization in the foreseeable future unless something happens that has never happened before now of course it's important to realize that history doesn't determine the future right history can only show what happened in the past and can give us an idea of which things are easy to do and what things are really difficult to do and I think what this survey does is at the very least it gives us an idea of just how hard it is to address economic inequality in the absence of these violent shocks and that's a situation that we find ourselves in right now so I guess that's all I have to say and I would welcome your questions thank you very much so so we have time for discussion questions I see hands up already I have a gentleman here in the blue jumper if you could say your name where you're from and and keep your question as a question that would be fantastic we're gonna take three questions together so that we can allow Walter to respond so there was a question here there was a question here in the gray shirt and one at the front in the blue shirt so we'll take those three and then we'll move forward what evening a very interesting speech and my name is Luke I'm coming from Italy so basically due to the fact that I just keep following their what what's happening in my country and in terms of inequality I feel that a major force that basically drive inequality is the justice systems because I saw from a political side even an economic side that basically when in the country welfare is a justice system that is not equal that basically doesn't punish who does crime and so basically everyone is entitled to basically breach rules that say the major driver for inequality and so I think that all your speech has been quite meaningful but I think even nowadays one of the reason of inequality is if a justice system is efficient or not Richard from London could you say why they need to be short term dramatic and intense shocks I'm thinking particularly about and widespread low-level disorder and violence in England in the 18th century and early 19th century that obviously didn't as you say have much impact because in inequality went up during that period so why do they have to be short term and intense shocks thank you I'm Paul Segal I'm down here hi there I'm a visiting fellow at the international inequalities Institute here I apologize mine is not a question but a challenge which I hope is also interesting so I'd like to make the case for the capacity for states to reduce inequality at least under the right conditions of soul society so um my working on Latin America and I disagree with your the picture you have of inequality in Latin America I think that's incorrect in the 20th century at least firstly we don't have much data so we can't be we can't be sure anyway but the countries are know reasonably well are Mexico and Argentina I'm currently working on Mexico and it's pretty clear to us that when you look carefully the data there's a significant decline in inequality in the mid 20th century and Argentina which has top income data the top 1% share declines a lot around the same period run and 1940s 1950s and stays low for quite a few decades then so right similar in profile to the European countries both those countries had a lot of very active civil society and lot of civil society but trade unions and agrarian organizations or then incorporate into the state so to me that's state-led well certain state led the state created decline the inequality supported by civil society and all kind of mobilization if you like social mobilization jumping to the present you see something comparable you mentioned the decline in equality in Latin America but I think you understate it it's pretty huge so in lot of these countries we're talking about ten or twelve Gini points which is quite comparable to the decline in inequality in the rich countries after the Second World War and the countries where was most dramatic since the early 2000s were Argentina Bolivia and Ecuador again countries with a very strong kind of social mobilization and governments that were supported by that social mobilization it might not last as you say but at least it occurred we have measured it and and it might last so you know does that challenge your thesis that's a great question so I should say I think it's we will have to investigate the kind of thing that you mentioned much more systematically right I mean there are many different variables that you could correlate with measures of economic inequality for instance and what you pointed out would be one of them right I mean how the justice system works oh that's just one of many ways of trying to enrich our understanding what the look this is you know the causal factors that drive inequalities are but you know what what the overall correlations are so I think that's that's a good point I don't sure why they have to be short and dramatic it just turns out that the they were right there is as I said that wasn't you know it has always been an enormous amount of warfare violence in in history between states within societies and so on and for the most part this would not did not generate any tangible improvements that we could see I should say that the father you go back in time the poor your your vision is so to speak you wouldn't really be able to see something moderate because you couldn't be sure when it's a really phenomenal show spared evidence so we tend to see the most dramatic changes because other ones that are securely documented so I can't rule out obviously there were some some improvements out there to a certain degree but in as much as we look at if whenever we look at really changes they are the ones that really seem to require everyone a strong word require but you really seem to require some kind of really profound shock that cannot be offset by the people who uphold or benefit from the established order and that is somewhere it really comes to the fore with modernization you could say right where for the first time you have more cohesive nation-states where people have more integrated into society overall so it's not by accident that this somewhere it comes to the fore especially in the 20th century I ask you like the America I think that was my biggest I was a concern but my biggest County example I have a long section on this in my book because I think Latin America is really important and maybe even a source of hope in a sense in that respect now of course you could be a little cynical and say well what happened in many Latin American countries was that you went from extremely high levels of inequality to very high levels really call it that's an improvement right but it's where this is a model to be a bit parochial for say European North American countries there's an open question because it's undeniably a lot of low-hanging fruit in Latin American countries right you don't have to totally change everything if you just target your fiscal measures a little better and you have a little more better education redistribution