A decimated workforce created upward pressures on wages. The plague used to kill between 30 percent and 60 percent of those infected, targeting primarily adults in the prime of life who left behind widows and orphans. To understand why COVID-19 is entrenching rather than easing inequality, a look at the epidemiological features of this coronavirus and the plague is useful. To add insult to injury, in June American billionaires were 20 percent richer than at the start of the shutdown in the United States in mid-March. economy lost more jobs than over the entire Great Recession, with workers with less than college education taking the largest hit. In their attempt to flatten epidemiological curves, governments across the world have upended the livelihoods of the least advantaged. If anything, the current pandemic is exacerbating inequality. Yet COVID-19 looks like the great exception to the well-established historical pattern. As others have pointed out, further pandemics, revolutions, and wars have been the main cause whenever inequality has fallen since. That pandemic wiped out an estimated one-third of the European population between 13, causing the richest 10 percent of the population to lose their grip on between 15 percent and 20 percent of overall wealth. But the most devastating one was, with no doubt, the Black Death. Recurring epidemic waves lasted for decades or even centuries. The standard historical case in point is the bubonic plague, given the disease’s horrifying symptoms and its continuous recurrence over the last 1,500 years. Epidemics usually emanated from Africa or Asia and then spread to Europe and America with the help of globe-trotting merchants. Whereas in a war, there are political and military hierarchies that determine the likelihood of being deployed to the battlefield and so the probability of dying in combat, killer pathogens have been blind to wealth, class, age, gender, and race. At least in theory, viruses, bacteria, and germs are perfect equalizers. Long stretches of high inequality have typically been followed by bursts of violent compression, owing to cataclysmic events like wars, revolutions, natural disasters, and, yes, pandemics. Going further back in history-from pharaonic Egypt to tsarist Russia, Victorian England, the Ottoman Empire, and China under the Qing dynasty-the pattern has been the same: Wealth tends to concentrate in the hands of a privileged elite.Īlthough inequality has been a persistent feature of civilization, it has not been constant. In the United States, for example, income inequality is just as high now as it was in the years leading up to the 1929 stock market crash. Yet while today’s level of income inequality is alarming, it is hardly exceptional by historical standards. Rising inequality is widely regarded as the defining economic challenge of our time. One of those effects is that disasters like pandemics have typically led to a reduction of inequality. Still, the worry surrounding the news offers a useful opportunity to reflect on some of the lesser understood effects of disease outbreaks-now and in history. And unlike in the past (and unlike the COVID-19 pandemic today), bubonic plague is a well-understood disease that can be effectively treated with antibiotics when it is contracted. Every year, there are a few hundred cases across the world-most recently in Inner Mongolia. To be sure, this is not the start of a new calamity.
In a year already defined by an unprecedented pandemic, this week California confirmed a case of the bubonic plague-the horrific infectious disease that devastated Europe for centuries.
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