The great socioeconomic levelers of all time are economic depression, famine, plague, revolution, and total war. Before delving into more ancient history, let us consider the United States in the era, 1929 to 1955. There was a lot of speculation and greed acting on Wall Street (the stock market) in 1929 and the ballooning stock prices could not be sustained so the market had a nearly fatal crash. That was early beginnings of our nearly a decade long economic depression. We were led out of the depression by the drums of war and our saber rattling in the East and West. Eventually, we entered World War II on December 8, 1941, which is twelve years before my birth coincidentally. We had a vast new middle class to come out of the war with GI Bill for education setting the standard for educating a lot of returning veterans of foreign wars. Unfortunately, that robust middle class no longer exists.
In recent time famine has led to our police actions in Africa especially in Somalia which is the ancestral home of the Barbary pirates and oil tanker pirates of today. On October 3, 1993, we had a bad setback in our attempts to render food aid to the Somali starving people. We entered Mogadishu the Somali capital to rescue downed helicopter with SEAL Team 6 members and Naval flight crew. Famine in Africa has been the driving force in some African revolutions.
We are in dire economic straits due the SARS Coronavirus-19, 20 and the sickness it causes, Covid-19, which is currently plaguing our country. We also have lost a lot of our Constitutional rights because of the near marshal law we are now under.
The United States Revolutionary War which began in earnest with the signing of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, changed our socioeconomic hierarchy. After the war there were a lot of shopkeepers in business who formed a basis of our middle class. The French Revolution was a blood and gore affair also. The royalty and other aristocrats were executed. That revolution was ended when Napoleon Bonaparte stole the show and declared war on all of Europe. The October Revolution (Bolshevik Coup) of November 3-4, 1917, installed Lenin as a supreme power and was the beginning of several pogroms and the ending of Tsarists epoch in Mother Russia. Most of the dictators that followed Lenin turned out to be mass murderers and purveyors of terror.
The United States was changed dramatically by our participation in World War I and World War II. After World War II we helped rebuild Europe and Japan with our Marshall Plan. We entered an era where a large and robust middle class was a direct product of World War II.
Numerical Explorations 