I’ve been distracted for a few days, first by the ASSA conference in Chicago – of which more in the next post – and then by my eldest son’s wedding. But I’m now eager to read a book that has just arrived at Enlightenment Towers, Walter Scheidel’s The Great Leveler: violence and the history of inequality from the Stone Age to the twenty-first century. “Are mass violence and catastrophes the only forces that can seriously decrease economic inequality?” the inside cover blurb starts. The following 450 pages answer: yes. I’m not expecting it to be a cheerful read.

By coincidence, there’s a recent VoxEU column supporting the Great Leveler hypothesis. Looking at Europe’s rich since 1300, Guido Alfani concludes that only the Black Death and world wars have significantly reversed increasing inequality. All this new work follows Thomas Piketty’s raising the question in his tome Capital in the 21st Century. Talk about an unpalatable trade-off.