IST Science and Society Lecture by Walter Scheidel

For thousands of years, economic inequality has been a defining feature of civilization. Only violent shocks have significantly reduced inequality: mass-mobilization warfare, transformative revolutions, state collapse, and catastrophic plagues. "The great leveler: violence and economic inequality from the Stone Age to the future", the IST Science and Society Lecture by Walter Scheidel, examines these processes over the long run of history, and considers the prospects of leveling in today’s more stable world.

Walter Scheidel is Dickason Professor in the Humanities, Professor of Classics and History, and Kennedy-Grossman Fellow in Human Biology at Stanford University. The author or editor of seventeen books and over 200 papers, he has worked on premodern social and economic history, historical demography, and the comparative global history of labor regimes, state formation and inequality.

Walter Scheidel will also give a talk in German at the Austrian Academy of Science. "Was reduziert Ungleichheit?" will be delivered at the "Theatersaal" on March 27, 2017.

Please register for the IST Science and Society Lecture and shuttle by March 22.

Free shuttle buses are provided to / from campus:
Regular IST Austria shuttle #242: 4:12 pm from U4 Heiligenstadt/public bus stop (return from IST Austria Campus at 6:49 pm)
Special IST Lecture shuttle: 4 pm from Schwedenplatz (return from IST Austria campus at 7 pm) – register online!