Sublime

The historian Walter Scheidel identifies “Four Horsemen of Leveling”: mass-mobilization warfare, transformative revolution, state collapse, and lethal pandemics. In addition to obliterating wealth (and, in the communist revolutions, the people who owned it), the four horsemen reduce inequality by killing large numbers of workers, driving up the

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Modern inequality is at record highs and, in some cases, even eclipses the extreme inequality of the ancient past. The Roman Empire, notorious for its unabashed plutocracy, doesn’t hold a candle to modern imbalances. In 2012, the economist Branko Milanovic estimated that the businessman Carlos Slim, a Mexican billionaire, had an annual income that

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