Violence and Inequality (Part Two)

The thesis of Walter Scheidel’s The Great Leveler:  Violence and Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century (Princeton UP, 2017) is easily stated: “Thousands of years of history boil down to a simple truth: ever since the dawn of civilization, ongoing advances in economic capacity and state building favored growing inequality, but did little if anything to bring it under control.  Up to and including the Great Compression of 1914 to 1950, we are hard pressed to identify reasonably well attested and nontrivial reductions in material inequality that were not associated, one way or another, with violent shocks” (391).

In particular, Scheidel says there are four kinds of “violent shocks” (he calls them the four horsemen): war, plague, system or state collapse, and violent revolution.  But it turns out that not even all instances of those four can do the job of reducing inequality.  The violent shocks, it turns out, must be massive. Only “mass mobilization” wars reduce inequality, so (perhaps) only World War I and, especially, World War II actually count as doing the job.  The Napoleonic Wars clearly do not–and it is harder to tell with the possible mass mobilizations in the ancient world.

Similarly, except for the Russian and Chinese revolutions of the 20th century (both of which caused, at the minimum, fifteen million deaths), revolutions rarely seem to have significantly altered the distribution of resources.  The Black Death (lasting as it did, in waves, over at least eighty and perhaps 120 years) and perhaps similar earlier catastrophic plagues (of which less is certainly known) stand as the only examples of leveling epidemics.  For system or state collapse, we get the fall of Rome—and not much else that is relevant since then, with speculations about collapses prior to Rome and in the Americas (Aztecs and Incas) where (once again) the available evidence leads to conjectures but no firm proofs.

Where does that leave us?  In two places, apparently.  One is that inequality leveling events are rare, are massive, and are, arguably, worse than the disease to which they are the cause.  Also, except for the revolutions, the leveling effects are unintentional by-products.  Which leads the second place: the very conservative conclusion (much like Hayek’s thoughts about the market as being beyond human control/calculation or T. S. Eliot’s similar comments about “culture” being an unplanned and unplannable product of human actions) that, although the creation of inequality is very much the result of human actions that are enabled and sustained by the state (i.e. by political organization), there is little that can be done politically (and deliberately) to reduce inequality.  Scheidel is at great pains to show a) that even the great shocks only reduce inequality for a limited time (about 60 to 80 years) before inequality starts to rise again; b) that the various political expedients currently on the table (like a wealth tax of the kind Elizabeth Warren is proposing or high marginal tax rates) would lower inequality very slightly at most; and c) that the scale of violence required to significantly lower inequality (as contrasted to the marginal reductions that less violent measures could effect) is simply too horrible to deliberately embrace as a course of action.

So the conclusion appears to be: bemoan inequality as much as you like, but also find a way to come to terms with the fact that it is basically irremediable.  Scheidel is good at the bemoaning part, portraying himself as someone who sees inequality as deplorable, even evil.  But he is just as resolute in condemning violence aimed at decreasing inequality.  So his unstated, but strongly, implied recommendation is quietist.

In line with my ongoing obsessions, the book appears to reinforce what I have deemed one of the paradoxes of violence: namely, the fact that the state is undoubtedly a constraint upon violence even as states are also undoubtedly the source of more violence than non-state actors.  In the new version of this paradox that Scheidel’s book suggests, the formulation would go like this: the state enables greater economic activity/productivity while also enabling far greater economic inequality.

Yet the state’s enabling of inequality doesn’t work the other way.  It seems just about impossible to harness the state to decrease inequality—except in the extreme case of war.  World War II certainly bears that out in recent (the past 300 years) history.  The US (in particular) adopted (in astoundingly short order) a very communistic framework to conduct the war (with a command economy in terms of what was to be produced and how people were to be assigned their different roles in production, along with strict wage and price controls, and rationing).  It would seem that the war proved that a command economy can be efficient and, not only that, but in times of dire need, a command economy was obviously preferable to the chaos of the free market.  The war effort was too important to be left to capitalism.  But outside of a situation of war, it has seemed impossible to have the state play that kind of leveling role, strongly governing both production and distribution.  Why?  Because only war produces the kind of social solidarity required for such centralized (enforced) cooperation?  To answer that way gets us back to violence as required—because violence is a force of social cohesion like none other.

To phrase it this way gets us back to an ongoing obsession of this blog: the problem of mobilization.  How to create a sustainable mass movement that can exert the kind of pressure on elites that is required to shift resources downward?  If violence as teh source of cohesion for that movement is taken off the table, what will serve in its place?  Which also raises the thought of why nationalism is so entangled in violence and in rhetorics/practices of sacrifice.  The means by which social cohesion is created.  Maybe that’s the “numinous” quality of violence to which Charles Taylor keeps gesturing.  A kind of Durkheimian creation of the collective, a way of escaping/transcending the self.

