Events

Power to the people

Monday 27 January, 6.30pm – 8.00pm. In-person and online event. Hong Kong Theatre, Clement House.

Speakers:
Dr Danny Sriskandarajah, Chief Executive, New Economics Foundation and Visiting Senior Fellow, LSE III
Jo Swinson, Director, Partners for a New Economy (P4NE) and Visiting Professor, Cranfield University 
Lysa John, Executive Director, Atlantic Institute 

Chair:
Professor Armine Ishkanian, Executive Director, Atlantic Fellows for Social and Economic Equity and Professor, Department of Social Policy, LSE

In 2024, two billion people headed to the polls in some 50 countries around the world. But the drama of these elections risks obscuring just how fragile the foundations of democracy have become. A political system that is geared towards short-term wins, run by politicians that few of us trust, is failing to address complex global problems. Many of us feel disempowered, disillusioned and distrustful.

Join this free talk to hear Danny Sriskandarajah discuss his new book Power to the People. Drawing on his extensive experience in leading civil society organisations around the globe, he sets out his radical blueprint for change. From giving democracy a participatory makeover to public ownership of social media spaces, and from re-energising co-operatives to creating a people’s chamber at the United Nations, he presents a range of inspiring ideas for how we can reclaim our power and change the world.

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Political economy of urban land grabbing in India: local developers, fragmented development and perils of governance
Inequalities Seminar Series 

Tuesday 28 January 2025, 12.45pm – 1.45pm. In-person and online event. Room 2.06, Cheng Kin Ku Building. 

Speaker:
Dr Ajay Kumar-Gautam, Sir Ratan Tata Visiting Fellow, LSE III

In India, the involvement of local developers in land grabbing strategies and the ensuing effects within informal land markets have received limited research attention. The present study investigates the incidence of land gabbing and development by local developers in the distinctive informal land markets of the Delhi National Capital Region (NCR). The research entails the conduct of personal conversations, semi-structured interviews, and group discussions with land market actors in two key locations: Gautam Buddha Nagar and Ghaziabad. The function of each actor is examined, including informants, brokers, developers, sellers, financiers, witnesses, buyers, government officials and politicians. The analysis reveals a strategic behaviour among local land developers, who are systemically buying vacant parcels of land as investments and for housing development (mostly unlawful and illegal) through land dispositions. The results indicate that the construction of dwellings, followed by land gabbing, has begun to influence land prices, which remain more affordable than the formal land market. Furthermore, the analysis underscores the intricate and interpersonal relationships that local developers have with the agricultural landowning castes in the neighbouring villages and the state apparatus. By circumventing the state's regulatory authority over land transactions, this cooperative partnership significantly influences the proliferation of illegal colonies and property prices. The case underscores the necessity of a comprehensive understanding of the relationships among stakeholders, regulatory frameworks, and market dynamics to effectively address the complexities associated with governance, development and informal land markets.

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(De)Mobilizing effects of misinformation: evidence from Brazil
Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 4 February 2025, 12.45pm – 1.45pm. In-person and online event. Room 2.06, Cheng Kin Ku Building. 

Speaker:
Dr Fred Batista, Associate Professor, Department of Political Science and Public Administration University of North Carolina, Charlotte

Misinformation is a growing concern among the public and policymakers. Yet we still lack a clear understanding of its political effects. As misinformation often contains politically motivated content that sends unambiguous signals in favor of or against a group, it may increase the salience of political identities and make individuals more oriented toward partisan goals. Consequently, misinformation may be effective at mobilizing voters. We assess this argument using novel descriptive and experimental data from Brazil. We find that, while misinformation is connected to online and offline engagement, this relationship does not follow the patterns anticipated by conventional wisdom. First, we analyze 4.1 million posts of Brazilian politicians across different social media platforms and observe that posts with misinformation indeed tend to receive more engagement from their social media audiences. However, two online survey experiments show that, when misinformation reaches the general public, it primarily lowers willingness to act in favor of the group targeted by the posts. All in all, misinformation may be more likely associated with silencing than with raising voices in public debates and elections.

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Does class inequality still matter? The Great British Class Survey ten years on

Tuesday 4 February, 6.30pm – 8.00pm. In-person and online event. Old Theatre, Old Building.

Speakers:
Zarah Sultana, Independent Member of Parliament for Coventry South
Aditya Chakrabortty, Senior Economics Commentator, The Guardian
Prof Mike Savage, Wealth, Elites and Tax Justice Research Programme Leader, LSE III and Martin White Professor of Sociology, Department of Sociology, LSE
Clare MacGillivray, Director, Making Rights Real and Atlantic Fellow for Social and Economic Equity

Chair:
Dr Faiza Shaheen, Distinguished Policy Fellow, LSE III

It is ten years since the seminal Social Class in the 21st Century was published. The research was undertaken by a team of sociologists from across the country over several years and reignited the conversation about the British class system amongst academics, the media, politicians and most importantly the great British public. It composed seven classes that reflected the unequal distribution of three kinds of capital: economic (inequalities in income and wealth); social (the different kinds of people we know) and cultural (the ways in which our leisure and cultural preferences are exclusive). Ten years on we will revisit the findings, ask if the trends have changed, why class seems to have fallen off the agenda, and what we can do to build solidarity in this new political era.

