Future Historians

By the early 21st century, it was common knowledge that income inequality had grown by leaps and bounds as a result of the neoliberal policies of the previous half-century. The United States was a case in point – in 2017 eight hyper-rich Americans owned as much as the entire bottom half of the nation's households – and that was no anomaly. Books such as Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century and Walter Scheidel’s The Great Leveller attempted to explain such stupefying disparities. While the two world wars and the world depression of the first half of the 20th century had entailed a massive destruction of accumulated wealth which, however catastrophic, did reduce inequality, the postwar peace restored the advantages of the very wealthy. Piketty proposed a global tax on wealth and believed that a top income tax rate of 80 per cent would be optimal, but he recognized that such policies stood little chance of being enacted, let alone enforced.

Scheidel could only express despair: “Thousands of years of history boil down to a simple truth,” he wrote. 'Ever since the dawn of civilisation, ongoing advances in economic capacity and state-building favoured growing inequality but did little if anything to bring it under control.' He implied that inequality in the economic sphere would produce, other things being equal, a political advantage that only perpetuated the position of the elite by means of taxes, business regulations and labour laws. Inequality, in other words, led to oligarchy, which in turn reproduced and exacerbated inequality.

Excerpted and paraphrased by Fred
from Scott_Inequality-Violence.docx
11/5/17