The Great Leveler summary

Today we hear plenty of talk about the one percent of the population controlling the majority of the money available in the world, but that wasn’t always the case.

Long ago, land was divided according to an egalitarian system. One of the earliest civilizations in written history were the Sumerians. They settled in South Mesopotamia – known today as Iraq – around 5,000 years ago. This ancient society shared most of the farmland amongst its many families. A male representative from each family would be the decision maker; dividing equal shares of the profits generated from farming.

In the case of an economic crisis or epidemic illness, poor people are particularly afraid of the consequences such events can have on their lives. While it’s interesting to note that everyone – regardless of how well off or not they may be – suffers from such devastating circumstances, poor people would actually be worse off if those catastrophes didn’t happen.

Throughout time, inequality in Europe has been prevented by both the collapse of the state and the plague.

Today, most people wouldn’t consider Japan an imperial power, but that wasn’t always the case.

Looking back a few decades to WWII, the Japanese Empire was a force to be reckoned with. Entering the war in 1941, the country quickly established its dominance in the Pacific. Despite unsuccessfully conquering China, Japan grew its empire – which had been expanding since the late nineteenth century – to cover land from the Philippines to Burma and Papua New Guinea to the Aleutian Islands.

So far, we’ve seen that war between nations can result in the unexpected curbing of rising inequality. But it can also take place during civil conflicts, such as the Russian revolution of 1917.

At that time, the Russian Empire – headed by Czar Nicholas II – was heavily involved in WWI. A total of 12 million Russian soldiers had been recruited, and by its end, 2 million had died, with 5 million injured and 2.5 million captured.

Today there aren’t many positive connotations associated with the government of Somalia, which is widely regarded to be a failed state. But this is a simplistic and one-sided perspective. While it’s true that the country is in a bad condition, there’s also the possibility that things can turn around.

In 1991, Somalia’s government collapsed completely. The dictator Mohamed Siad Barre was thrown out of office and the country fractured; regions and communities began operating independently of a central government. Over time, a large portion of the country fell into the hands of warlords, militias – and in some cases – foreign soldiers. A civil war ensued and raged for five years, but even after it ended the living conditions in Somalia remained very poor. Studies on poverty in Arab countries – which look at factors such as infant mortality rates and access to food, education and other basic necessities – consistently highlighted Somalia as one of the worst countries in which to live.

For some time, democracy has been viewed as the best system of government by the West; the belief being that equality can be achieved through democratic means.

But democracy is not the answer to the problem of inequality. We believe that spreading power beyond the head of state to the general population will result in equality, but the fact is there’s no conclusive evidence to support this belief.

So what now? Do we sit back and wait for the third world war to come knocking at our door, or for global warming to bring us natural disasters so that we can start seeing some improvements to inequality?

In the past, disasters often counteracted the wealth and power of the elite, but nowadays there are alternatives to bring about change.