programs and so on that is bound to have a real effect right and that is something we have seen there are I think windfall effects the commodities boom are driven by China that benefited non-urban workers disproportionately well certain other things coming into the equation to make everything more complex this is why I think what's happening right now so frustrating because we're just too close to this to really see where this is the first act of an ongoing process that's going to continue this decade next decade in the way we see it in in in in in we saw it in the first half of the 20th century in other countries or whether this will somehow turn into some kind of blip which will be very unfortunate right I think I mean I don't know if you agree but I think it's at this point itself too soon to be really to be either very optimistic or very pessimistic because the jury is still out innocent so we are in the midst of this but I find it I find it absolutely fascinating so I do agree with this and that's what a historical date they're sure I mean you have this is this is a major compression story right I have little blips here here there are decades certainly already the beginning of the 20th century then in the in the post-war period in some cases in the 70s or so in individual countries you have noticeable improvements in in income and wealth concentration but the overall trend then ultimately especially if you wait for population and you look at very populous countries like Brazil there's a drag up other than being quite considerably the overall trend once you iron out all these fluctuations from decade to decade seems to be as far as I can tell since there have been upwards but again this really changed after 2000 right and you have a broad change in the following decade and that's certainly something very much worth watching so I fully agree with that okay there's a the the the gray jumper just there and then the gentleman in front and then a yellow shirt up top thank you very much you're very thought-provoking talk I I'm interested in the subject of plagues because you say we're not likely to have any more in the future and but you brought in secular aging as well and I was just wondering in a closed society where you have limits to migration could the aging population vast numbers of people literally falling off a cliff dying be sort of you know in some ways similar to the idea of a plague on on on wages in that society and and my second point was to do with your optimism about medicine just because a lot of people are predicting that antibiotic resistance is going to be a huge problem in the future so any thoughts on that thank you for the hoody talk what I'm curious about is though the role of the colonial context in the world wars so it seemed to me that you had no data from world-system theory or other theories we'll call it the periphery I mean I know that there isn't much data because imperial power said other things to do then collect data during that times but I think it would be really interesting to see how inequality evolved in the colonial context during the war because I can imagine that there were really different developments I know from the sources I looked into in British India that the British were really keen on collecting war taxes in in poor rural communities and the inequality inequality but the the economic developments in India during the war were one of them one of the main processes which affect the decolonization and the mass mobilization of anti-coal on your protests etcetera etcetera so I think it would be quite a valuable topic of like inquiry in this context Thanks always wear yellow shirt if you want to ask a question in a lecture sent in near the first world war end of the first world war starts is next year obviously I was just thinking a yeast for a useful use for history will be to look back and uncover some other social solidarity issues she talks about and maybe eating them to other inequalities or reduction inequalities such as gender inequality and reduction of economic inequality the housing boom in housing homes or heroes and all that sort of stuff and a lot of that isn't known or it's been lost and history is one of the things which could play a role in change in the debate nowadays I would hope so because otherwise I wouldn't have written the book right I mean there's at least the hope that history has something to contribute not like I said it doesn't predict the future but it's also something we have to figure out what it is as for the colonial aspect it's true of course their data aren't great while work has been done especially by Atkinson Associates what we see in those cases where the out date is really quite striking that you have four top income shares a great compression in India during World War two I'm not sure anybody really fully understands what it is but it certainly fits the overall pattern Mauritius is very well at tasted because the data good and you see the same effect there in fact that one country we don't have is Argentina right in Argentina the rich gets richer during World War two because they sell meat to Britain and the people who owned all the herds that become even richer than before and then you have the backlash in the 50s sort of Perelman zones or there's a delayed effect that's actually the one conduct exception proves the rule in a way because it's really removed from this I guess I still like I said work to be done and stuff to be unearthed I think general very broadly speaking decolonization does go hand-in-hand with an attenuation of inequality even though I mean individual countries it's all over the place but overall the trend that's again not perhaps terribly surprising but again worth studying in greater detail and as for the plague yeah that's true in fact a related question is sometimes people say well what about climate change right I mean you talk about born revolution so climate change has the potential if you fold of the worst case scenario is over next whatever 50 hundred years has a potential of renewing all these things you could have Wars Syrian civil war is a good example already driven by a long term drought to some extent happens in Yemen it sort of it it could precipitate new diseases right because again climatic reasons state collapse and so on it wouldn't be an independent factor because it would operate through one or more of these four that I identified but it might actually bring about some kind of revival that is surely undesirable as for having an actual plague or widespread antibiotic failure and in developed countries the problem here is that we don't really know we can't know from experience and I'm not aware of anybody having tried to simulate a model as what effect in a in a high-income society would be of losing a large chunk of the population in an agrarian setting it's really very straightforward in a in a more complex industrial post-industrial society the effects are I think very hard to predict in any meaningful way