It would have been nice to have a control group, true, but howya gonna do dat? We have to look at the evidence we have, and there is a fair bit of it, so we might as well take a look. I don't think the author is cherry-picking. There's nothing shocking about stability increasing organization and stratification that's hard to maintain during chaotic times. Power tends to concentrate, I think that was noted before Marx came along. And I've read books highlighting the phenomenon from a couple decades back that focused more on China and the east, as warlords rose and fell in three-century cycles. A better argument against this idea is that the article mentions that reductions in inequality continued a full thirty years after WWII, which doesn't fit the thesis all that well.
> It would have been nice to have a control group, true, but howya gonna do dat? We have to look at the evidence we have, and there is a fair bit of it, so we might as well take a look.
I totally get that, but that's no excuse for saying you have causation when you have only correlation. It's also no excuse for claiming to have proved a negative.
> I don't think the author is cherry-picking
Calling it cherry picking is generous: this is anecdotal evidence. You need more than a half dozen examples to prove a trend, and I'd prefer examples more precise than the events that occurred across an entire country over the course of decades.
To be clear, I don't question that catastrophe can reduce inequality, but I don't think it is the only thing.
Only if you assume the data have been fiddled do you have to worry about correlation not being causation; otherwise the law of large numbers applies thoroughly - if not coincidence, that leaves causation in this case. Why? Because present inequality can't be causing previous peace; and as for both being a downstream cause of something else ... well that just beggars my imagination - Descarte's Evil Genius or Aliens with a sense of humor are the only such upstream causes I can imagine. But if you can do better, I'm open.
Most eras of history consist of anecdotal evidence; ya gotta examine and play the cards you have, not those you'd prefer. You infer that you've done a lot of reading plump with evidence contradicting this without ever offering bibliography or counterexamples; but my reading, which I mentioned, supports the thesis (for example, in the East as well) (and as it happens, supports Marx in this matter.) Please raise, call, or fold.
