Growing inequality has driven, both indirectly and indirectly, the wave of populist protest that has swept through the developed world in the last few years. For a brief period of some fifty years – from the 1930s to the 1980s – inequality diminished and the middle class grew across the developed world. But the last thirty years tell a different story, as the top 1% takes an increasing share of global wealth and the working poor get less and less. 

Can political leaders keep this promise? Can they narrow the income gaps? Can they create the hundreds of thousands of well-paying and secure jobs that they have promised? Can they reduce the disruptive force of inequality?

Walter Scheidel says – No. In his provocative new book, The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century, he sweeps us through thousands of years of history and comes to a very pessimistic conclusion. He tells us that inequality never dies peacefully.

Host Janice Stein spoke with Dickason Professor in the Humanities, Professor of Classics and History, and a Kennedy-Grossman Fellow in Human Biology at Stanford University about the future of inequality.