The Only Thing, Historically, That's Curbed Inequality: Catastrophe (theatlantic.com)

ColdWetDog writes: The Atlantic has an interesting article on how societies have decreased economic equality. From the report: "Calls to make America great again hark back to a time when income inequality receded even as the economy boomed and the middle class expanded. Yet it is all too easy to forget just how deeply this newfound equality was rooted in the cataclysm of the world wars. The pressures of total war became a uniquely powerful catalyst of equalizing reform, spurring unionization, extensions of voting rights, and the creation of the welfare state. During and after wartime, aggressive government intervention in the private sector and disruptions to capital holdings wiped out upper-class wealth and funneled resources to workers; even in countries that escaped physical devastation and crippling inflation, marginal tax rates surged upward. Concentrated for the most part between 1914 and 1945, this 'Great Compression' (as economists call it) of inequality took several more decades to fully run its course across the developed world until the 1970s and 1980s, when it stalled and began to go into reverse. This equalizing was a rare outcome in modern times but by no means unique over the long run of history. Inequality has been written into the DNA of civilization ever since humans first settled down to farm the land. Throughout history, only massive, violent shocks that upended the established order proved powerful enough to flatten disparities in income and wealth. They appeared in four different guises: mass-mobilization warfare, violent and transformative revolutions, state collapse, and catastrophic epidemics. Hundreds of millions perished in their wake, and by the time these crises had passed, the gap between rich and poor had shrunk."

Slashdot reader ColdWetDog notes: "Yep, the intro is a bit of a swipe at Trump. But this should get the preppers and paranoids in the group all wound up. Grab your foil! Run for the hills!"

Comments

Re:Rose tinted glasses

[WarJolt]

You know what else we had coming out of the world wars? Incredible advancements in technology. Yes, technology levels the playing field. That's the /. nerd slant.

Re:Rose tinted glasses

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree and I'd like to add another historical perspective that explains why only disaster ever fixed anything.
What made early Roman society great was its strong plebs and the farmer / craftsman who fought for his country. But as the Roman state expanded and turned into an empire, the labour market was flooded by slave labour, the foundation of the societal pyramid lost its value and eventually all land and wealth passed into the hands of the by now proverbial one percent. Populist politicians, i.e. people who were trying to fix the situation, got murdered because wealth is power and the section of society that could afford to pay for murder and get away with it unsurprisingly didn't consider society as something needing to be fixed. Eventually this set the stage for a seemingly endless series of civil wars, which the rich won. A lot has been written about this, but in my opinion they won in large part because they were rich, which is depressing because that doesn't bide well for our future. A lot of the later civil wars, which severely weakened the Roman state, were essentially about the rich versus the poor, albeit not always about wealth redistribution per se. For example one of the bigger ones was about issues like the poor wanting safety from viking-like raids versus the rich wanting imperial control.
There are plenty of examples in history, where only independence wars or complete collapse of society (eventually) fixes the problem.
So in my view, the reason that only disaster ever fixes anything, is because so far every time people tried to fix it in another way, they were thwarted by the very powerful rich elite.