right and it will obviously be very very very disruptive but when it would also be equalizing at the same time that's not at all clear to me so it may well be that this particular force run its course and if it comes back again it may well not have the same effect that it used to have in the pre-industrial period great so lots of questions I'm going to try and gentleman at the front here then can you come to the front fourth row back in the in the middle and then far side black thank you thank you very much for an interesting you know a bit pessimistic talk so and I wonder maybe inequality is better than the alternative and could one imagine a kind of society where and with huge inequality but where even the least advantage could leave decent lives or good inequality in itself dr brutalization repression or maybe the brain you like brave new world is an alternative oh yeah so hi my name is virtual and I'm from America my question is can violent sharks have the opposite effect of increasing inequality especially if it's for example country X taking over a country why during a war leading to country Y becoming second-class citizens and country X and at the same time given inequality given violence is only a short-term stopgap and we see inequality again rising back up after periods of violence is there truly any way to have a lasting negative impact on inequality to reduce it is possible hi my name is Jonah and I have two questions for the quick what are your thoughts on artificial intelligence and machine learning and the economic effects and on equality and both baseline and welfare and second is about what about their development of cryptocurrencies which is a movement to get out of a fiat based currencies which are manipulated by their governments and how does that do you think that pan out for a both equality and baseline I must admit I haven't thought about that I mean the very last point but that's that's an interesting well I obviously have to be a more widespread phenomenon it is now but if you think with just the beginning of this that's worth thinking about as for a I I guess the argument the economists over say well it really will be better off because we get rid of the horrible job and we'll have better jobs just like it happened 200 years ago but that is at the very least unlikely to be a very smooth process and in in the enzyme is going to own the robots too right so even if deliver certain benefits it can still lead to an even higher concentration of material inequality as for well your quest that's a question often comes up one could certainly argue that poverty alleviation is import important in a fundamental sense than addressing purely distributional issues right so for instance if you take the development of China or last generation well in the 80s everybody was equally poor crudely speaking and now hundreds of millions of people have middle-class incomes and there is twice as much inequality as before what is the more desirable scenario I would imagine most people would say the one we have not the one that existed in the past so and we talk about as in fact before we came here there's really we are only really beginning to study very systematically what the relationship is between poverty and inequality as such is that is there a meaningful connection can you fully you know separate them could you have a system where object if absolute levels of inequality keep going down while relative inequality goes up that's perfectly possible I gave me needs I think more and more systematic investigations of this and that ultimately it becomes a a philosophical but a political and ethical issue right to say should that be enough as long as we can guarantee that people don't fall through the safety net and even the least advantaged are little better off than they were last year let's say is that good enough or is there a broader responsibility in a nation-state or in a democratic system of making sure that whatever gains are being generated that there are not too unevenly distributed even if poverty itself is being properly addressed that's that's a very open-ended kind of easier but certainly one that we will talk we'll have to talk more about this as a society in the future as a as for your question um so but let me so the question was why he could have the inverse so violence could have an the opposite effect I mean it does I mean that's why I put in the example of the civil wars right I mean if it happens in outside the context of states that only have pretty you know stable institutions and participatory arrangements in place the net result may well be too excessive age rather than alleviate problems and as you say I mean especially once it forces people to go on the move and so on it could certainly have the effect at least in the short term that's that's certainly true so that's why we can't just say oh violence solves the problem it's a very super specific type of violent event historically speaking that has had the effect and for FEMA we can understand pretty well why and most didn't have and even today in the future won't have I think that's fair to say okay so there was a white blue and white shirt there white and blue jumper kind of and then after that I i know i'm picking randomly so forgive me but we haven't had one from the very back so there's someone that the kind of final final back what will grab that person this may be the last round of questions but hopefully we'll have some times and what's right for those that we don't get so I sincerely apologize but yes here and then we'll work around great thank you my name is up weena and I'm from Belgium and I live in and work here in northern and my question for you is about Universal revenue which is very debated now in in France and other countries is that something you think that would be a solution against the inequality Universal revenue the universe yes so this is a new concept which is debated in in Europe because of this automation and other things so people are thinking is maybe that would be a solution for the automation coming and other stuff so but my last question would be about the concept of inequality which is really a very concept right so what we really need is it is society where we have a justice system which provide the equal chance of people to compete and realize where there the ambition for example instead of focusing on the difference of revenue between people and stuff yeah hello I'm Xavier I'm from Spain and my question we so the social policy measures you mentioned them at Angela slide but I was further missing in the first part when you were addressing the different options to reduce inequality different causes and I think Sweden poses this example because Sweden had not violent history during the 20th century and Sweden went through from a very in equal country to a very eco country and the was basically thanks to social policies such as universal education you know so healthcare unemployment benefits and so wouldn't the social but the case