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On March 29, 2017, IST Austria hosted Stanford University Professor Walter Scheidel for an IST Science and Society Lecture. More than 220 people convened in the Raiffeisen Lecture Hall to hear him talk about “The great leveler: violence and economic inequality from the Stone Age to the future”. With economic inequality being a defining feature of civilization for thousands of years, he examined such violent processes as mass-mobilization warfare, transformative revolutions, state collapse, and catastrophic plagues over the long run of history and considered the prospects of leveling in today’s more stable world.