Black Death historian: 'A coronavirus depression could be the great leveller'

If the affliction of coronavirus has shamed us into anything, it is a vivid appreciation of just how cruelly topsy-turvy our world is. Low-paid healthcare workers, bin collectors, bus drivers and supermarket shelf stackers, not hedge fund managers or venture capitalists, have kept us from falling apart. It has taken actual disaster to expose the deep-seated social injustices and inequalities that we knew, but seemed to have forgotten, are hardwired into our economy. So could the global convulsion caused by the pandemic put us on the path to greater equality?

The Austrian economic historian Walter Scheidel argues that throughout history, from the stone age onwards, pandemic is one of the only four events capable of bringing about greater equality. War, state collapse and revolution are the other three.

In his book he showed how the Black Death in the 1300s led to the wipeout of a third of Europe’s population and massively reduced inequality by raising the price of labour. More recently, in the 20th century, two catastrophic world wars and