Awards

• Commended for The HCSS Bookshelf (chosen by Stephan De Spiegeleire) 2017 2017
• Short-listed for 2017 Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award 2017
• Short-listed for Project Syndicate's Best Reads in 2017 (chosen by Dambisa Moyo) 2017
• Short-listed for Strategy+Business Best Business Books 2016 in Economics 2016

Overview

Are mass violence and catastrophes the only forces that can seriously decrease economic inequality? To judge by thousands of years of history, the answer is yes. Tracing the global history of inequality from the Stone Age to today, Walter Scheidel shows that it never dies peacefully. The Great Leveler is the first book to chart the crucial role of

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Reviews

One of The Wall Street Journal's What Business Leaders Read in 2017, chosen by Mohamed A. El-Erian The Great Leveler should set off loud alarm bells.... The range of evidence is breathtaking. --Timur Kuran, Foreign Affairs A readable and quirky history of economic inequality from the great apes to the modern day.... It is well worth the read. It is, in a word, gripping. --Victoria Bateman, Times Higher Education Sweeping and provocative. --New Yorker Mr Scheidel's evidence is so persuasive that readers will find themselves cheering on the Black Death as a boost to median wages. --Janan Ganesh, Financial Times Walter Scheidel's The Great Leveler is a smartly argued book.... For anybody who has ever debated issues related to inequality and their broader meaning, this book provides more than just a powerful thought experiment. --Andrew Ross Sorkin, New York Times A superb book. --Steven Pinker, Times Literary Supplement strategy+business Best Business Book of 2017 in Economics One of World's 2017 Books of the Year in Understanding the World One of Financial Times (FT.com) Best Books of 2017: Economics, chosen by Martin Wolf One of the Economist.com 2017 Books of the Year in Economics and Business Selected for The HCSS Bookshelf (chosen by Stephan De Spiegeleire) 2017 One of Project Syndicate's Best Reads in 2017 (chosen by Dambisa Moyo) One of the Microsoft Best Business Books of 2017 One of The New York Times Deal Book Business Books Worth Reading 2017 (chosen by Andrew Sorkin) One of BBC History Magazine's Books of the Year 2017 Shortlisted for the 2017 Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award Shortlisted for the 2017 Cundill History Prize, McGill University One of the CNBC 13 Best Business Books of 2017

One of The Wall Street Journal's What Business Leaders Read in 2017, chosen by Mohamed A. El-Erian Medium.com's Books of the Year 2017, chosen by Mark Koyama The Great Leveler should set off loud alarm bells.... The range of evidence is breathtaking. --Timur Kuran, Foreign Affairs A readable and quirky history of economic inequality from the great apes to the modern day.... It is well worth the read. It is, in a word, gripping. --Victoria Bateman, Times Higher Education Sweeping and provocative. --New Yorker Mr Scheidel's evidence is so persuasive that readers will find themselves cheering on the Black Death as a boost to median wages. --Janan Ganesh, Financial Times Walter Scheidel's The Great Leveler is a smartly argued book.... For anybody who has ever debated issues related to inequality and their broader meaning, this book provides more than just a powerful thought experiment. --Andrew Ross Sorkin, New York Times A superb book. --Steven Pinker, Times Literary Supplement strategy+business Best Business Book of 2017 in Economics One of World's 2017 Books of the Year in Understanding the World One of the CNBC 13 Best Business Books of 2017 One of Financial Times (FT.com) Best Books of 2017: Economics, chosen by Martin Wolf One of the Economist.com 2017 Books of the Year in Economics and Business Selected for The HCSS Bookshelf (chosen by Stephan De Spiegeleire) 2017 One of Project Syndicate's Best Reads in 2017 (chosen by Dambisa Moyo) One of the Microsoft Best Business Books of 2017 One of The New York Times Deal Book Business Books Worth Reading 2017 (chosen by Andrew Sorkin) One of BBC History Magazine's Books of the Year 2017 Shortlisted for the 2017 Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award Shortlisted for the 2017 Cundill History Prize, McGill University

