Historian Walter Scheidel from Stanford University writes in today's NYT:
In the Americas, Spain’s conquistadores faced similar challenges. In what was the most horrific pandemic in all of history, unleashed as soon as Columbus made landfall in the Caribbean, smallpox and measles decimated Indigenous societies across the Western Hemisphere. The conquistadores’ advance was expedited by this devastation, and the invaders swiftly rewarded themselves with enormous estates and whole villages of peons. For a while, heavy-handed enforcement of wage controls set by the Viceroyalty of New Spain kept the surviving workers from reaping any benefits from the growing labor shortage. But when labor markets were finally opened up after 1600, real wages in central Mexico tripled.
None of these stories had a happy ending for the masses. When population numbers recovered after the plague of Justinian, the Black Death and the American pandemics, wages slid downward and elites were firmly back in control. Colonial Latin America went on to produce some of the most extreme inequalities on record. In most European societies, disparities in income and wealth rose for four centuries all the way up to the eve of World War I. It was only then that a new great wave of catastrophic upheavals undermined the established order, and economic inequality dropped to lows not witnessed since the Black Death, if not the fall of the Roman Empire.
In looking for illumination from the past on our current pandemic, we must be wary of superficial analogies. Even in the worst-case scenario, Covid-19 will kill a far smaller share of the world’s population than any of these earlier disasters did, and it will touch the active work force and the next generation even more lightly. Labor won’t become scarce enough to drive up wages, nor will the value of real estate plummet. And our economies no longer rely on farmland and manual labor.
Yet the most important lesson of history endures. The impact of any pandemic goes well beyond lives lost and commerce curtailed. Today, America faces a fundamental choice between defending the status quo and embracing progressive change. The current crisis could prompt redistributive reforms akin to those triggered by the Great Depression and World War II, unless entrenched interests prove too powerful to overcome.
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