Will the Virus Make Inequality Worse?

The Great Depression changed the social order—but the rich got even richer after the Great Recession

- BY Cristina Lindblad

A recession is no picnic. A financial crisis leaves wounds that last for decades. A pandemic, though, can sow a unique kind of chaos.

The Black Death took a highly stratified medieval society and turned it upside down. With 75 million dead, Europe’s wealthy landowners couldn’t find enough people to tend their fields. When peasants—the essential workers of the day— demanded higher pay, the elites of the 14th century fought back with punitive laws, forced labor, and taxes. Even so, wages for the lowliest workers soared. In rural England, they doubled.

As epidemics go, the novel coronavirus is a relative lightweight—one that has nevertheless killed more than 200,000 people worldwide so far. Yet it’s accomplished something not seen in far deadlier outbreaks of the past: a simultaneous shutdown of much of the world’s commerce. No one can predict the long-term effects of a pandemic hitting an economy this complex and globalized.

For now, the most obvious guide to what comes next isn’t the Black Death, which precipitated the demise of European feudalism, but the Great Recession, which had more or less the opposite effect. In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, inequality soared to heights not seen since the early part of the last century. At first, elites feared that much of their wealth would be wiped out in a globally synchronized market crash, à la 1929. But central banks pumped out trillions of dollars as monetary stimulus, markets recovered, and what followed may have been the best decade in history for the superwealthy.