Will the pandemic shore up inequality or bring change?

Throughout recorded history, pandemics have been effective levelers of social and economic inequality. This time, too?

As the world struggles against the current coronavirus crisis, could social and economic transformations follow as before?

Below, Stanford University historian Walter Scheidel takes on this question, looking at how disease outbreaks in the past disrupted the status quo and catalyzed change.

For example, the Black Death, the bubonic plague that tore through Europe and the Middle East from 1347 onward, led to collective bargaining and an end to feudal obligations. But these transformative changes came at a devastating cost—a third of all people in Europe and the Middle East lost their lives, Scheidel notes.

Scheidel, professor in the humanities and fellow in human biology in the School of Humanities and Sciences, is the author of The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century (Princeton University Press, 2018), an in-depth look into what he called “the four horsemen” of major economic leveling: mass mobilization warfare, transformative revolution, state collapse, and plagues.

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