Some notes on pandemics and inequality

The history of society is the history of...disease?

Though it never achieved the fame of its successor, critics praised Walter Scheidel’s The Great Leveler upon its 2017 publication as a scholarly sequel to Thomas Piketty’s Capital In The Twenty-First Century. Whereas Capital sets out to relate inequality to decidedly economic factors, however — namely, growth and the rate of return on capital — Leveler …