A different thought: Scheidel makes a fairly compelling case (although it is not his main focus) that the creation of inequality is itself dependent on violence.  Sometimes the violence of appropriation is massive–especially in the cases of empires which are basically enterprises of either outright extraction (carting off the loot) or somewhat more indirect extortion (requiring the payment of “tribute” in return for peace/protection).  Or sometimes the violence of appropriation is less massive and less direct.  But appropriation still requires a state that, in the last instance, will protect appropriated property against the claims of those who see that appropriation as either unjust or as inimical to their own interests.  In short, the power of the state (a power that resides, to at least some extent, in its capacity for violence and its willingness to put that capacity into use) is necessary to the creation and maintenance of inequality.  So, in one way, it seems like a “little” violence can get you inequality, but it requires “massive” violence to dislodge that inequality in the direction of more equality.  And it is this difference in scale that places the exploited in such an unfavorable position when it comes to remedial action.

Of course, the growth in inequality since 1980 in the US was grounded in legal instruments and institutional practices.  The increasing power of employers over employees, the prevention of the state from intervening in massive lay-offs or equally massive outsourcing, the onslaught of privatization and deregulation (or lax enforcement of existing regulations), the legalization of all kinds of financial speculation and “creative instruments” etc. etc. was all accomplished “non-violently” through a classic “capture of the state.”  This is what inspires the most radical leftist visions; the left seems utterly paralyzed as it witnesses all these court cases, new laws, revisions of executive practice, a paralysis generated by the fact that the shifts of power and wealth to the top 10% are all “legal.”  The radical claims there is no “legal” room left for the radical egalitarian to occupy.  The system is so corrupt that it offers no remedies within its scope.  But the distaste for massive violence (here is where Scheidel is relevant) appears to take extra-legal methods for change off the table.

 

 

Violence and Inequality

Mollie Panter-Downes wrote a weekly letter from London for the New Yorker during the course of World War II.  On April 29, 1945, with the end in sight, she writes of the Budget report just released: “The figures on net incomes, prewar and war, which were given in the Budget provides much food for brooding in the clubs.  Seven thousand people had net annual incomes of six thousand pounds and over in 1939, the report said, but there were only eighty in the category in 1943.  The figures showed an increase of three million persons in the group which earns between two hundred and fifty and five hundred pounds a year.  Some of the things that Socialist orators in Hyde Park have long been clamoring for on Sunday mornings seem to have come about not through a bloody revolution but through a very bloody war” (London War Notes [London: Persephone Books, 2014]: 452-53).

To begin with an irrelevancy: I can’t help but be astonished by the numbers.  Six thousand pounds at the high end; two hundred fifty pounds as a decent income!  The UK National Archives website has a handy currency converter that tells me 250 pounds in 1945 had the purchasing power of approximately 9000 pounds in 2017. (Hard to believe you could live on 9000 pounds in 2017 England.  Double that–i.e. 500 1945 pounds–might just barely keep you in house and food.) That means 6000 pounds in 1945 comes out to 216,000 pounds in 2017 dollars.  And an income of 6000 pounds is 24 times greater than one of 250 pounds.

So: three things to note.

  1. Pretty substantial inflation between 1945 and the present—after a very long run of non-inflation and, in fact, slight deflation between the Napoleonic wars and World War II (about 125 years).

2.  The number of the population receiving high incomes is very, very small.  Seems hard to believe.  Only 7000 people at the top income level in 1939?  When there are at least 3 million lower wage earners.  That works out to two tenths of a percent at the top income level.  Digging around a bit, (one good source: https://ourworldindata.org/income-inequality) I get these historical figures for the UK:

The top 10% had 35% of all incomes in 1939; 22% of all incomes in 1972; and it was back up to 35% in 2016.  The top 1% had 19% of total income in 1913; it had sunk all the way to 6% in 1972; and was up to 15% in 2010.  (We can safely assume it is a point or two higher in 2019.)

What do those figures tell us?  Basically that, for the UK at least, the very high level of income inequality that prevailed prior to the triple whammy of World War I, the depression, and World War II has almost been completely reestablished since 1972.  This result, of course, should not surprise us.  It is what Thomas Piketty and his various colleagues have been telling us for the past ten years.

But these figures suggest that more than 0.2% of the population were earning the top incomes in 1939.  And they also suggest that some of those top incomes must have been substantially higher than 6000 pounds—which is only 24x greater than 250 pounds (a laughable figure by 2019 standards when CEOs earn 250x and more than the average worker.)