One of World's 2017 Books of the Year in Understanding the World One of the CNBC 13 Best Business Books of 2017 One of The Wall Street Journal's What Business Leaders Read in 2017, chosen by Mohamed A. El-Erian One of Financial Times (FT.com) Best Books of 2017: Economics, chosen by Martin Wolf One of the Economist.com 2017 Books of the Year in Economics and Business Selected for The HCSS Bookshelf (chosen by Stephan De Spiegeleire) 2017 strategy]business Best Business Book of 2017 in Economics One of Project Syndicate's Best Reads in 2017 (chosen by Dambisa Moyo) One of the Microsoft Best Business Books of 2017 One of The New York Times Deal Book Business Books Worth Reading 2017 (chosen by Andrew Sorkin) One of BBC History Magazine's Books of the Year 2017 Shortlisted for the 2017 Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award Shortlisted for the 2017 Cundill History Prize, McGill University

In this remarkable study, [Scheidel] argues that after agriculture (and the agrarian state) was invented, elites were amazingly successful in extracting all the surplus the economy created. . . . Mr Scheidel suggests that inequality is sure to rise. We must prove him wrong. If we fail to do so, soaring inequality might slay democracy, too, in the end. --Martin Wolf, Financial Times A bold argument which . . . offers the kind of sweeping, provocative ideas that global history lends itself to well. --Matt Elton, BBC History Magazine Depressing and convincing. --The Economist Depressing and thought-provoking. --Isaac Chotiner, Slate He is a formidable global historian for whom no place or period is beyond reach. . . . Scheidel questions whether anything can prevent resurgence and persistence of inequality. --Avner Offer, Times Literary Supplement A convincing--if depressing--portrait of wealth equalization over time and across space. --Anthony Comegna, Cato Journal Mr Scheidel's evidence is so persuasive that readers will find themselves cheering on the Black Death as a boost to median wages. --Janan Ganesh, Financial Times I am greatly impressed by his ingenuity in constructing his data-sets. . . . A very brave attempt to say very important things backed up by enormous empirical research. . . . This is a fascinating, brave and important book. I recommend that you should read it. --Michael Mann, Millennium: Journal of International Studies Scheidel's excellent survey has the merit of drawing evidence from the smallest scrap--height in burial sites, records of wages or rations, differences in house sizes over time, for example. --Ben Collyer, New Scientist Try The Great Leveler, by Walter Scheidel. In this well-reviewed nonfiction book, the author argues that only catastrophes like pandemics and great, violent upheavals like world wars can ever address economic inequality. Hey, you're depressed anyway. Might as well be educated as to why. --Randi Kreiss, Long Island Herald (Summer Reading) This book will be widely read and spur a wave of critical scholarship. --Choice The Great Leveler is a fantastic piece of social science. --Mark Koyama, Public Choice A perceptive, if grim, explanation for the ever-widening socio-economic gap in America, for the growing practice of paying corporate leaders 300 or 400 times what's paid workers on the shop floor, and for the reasoning behind appointing a Cabinet filled with billionaires. who have little in common with average citizens. --Bill Mares, Vermont Public Radio The Great Leveler is a fascinating and informative book, and likely to become a classic--as a warning about our fate if we accept inequality as a law of nature. But now we know better. --Crawford Kilian, The Tyee A readable and quirky history of economic inequality from the great apes to the modern day. . . . It is well worth the read. It is, in a word, gripping. --Victoria Bateman, Times Higher Education In his remarkable new book, The Great Leveler, historian Walter Scheidel shows that . . . reducing inequality has always been a miserable business. . . . Magisterial. --Ian Morris, BBC History Magazine The current tome that has policy circles all abuzz. --Dave Neese, The Trentonian [Scheidel] draws on mountains of data to examine the social, economic and political forces that have been responsible for the growth of material inequality--and those that have reduced wealth. . . . Fascinating. --Glenn Altschuler, Huffington Post One of the most important books on geostrategic trends to have been published in some years. . . . A dark masterpiece, and everyone who thinks about global trends should read it. --Ian Morris, Stratfor A new comprehensive and compelling account of the history of inequality by Walter Scheidel suggests that the only means of substantially levelling economic outcomes have been mass mobilisation war, violent revolution, pandemics (think bubonic plagues) and state failure. --Ryan Bourne, City AM Tight labor markets shrink income inequality by causing employers to bid up the price of scarce labor, so policymakers fretting