of Sweden contradict your theory what would you say to that yeah and on my side my name is also annum I'm from France I live here in London and it's actually a mix of those two equations and trying to focus on the positive correlation between economic growth and to decline inequalities so my first question was actually in your in your research if you've seen in the past 30 years that are more relevant today because to put things into context as you say thinking about globalization automation if you've seen a country in the developed world where we could see economic growth and at least not arise inequalities in inequality and the second question was about not just the universal income but the minimum wage if you think those type of economic programs can revive a number one wage inflation and the consequence kind of revive the middle class that then can be beneficial to economic growth and everyone or if it's just something that was the case in kind of the 30 glorious years after World War two thank you let me start with a historical question um I had to address Latin America and I had to address Sweden because everybody who said what about Sweden that was a popular question when I was working on the book and Kane is really striking because we now think of Scandinavians being these equivalent area and people and 200 years ago it's gonna have any kind of a phenomenally only called Denmark oh and so and in some cases you could say okay well it's world war ii occupation Norway Denver Finland this very heavily involved in the board Sweden wasn't so mean it was technically neutral kind of was I mean word about wire decided more of the Axis powers and had a big fallout when Germany effectively collapsed and you had the Russia volution next door and have all kinds of disturbances or went in the 1920s as a result of this really are boosting the social socialist further for the first time and then the Brotherhood I actually really made sure to get into this I have a whole section that's in my book the experience of Sweden walls were to is not that terribly different from the experience of other European countries because they are fully surrounded by Germans and their allies that's full mobilization enormously high percentage of all people in Sweden serve in the military throughout World War two because they have every day that could be an invasion by German it could be an Allied invasion - you know outflank Germany there is a massive state intervention in the economy a planned economy effectively very enormous increase let's see if I have this haha see what about Sweden see what happens in Sweden in Sweden you have to say I show you this chart earlier for Western countries in general in Sweden what happens for our incomes while incomes go for a roof here what happens here this is the man in late 1930s and early 1940s all of a sudden the Swedish government says it called concentration government all the poor it says well we have to do this right we have to you have to have a war industry they built a war industry overnight it's because they were cut off from imports that's why they're so successful British Army armaments industry was built in this period conscription rationing effectively a planned economy for quite a long time and then after the war the decision was well are we go and the Conservatives said are we going a cut back again and the Social Democrats said are we going to keep this up and use those funds for Social Welfare and they carried the day so the electorate was on the side of the the performance of the expanded welfare state but the war acted in a sense as a catalyst I feel it's very important to distinguish I'm not saying that the board itself causes all kinds of things that would never have happened in any way otherwise what it does is it has a catalytic function where it hugely accelerates sort of processes that were already underway in a much more gradual way amplifies them compresses them in time creates these you know spikes you wouldn't otherwise get and then if you look at the overall statistics accounts for this dramatic change in a relatively short period of time and that's something that I wasn't doing the book and look at counterfactuals but I said well what would have happened if there had never been a big war in the 20th century right the world oh one hints there would not have been Lenin either no Lenny no my own or nothing no Cold War nothing like this would have happened how would that have affected inequality would inequality have gone down anyway because of you know economic development better education for more people more democratization unions all these things were already happening anyway right just it might have happened much more gradually and it's worth thinking about and Sweden is a good example for this also so I mean it's it's everything is it's more complex in a way but I think you can actually make a pretty good case even the Swedish case it is a Swiss case too although less so you can see very tangible effects of that not being you know responsible for what happens to the exclusion of everything else but really nurturing is too weak you were pushing trains that were already they are in in a certain direction amplifying accelerating them and that can certainly be well-established for Sweden as for the basic income a very very short answer is that if you implement a basic income that is politically feasible and easily affordable it's not gonna make a big difference because many Western countries only have if you lump together all the various benefits you already have almost like basically universal income anyway right if you want the universal incra makes a real difference that's going to be very expensive and politically unfeasible arguably in the world we currently inhabit right so I think you have ideal typically two options one is to go for more timid version that's not gonna make a big difference and you go for an aggressive version that might make a difference but it's not going to actually happen so that seems to be my enthusiast my understanding of this but again this is summary has really just began to be debated more seriously in any recent year so we'll see what what people will come up with from that but thank you professor Seidel join me in thanking him [Applause]

Channel: LSE

Views: 8,682

Rating: 4.8095236 out of 5

Keywords: LSE, London School of Economics and Political Science, London School of Economics, University, College, inequality, income, wealth, reducing economic inequality, violent upheaval, mass mobilization war, transformative revolution, state collapse, pandemics, leveling wealth, survival, Professor Walter Scheidel

Id: -0qsQux6zeI

Length: 89min 15sec (5355 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 04 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/theteams]

This is a great book, I definitely recommend that people read it.

[u/criticus_arbitrandus]

Fanasinating. As a vet, I've always said that the military has been the prime mover of American equity.