{"id":15254,"date":"2017-04-18T09:00:50","date_gmt":"2017-04-18T13:00:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.Centives.net\/S\/?p=15254"},"modified":"2017-04-18T10:03:07","modified_gmt":"2017-04-18T14:03:07","slug":"the-best-way-to-reduce-inequality-chaos","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.Centives.net\/S\/2017\/the-best-way-to-reduce-inequality-chaos\/","title":{"rendered":"The Best Way To Reduce Inequality? Chaos."},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"\" src=\"http:\/\/www.Centives.net\/S\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/04\/041817_1358_TheBestWayT1.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"640\" height=\"395\" border=\"0\" \/><\/p>\n<p>The Economist reviewed &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/amzn.to\/2ok4yCv\">The Great Leveller: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century<\/a>&#8221; by Walter Scheidel:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Going back to the Stone Ages, only four things have been found to consistently reduce inequality. First, an epidemic like the Black Death.<\/li>\n<li>Second, the collapse of a state \u2013 like the end of the western Roman Empire.<\/li>\n<li>Third, a revolution, like the ones the Russians had in the 20<sup>th<\/sup> century.<\/li>\n<li>Fourth, a war of mass mobilization.<\/li>\n<li>Conversely financial crises may end up increasing inequality. Policies like land reform or debt relief were found to have little effect \u2013 unless violence was involved.<\/li>\n<li>Violence isn&#8217;t required to reduce inequality but it helps. Bombs destroy buildings and machines owned by the rich. And to fight wars governments have to tax those who have the most money.<\/li>\n<li>The comradery that wars create also drive up trade union membership, further mitigating inequality.<\/li>\n<li>All this means that inequality may only get worse. Plagues seem less likely. And in a world of nuclear weapons it&#8217;s unclear that a war of mass mobilization will ever be required.<\/li>\n<li>On the bright side while inequality within countries might march inexorably upwards, that between countries has fallen.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Read more on <a href=\"http:\/\/www.economist.com\/news\/books-and-arts\/21717801-only-catastrophe-truly-reduces-inequality-according-historical-survey-lessons\">The Economist<\/a>. Get the book <a href=\"http:\/\/amzn.to\/2ok4yCv\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Economist reviewed &#8220;The Great Leveller: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century&#8221; by Walter Scheidel: Going back to the Stone Ages, only four things have been found to consistently reduce inequality. First, an epidemic like the Black Death. Second, the collapse of a state \u2013 like the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":15253,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15254","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-daily-bulletin"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"http:\/\/www.Centives.net\/S\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/04\/041817_1358_TheBestWayT1.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.Centives.net\/S\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15254","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.Centives.net\/S\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.Centives.net\/S\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.Centives.net\/S\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.Centives.net\/S\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15254"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.Centives.net\/S\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15254\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15258,"href":"http:\/\/www.Centives.net\/S\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15254\/revisions\/15258"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.Centives.net\/S\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15253"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.Centives.net\/S\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15254"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.Centives.net\/S\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15254"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.Centives.net\/S\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15254"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}