Sunday, December 11, 2016
GOD Cares Not About Your Suffering, Only Your Ability To Overcome It
NYTimes | The
point is that delivering deep and lasting reductions in inequality may
be impossible absent catastrophic events beyond anything any of us would
wish for.
History
— from Ancient Rome through the Gilded Age; from the Russian Revolution
to the Great Compression of incomes across the West in the middle of
the 20th century — suggests that reversing the trend toward greater
concentrations of income, in the United States and across the world,
might be, in fact, nearly impossible.
That’s the bleak argument of Walter Scheidel, a professor of history at Stanford, whose new book, “The Great Leveler”
(Princeton University Press), is due out next month. He goes so far as
to state that “only all-out thermonuclear war might fundamentally reset
the existing distribution of resources.” If history is anything to go
by, he writes, “peaceful policy reform may well prove unequal to the
growing challenges ahead.”
Professor
Scheidel does not offer a grand unified theory of inequality. But
scouring through the historical record, he detects a pattern: From the
Stone Age to the present, ever since humankind produced a surplus to
hoard, economic development has almost always led to greater inequality.
There is one big thing with the power to stop this dynamic, but it’s
not pretty: violence.
The
big equalizing moments in history may not have always have the same
cause, he writes, “but they shared one common root: massive and violent
disruptions of the established order.”
By
CNu
at
December 11, 2016
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Labels: computationalism , evolution , global system of 1% supremacy , Great Filters
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