A correspondent recently brought Walter Scheidel’s book, The Great Leveler, into a discussion of COVID-19:

[Scheidel] argues persuasively that throughout human history plague has been one of the only four causes of significant reduction in income inequality (along with war, revolution, and state collapse). If the most dire of projections comes to pass (2.2 million deaths in the US), might that radically change our demography? People like the three of us are most likely to be among the departed. Some zip codes in Florida and Arizona would need a lot fewer mailmen. So, might Corona move the national political needle to the left? And even if demography doesn’t change things at the ballot box that much, won’t all this unavoidable reliance on government give the case for more government a boost? Might the possible persistence of Corona or a successor, make that boost even stronger?

My response:

My first reaction to your account of Scheidel’s book is that Scheidel must be some kind of ghoul. Plague, war, revolution, and state collapse (like their biblical counterparts) cause great misery (temporarily, at least) among all economic and social classes. The fact that the upper classes suffer more than the lower classes would be a consolation only to the pathologically envious among the lower classes or the economically ignorant (and self-flagellating) among the upper classes, who seem to believe that inequality arises from greed and not (in the main) differences in talents and accomplishments.

My second reaction is that Scheidel is underscoring the lesson that inequality is a natural phenomenon, whereas equality — the fool’s gold of the envious and the ignorant — can be had only at a price that no one should be willing to pay.

You’ve had the great advantage of reading the book. What say you?

The correspondent hasn’t replied to my question. Perhaps I touched a nerve; he is an affluent San Franciscan.