  1. Walter Scheidel, a historian at Stanford, set out to test Piketty’s theses about the fluctuations of income and wealth inequality in the largest possible historical frame. Scheidel’s fascinating (and deeply depressing) book is The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century (Princeton University Press, 2017).  Panter-Downes, in 1945, already recognized what Piketty was to assert in his 2014 Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Harvard University Press): the “great compression” of the years 1914 to 1970, the dramatic decrease in income and wealth inequality in the middle years of the 20th century, were the direct result of long and bloody wars.  Europe in the 20th century conducted a huge potlatch, a wanton destruction of vast amounts of wealth.  And since the already wealthy had the most to lose since they possessed the most at the outset, the outcome was a general leveling.   When we recognize that 1972 marked the pinnacle of economic equality in countries like the UK and the US, the counter-revolution begun in the Thatcher and Reagan years comes into sharp focus.

 

I am going to write at length about the Scheidel book, but will leave that to the rest of this week.

The Sam Saga

UNC Chancellor Carol Folt resigned yesterday—and took the remnants of the campus’s Confederate monument out the door with her.

While the UNC system’s Board of Governor’s met in an emergency session to discuss “Chapel Hill leadership,” Folt stole a march on them, announcing her resignation and her order for the removal of the toppled statue’s still-standing pedestal to an undisclosed location, before the Board’s meeting ended.

Campus work crews had dismantled the pedestal and hauled it away by midnight last night.

Good on her.

The Chancellor has now committed her own act of civil disobedience.  I wonder if there will be calls to prosecute her.  To the best of my knowledge, the law that forbade removal of monuments did not specify the sanctions for those who broke it.  The Gordian knot of the statue was always there to be undone by Folt; it always seemed it would be a trade of her breaking the law in return for losing her job.  She waited a long time–perhaps until the very last moment–to take that step.  But surely there will be those on the right who think her losing her job is not punishment enough.

Now is not the time, it seems to me, to repine over what could or should have been.  Instead, we should accept where things currently stand and, as a campus, stand braced to fight back against any retaliatory actions coming from the BOG.  Reviling the BOG or speculating about what it has or will do is also not very useful in my view.  But we should be clear that BOG is not in our corner and that its actions must be carefully monitored and steadily resisted.

In the meantime, all honor is due to Maya Little and her many allies.  They forced the issue.  Resolute action triumphed over dithering.  What a lovely, perfectly expressive, word: dithering.

Broken America

At the MLA Convention, I picked up a book from Penguin with the title Tales of Two Americas: Stories of Inequality in a Divided Nation, edited by John Freeman.  The book collects various vignettes, along with some poems and longer essays, on life in these Untied States by a set of novelists and poets.  They are almost completely free of attempts to generalize; instead, they just focus in on particular stories set in particular places, almost all of them (reflecting their writers’ own lives) in cities.  They are consistently well-written and moving.

In his introduction, Freeman writes:  “America is broken.  You don’t need a fistful of statistics to know this.  You just need eyes and ears and stories.  Walk around any American city and evidence of the shattered compact with citizens will present itself.  There you will see broken roads, overloaded schools, police forces on edge, clusters and sometimes whole tent cities of homeless people camped in eyeshot of shopping districts that are beginning to resemble ramparts of wealth rather than stores for all.  Thick glass windows and security guards stand between aspirational goods and the people outside . . .” (x).

I don’t know why such a stark statement of the case should shock me.  And shock isn’t exactly the right word anyway—unless it is the shock of recognition.  Still, there are the multiple ways we all find everyday to evade this knowledge, the ways we carry on our normal lives and try to ignore the fact that our politicians refuse to face up to even the most glaring of our nation’s problems, and that our media/culture never focuses on anything substantive, and that our elites work hard to make things worse even as they spin tales about how they are making things better.  We think of emergencies of the past—the Depression, World War II—and imagine a nation actually focused on the real issues and determined to roll up its sleeves to address them.

Maybe that’s a fantasy, but FDR (for all his faults) did things—and he had a solid majority urging him to do those things.  Today, instead, a strong minority (and one that has power beyond its numbers due to gerrymandering and the undemocratic Senate) aims to take away the healthcare subsidies and food stamps that are just about the last meager help offered to the most destitute.  There appears to be an absolute refusal to even acknowledge the suffering at the bottom of our society.  And it is that refusal, along with the fact of the suffering, that marks America as broken.  The old conundrum of poverty amidst plenty stalks the land.  How can we be so rich and so mean at the same time?  How is it that we use our resources so foolishly?