This free public event will be held at LSE, where Social Class in the 21st Century was first launched in November 2015. This event will again question and open the continued difficult debate about the British Class system. Our panel will ask - does social class still matter in Britain in the 21st century?

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International Workshop on Perceptions of Inequality

The Perceptions of Inequality Research Programme at the International Inequalities Institute at LSE is delighted to announce an in-person workshop on perceptions of inequality, taking place on 20th May 2025 at LSE.  

We are accepting extended abstracts or full papers on any aspects of perceptions of inequality.

Deadline for the submission of papers or extended abstracts is 15th February, 2025.

Papers that are presented at the workshop will be considered for inclusion in a special issue of the Journal of Economic Behaviour and Organization.

In case of any questions, please email j.t.dirksen@lse.ac.uk 

POLINEQUAL: Exploring representations of economic inequality and their implications in three European welfare regimes
Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 11 February 2025, 12.45pm – 1.45pm. In-person and online event. Room 2.06, Cheng Kin Ku Building. 

Speakers:
Professor Sonja Zmerli, Professor, Sciences Po Grenoble - UGA
Daniel Walsh, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Sciences Po Grenoble - UGA

The ERC funded research project POLINEQUAL has set out to better understand the causes and mechanisms that motivate citizens to respond to economic inequality. As a conceptual baseline, we posit that 1) perceptions of economic inequality are biased as they are mediated by individual justice evaluations and, therefore, do only partially mirror objective levels of economic inequality, 2) perceptions of economic inequality can also be informed by facts, ideological cues, media representations or personal heuristics, 3) perceptions and evaluations are malleable to the extent that economic inequality is being politicized in the public sphere and becomes politically salient, and 4) politically salient perceptions and evaluations of economic inequality evoke individual emotional, attitudinal and behavioural responses. Above all, perceptions of economic inequality, and justice evaluations that instil them, are assumed to be, in part, also subject to social norms that are deeply rooted in the ‘moral economies’ of welfare regimes.

To empirically address these assumptions, POLINEQUAL's comparative research design, encompassing the 'prototypical' welfare regimes of France, Great Britain and Sweden, is based on a mixed-methods approach, organized in different stages and combining data derived from online focus group discussions, discourse and content analysis of political party programmes and the mass media, representative online surveys and experimental framing studies. During our 'tour d'horizon', we will substantiate POLINEQUAL's theoretical reasonings, outline cross-country similarities and differences of individual inequality heuristics at different levels of personal proximity, demonstrate whether and in which way political parties refer to economic inequality and redistribution, and report on the breadth and political consequences of emotions elicited by different representations of economic inequality.

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The historical incarceration penalty in the U.S.
Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 18 February 2025, 12.45pm – 1.45pm. In-person and online event. Room 2.06, Cheng Kin Ku Building. 

Speaker:
Dr Ellora Derenoncourt, Assistant Professor of Economics at Princeton University

The United States has both the largest prison population and one of the highest incarceration rates worldwide. Furthermore, the U.S.’s reliance on incarceration in criminal justice is not only a modern phenomenon but dates back to the late 19th century. An active literature seeks to understand the social and economic impacts of this policy, including the labor market effects of incarceration, reaching mixed conclusions. In this paper, we trace the labor market trajectories of incarcerated vs. non-incarcerated individuals in the U.S. during the first major increase in incarceration, from 1870-1940. Using data on millions of historical inmates from the Census and state prison ledgers, we provide new descriptive statistics on the evolution of incarceration. We then estimate the incarceration penalty, the difference in labor market outcomes such as occupation, earnings, employment, and labor force participation between incarcerated and non-incarcerated men across this full time period. We find a penalty in occupation-based income scores ranging from 6-14% over the period, with the penalty increasing over time as incarceration rates increased. Using samples linked back to their childhood census and a linked sample of brothers, we show the penalty remains even after controlling for observed and unobserved measures of family background. Finally, we estimate a pseudo-event study around the year of prison admission for state prisoners linked to Census and show that labor market trajectories prior to incarceration cannot explain the penalty

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Wealth, poverty and enduring inequality: let's talk wealtherty

Wednesday 19 February 2025 6.00pm - 7.30pm. In-person and online event. Room 1.08, Marshall Building. 