about income inequality could give an epidemic disease a try. This might be a bit extreme but if increased equality is the goal, Stanford's Walter Scheidel should be heard. His scholarship encompasses many things (classics, history, human biology) and if current events are insufficiently depressing for you, try his just-published book The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century. Judge this book by its cover, which features Albrecht Durer's woodcut 'The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.' --George Will, Washington Post A new history of wealth inequality from primitive times to the present that is provoking wide debate. --David Talbot, San Francisco Chronicle A thoroughly unsunny . . . but fascinating look at the engines of our discontent. --Kirkus A scholarly and ambitious book. --Paul Mason, The Guardian Reducing inequality by peaceful means looks harder than ever, giving Mr. Scheidel's arguments even greater resonance. --Buttonwood, Economist As a supplier of momentary relief, the Great Depression seems an unlikely candidate. . . . Yes, it brought widespread suffering and dreadful misery. But it did not bring death to millions, and in that it stands out. If that counts as relief, you can begin to imagine the scale of the woe that comes before and after. [Scheidel] puts the discussion of increased inequality found in the recent work of Thomas Piketty, Anthony Atkinson, Branko Milanovic and others into a broad historical context and examines the circumstances under which it can be reduced. --The Economist Complex societies naturally generate inequality. It has been so, argues Stanford University professor Scheidel, ever since the discovery of agriculture. Might policy ameliorate, or even reverse, the tendency towards inequality? No. In Scheidel's account the lessons of history are clear: only war, revolution, state collapse or catastrophic plague--or a combination of such disasters--destroy the wealth of the rich. I wish the argument were wrong, but suspect it is not. . . . Very powerful. --Martin Wolf, Financial Times In [Scheidel's] magisterial sociopolitical history The Great Leveler, inequality is shown as preferable to the alternative: society levelled by vast upheavals. --Aaron Reeves, Nature An astonishing tour de force. --Gregory Clark, Wall Street Journal One by one Scheidel dismisses the non-catastrophic alternatives that have been the focus of virtually every peaceful movement for social justice: democracy, the extension of the franchise, education, economic growth, social democracy, trade unionism and the welfare state. Their effects, he demonstrates, have been comparatively trivial and have never compensated for the inexorable march of inequality. --J. C. Scott, London Review of Books Sweeping and provocative. --New Yorker Mr. Scheidel's depressing view is bound to upset [those] who quite naturally might prefer to live in a world in which events might move political and social systems to figure out a more equitable way to distribute the fruits of growth without the plague, the guillotine or state collapse. --Eduardo Porter, New York Times Walter Scheidel's The Great Leveler is a smartly argued book. As you may be able to tell from the title, Mr. Scheidel makes the case that throughout history, inequality has led only to terrible things (think pandemics and wars). For anybody who has ever debated issues related to inequality and their broader meaning, this book provides more than just a powerful thought experiment. --Andrew Ross Sorkin, New York Times Shortlisted for the 2017 Cundill History Prize, McGill University Shortlisted for the 2017 Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award Selected for The HCSS Bookshelf (chosen by Stephan De Spiegeleire) 2017 strategy+business Best Business Book of 2017 in Economics One of Project Syndicate's Best Reads in 2017 (chosen by Dambisa Moyo) One of the Microsoft Best Business Books of 2017 One of The Wall Street Journal's What Business Leaders Read in 2017 One of The New York Times Deal Book Business Books Worth Reading 2017 (chosen by Andrew Sorkin) One of BBC History Magazine's Books of the Year 2017 One of the Economist.com 2017 Books of the Year in Economics and Business One of Financial Times (FT.com) Best Books of 2017: Economics, chosen by Martin Wolf One of The Wall Street Journal's What Business Leaders Read in 2017, chosen by Mohamed A. El-Erian One of the CNBC 13 Best Business Books of 2017 One of the Microsoft Best Business Books of 2017 One of World's 2017 Books of the Year in Understanding the World

Author Information

Walter Scheidel is the Dickason Professor in the Humanities, Professor of Classics and History, and a Kennedy-Grossman Fellow in Human Biology at Stanford University. The author or editor of seventeen previous books, he has published widely on premodern social and economic history, demography, and comparative history. He lives in Palo Alto, California.

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