Are mass violence and catastrophes the only forces that can seriously decrease economic inequality? To judge by thousands of years of history, the answer is yes. Tracing the global history of inequality from the Stone Age to today, Walter Scheidel shows that it never dies peacefully. The Great Leveler is the first book to chart the crucial role of violent shocks in reducing inequality over the full sweep of human history around the world. The “Four Horsemen” of leveling—mass-mobilization warfare, transformative revolutions, state collapse, and catastrophic plagues—have repeatedly destroyed the fortunes of the rich. Today, the violence that reduced inequality in the past seems to have diminished, and that is a good thing. But it casts serious doubt on the prospects for a more equal future. An essential contribution to the debate about inequality, The Great Leveler provides important new insights about why inequality is so persistent—and why it is unlikely to decline anytime soon.
I joined SITA Paris in June 1978 as an engineer in the Technical Studies department which was then managed by Georges Giraudbit. After developping planning tools for the HLN and later the DTN, I led the design and implementation of the new routing algorithm of the DTN.
Later my team delivered the strategy and specification for migrating the network from airline specific protocols to open standards, and whichalso served for the RFP for the MTN.
After working on developing projects for non-airline customers, I moved to SITA Geneva in 1999, in marketing and later fiance departments.
In 2004 i left SITA to join IATA in Geneva.
With IATA I first worked on launching and developing a new business based on providing credit card payment services to travel agencies. Then I moved to IT, in charge of all data management for successfully.implementing SAP at IATA. Once that project was over I joined the Cargo department at IATA, in charge of Technical developments.
Having worked both at SITA and IATA has been a very unique experience for me!
