More tomorrow but for openers we'll visit Stanford's Walter Scheidel, last seen just yesterday in Review: "The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century".
From Inference Review, May 18, 2020:
The current pandemic is likely to increase inequality in the short term. It has already exacerbated existing inequalities of opportunity and outcome.1 In terms of physical well-being, COVID-19 has opened up a gap between those able to work from home and those exposed to potentially infectious strangers. Disadvantaged minorities in the US are experiencing higher case fatality rates. With respect to income and financial security, the burden of lockdowns and distancing has been very unevenly distributed across different sectors of the economy. In April, average hourly private sector wages in the US rose almost 5 percent simply because so many lower-paid workers had just lost their jobs.2 Younger workers have been disproportionately hurt. And school closures and the shift to online instruction have separated students with access to broadband internet connections and dedicated computers from those without.
All of this has widened multiple fault lines within society: not only between the financially stable and those living in precarity, but also between white-collar and blue-collar workers, between different ethnic and racial groups, and between the generations. Given the severity of the economic downturn, these amplified inequalities are likely to persist.3 If investment portfolios recover while employment lags, these gaps could grow even further.
These developments stand in marked contrast to the equalizing consequences of some of the greatest epidemics of the past. The Black Death is the most famous case, a plague pandemic that struck Europe and the Middle East in the late Middle Ages. It killed so many people—perhaps as many as one in every three Europeans—that labor became scarce and surviving workers commanded higher wages and came to enjoy higher living standards. At the same time, propertied classes suffered as demand for the land they owned fell and operating costs rose. Similar leveling processes occurred in the great plague pandemic at the end of antiquity and in the massive outbreaks of smallpox and measles that the arrival of the Spanish conquerors inflicted upon the indigenous population of the Americas.4
Today, these dynamics no longer apply. Even in the worst-case scenario, mortality from COVID-19 will be dramatically lower than on those previous occasions. No labor shortages will ensue. Modern technology stands ready to curtail workers’ bargaining power. Even if mortality were much higher (as it might be in a future pandemic), automation and AI would help offset contractions of the human labor force. For these reasons alone, we ought to steer clear of facile analogies between past pandemics and the present crisis.5
This is not to say that history offers no lessons at all. In the longer term, COVID-19’s impact on inequality will be critically mediated by policymaking, just as it had been in the past. In the wake of the Black Death, political power relations determined both workers’ ability to bargain for better conditions and the elites’ ability to resist such demands. As a result, actual outcomes varied by country. The same logic applies to modern societies: in the end, policy choices will have a greater influence on the distribution of resources than the pandemic as such.6
The current crisis opens up political space for redistributive reform that ensures access to healthcare, cushions workers from underemployment and precarity, and may revive more progressive taxation to finance mushrooming deficits. One might conjecture that in the absence of effective relief measures, the economic fallout from the crisis might destabilize the social and political order. This in turn could prompt more radical and possibly violent challenges to plutocratic privilege.
But just how likely is it that the pandemic will bring about leveling by either peaceful or violent means? The risk of disorder merits attention because in the past, the most violent ruptures were often the ones that reduced inequality the most. Next to the worst plagues, these events included the collapse of states, which took down elites, the two world wars, and the great communist revolutions. Nothing even remotely comparable is on the horizon.7...MUCH MORE (come for the exposition, stay for the footnotes!)
Even though some commentators have already raised the specter of coming social unrest, the historical record speaks against such scenarios, at least as far as high-income countries are concerned.8 No society with an average real per capita GDP of more than a few thousand dollars has ever experienced societal breakdown or civil war.9 The Great Recession of 2008 did not trigger domestic conflict: anti-G20 summit protests and the Occupy movement in the US remained utterly inconsequential, and even Greece avoided major strife in the face of harsh austerity measures. In both Europe and the US, violent crime continued to decline....
