Walter Scheidel wrote last year a really interesting book, The Great Leveler, which I am in the process of reading. He argues that revolutions, wars and other forms of violence have historically been the way to significantly reduced inequality. The argument has been used by the right to argue that there is not much we can do to reduce inequality. In this interview, The Economist tries very hard to make Scheidel recognize exactly that. Yet this is a silly argument for several reasons: (a) there are some exceptions to Scheidel´s rule; in particular, the Social-democratic social experiment in the Scandinavian countries begun before the Second World War and was only partly facilitated by it; (b) the fact that conflict helps inequality reduction does not mean that we cannot find more creative policy tools in the future; in fact (3) this is an alternative interpretation of the book: unless we don´t find ways to stop the current concentration of income at the top in the global economy, we may have to deal with significant conflict.
The book may also be quite significant for Latin Americanists and partly explain why inequality never went down as much in this region than others. Latin America has historically been a relatively peaceful continent, particularly in the 20th century. The World War and the Communist challenge affected it but less than to Europe. And yet, it is also interesting than, as far as we know, the process of Independence replaced one elite by another without significantly reducing inequality. Do we have good studies of why that was the case?
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