He began with the long arc of European inequality, which peaked just before the First World War after roughly four centuries of rising inequality following the Black Death. Within that period, he argued, the Thirty Years’ War was the only major interruption, illustrating his central thesis that only massive, usually violent shocks have historically produced significant levelling: mass-mobilisation warfare, communist revolution, state collapse and catastrophic pandemics. The great compression between 1914 and 1945, followed by further, gentler equalisation into the 1970s, was a semi-global phenomenon. East of the Iron Curtain it was driven by communism; in Western market economies by falling returns on capital, progressive taxation, unionisation and the post-war welfare state. Since the 1980s, however, deregulation, financialisation, automation and, above all, globalisation—which added roughly a billion low-income workers to the world economy—have reversed the trend, steadily increasing the share of income flowing to capital rather than labour.
Against this backdrop, Scheidel argued, no comparable levelling force is in sight. COVID-19 was briefly hailed as a "Scheidelian shock", but with low working-age mortality and extensive state intervention it had only a marginal effect. He nevertheless cautioned against overstating a European "inequality crisis". By international standards Europe remains comparatively equal, thanks to strong pre-distribution—collective bargaining, minimum wages and regulation—combined with redistribution, leaving top income shares consistently lower than in the United States. The key distinction, he argued, is between reducing inequality, which has historically required a major shock, and containing it, which existing institutions can achieve. Western European inequality has remained broadly stable for around twenty-five years. He was equally sceptical of optimistic accounts, such as the Swedish economist's recent Richer and More Equal, which argues that home ownership and pensions equalised wealth during the twentieth century. Those same forces, he observed, now tend to widen disparities as property values rise and private pensions become more significant.
Turning to what makes Europe distinctive, Scheidel drew on Escape from Rome. The European nation-state, he suggested, is generally a comparatively equalising form through mass education, healthcare and the extension of the franchise. Yet Europe's enduring polycentrism and fragmentation since the fall of Rome, often credited with its economic dynamism, has different implications for inequality. The long rise in inequality before 1900 and the sharp decline after 1914 were remarkably synchronised across very different European countries, and Britain's inequality profile resembles Sweden's far more closely than that of the United States. European integration has brought convergence between countries as poorer economies grew faster, but little convergence within them, with one exception: the top one per cent, whose income shares have converged across the eurozone over the past thirty years. On most other measures, countries fall into shifting clusters that follow no simple north–south, core–periphery or east–west pattern. Europe, he concluded, is doubly trapped: by global forces that, under conditions of peace and integration, favour the very richest, and by its own fragmented history, which keeps national outcomes for the wider population stubbornly idiosyncratic, leaving little scope for a single Europe-wide policy.
The discussion was wide-ranging and, as the chair remarked, unexpectedly cheerful. Asked whether his thesis also applied to gender, racial and spatial inequality, Scheidel argued that these forms have generally diminished, whereas economic inequality is uniquely "protean", proving resilient across very different political and economic systems. On the widening gap at the top, he argued that the real story lies within the one per cent itself, as billionaires give way to prospective trillionaires whose wealth is effectively beyond reach without wealth taxes that are difficult to design and enforce. Invited to identify where the broader population fares best, he pointed to Belgium and Slovenia, while cautioning that such dissimilar cases offered no transferable policy lesson. Others questioned the consequences of inequality. Scheidel doubted that inequality alone reliably destabilises societies, noting that highly unequal states have often proved durable, while accepting that it remains ethically objectionable and may indirectly fuel populism by heightening public awareness of disparities.
Further exchanges tested the limits of his framework. Participants asked whether his emphasis on structural forces left sufficient room for policy and political agency, citing Scandinavian peacetime levelling and municipal housing experiments from Berlin to Barcelona and Vienna. Scheidel acknowledged that welfare-state effects carried over from the war era and that such policies matter, while resisting any neat separation of cause and effect. Another question suggested that Western European societies had settled after the 1920s on a durable and "measured" level of inequality rather than pursuing material equality. Scheidel linked this to disillusionment with communism and to the persistence of inequality even within communist systems. Discussion also turned to inequality and democratic resilience, demographic theories that future labour shortages might reduce inequality, and a historian's challenge that Scheidel drew selectively on the past to support his thesis. He replied that he had expected to find more exceptions and had been surprised by how few there were, citing Tokugawa Japan as one of the rare cases of stable inequality without the usual causes.
Three themes brought the seminar together. First, Scheidel reaffirmed that major reductions in inequality have historically required catastrophe, and that no comparable levelling force is currently in view. Second, he recast Europe's relative equality as a success not of levelling but of containment: institutions that have held inequality broadly stable despite powerful forces pushing in the opposite direction, making Europe a "great container" rather than a "great leveler". Finally, he argued that Europe remains caught between two histories: the near-universal dynamics that concentrate wealth at the top, and its own polycentric fragmentation, which frustrates any common European response. The chair closed by wondering whether the combination of financialisation and artificial intelligence might yet open a genuinely new chapter in the long relationship between capital and labour.
By Yangyang Zhao (Events Assistant)
No comments:
Post a Comment