Speakers:
Dr Sarah Kerr, Research Fellow in Wealth, Elites and Tax Justice Research Programme, LSE III
Professor Armine Ishkanian, Executive Director, Atlantic Fellows for Social and Economic Equity and Professor, Department of Social Policy, LSE 
Dr Rajiv Prabhakar, Senior Lecturer in Personal Finance at the Open University
Frank Soodeen, Director of Communications and Public Engagement, Joseph Rowntree Foundation

Chair:
Professor Mike Savage, Wealth, Elites and Tax Justice Research Programme Leader, LSE III and Martin White Professor of Sociology, Department of Sociology, LSE

Join us for the launch of Sarah Kerr's new book, in which she undertakes an experiment. Starting from the premise that continuing to centre poverty encourages researchers and policymakers alike to 'look down' she contributes to a strand of social policy and sociological literature that asks: what happens if we 'look up'?

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Peak Injustice: solving Britain's inequality crisis
Co-hosted with LSE Department of Sociology  

Monday 24 February 2025 6.30pm - 8.00pm. In-person and online event. Old Theatre, Old Building. 

Speakers: 
Professor Danny Dorling, Halford Mackinder Professor of Geography, University of Oxford
Dr Danny Sriskandarajah, Chief Executive, New Economics Foundation and Visiting Senior Fellow, LSE III
Professor Kitty Stewart, Professor of Social Policy and Associate Director of the Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion (CASE)
Polly Toynbee, Journalist and writer 

Chair:
Professor Aaron Reeves, Professor of Sociology, LSE  

Why has absolute deprivation continued to grow in the UK? What role does high inequality play in understanding how we have got to the point of peak injustice?

With child mortality rising in the UK and a majority of parents with three or more children going to bed hungry, Danny Dorling looks to the future, highlighting the challenges ahead and identifying solutions for change.

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Using microdata and microsimulations to estimate historical income distributions at high frequency: Italy, 1861-2021
Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 4 March 2025, 12.45pm – 1.45pm. In-person and online event. Room 2.06, Cheng Kin Ku Building. 

Speaker:
Professor Giovanni Vecchi, Professor of Economics, University of Rome Tor Vergata

This seminar presents a novel approach to reconstructing high-frequency historical income distributions, by combining an extensive historical microdata collection with modern microsimulation techniques. The Historical Household Budgets (HHB) project’s dataset is the largest historical micro-dataset assembled for post-Unification Italy, spanning 1861-2021 (to date, it comprises 260,000 observations, harmonized to modern survey data). The proposed approach involves constructing nationally representative datasets from historical household budgets for benchmark years, and exploring the use of static microsimulation models to fill in the gaps. This produces annual estimates of the distribution of household income, yielding not only estimates of inequality and absolute poverty indices at unprecedented temporal resolution, but also an account of gains and losses across the whole distribution. We argue that this method enables a more nuanced understanding of the distributive effects of both systemic and idiosyncratic shocks that took place in the past, revealing previously unobservable medium- and short-run distributional dynamics.

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The Political Consequences of Exposure to Inequality on Social Media: A Randomised Field Experiment 

Wednesday 5 March 2025, 12.30pm - 1.30pm. In-person and online event. Room 1.15, Cheng Kin Ku Building. 

Speaker:
Dr Melissa Sands, Assistant Professor of Politics and Data Science, Department of Government, LSE

Join us for this seminar in which Dr Melissa Sands investigates the impact of exposure to inequality on political behaviour. 

People experience economic inequality through social media. Services like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, offer users a curated window into the lives of the wealthy. The effects of this digital exposure to inequality on political behaviour are not yet understood. To fill this gap we use a placebo-controlled field experiment that randomly assigns college students to follow the Instagram account of a fellow student enjoying a luxury Spring Break vacation. The experiment, conducted at both an elite private university and a non-elite public university, reveals limited effects of the treatment on students’ political attitudes and behaviours. Suggestive evidence emerges, however, of a suppressive effect: the treatment appears to reduce participants’ willingness to act in support of taxing large inheritances, mostly notably among students from historically-disenfranchised groups. While experiencing inequality online appears to have limited effects overall, it has the potential to suppress willingness to act in favour of redistribution.

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Leaving Legacies and Liabilities: The Distribution of Wealth at Death
Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 11 March 2025, 12.45pm – 1.45pm. In-person and online event. Room 2.06, Cheng Kin Ku Building. 

Speaker:
Dr Franziska Disslbacher, Assistant Professor, Research Institute Economics of Inequality and the Department Socioeconomics, WU Vienna University of Economics and Business

Using novel administrative data from the compulsory probate process on terminal wealth in Vienna, we find that Gini indices of wealth inequality at death exceed unity, with 20–30% of decedents leaving behind debt. Investigating individual-level and institutional drivers of this distribution, we observe that the determinants of terminal wealth distribution differ from those of wealth inequality among the living. Life-cycle effects have limited explanatory power. In contrast, bequest motives are associated with higher wealth, and a marginal increase in the share of decedents who express preferences for post-mortem resource allocation reduces inequality. Homeownership is positively correlated with higher wealth (the reverse is true for care-home residency), although housing wealth does not benefit those at the bottom of the distribution. Finally, means-tested long-term care transfers significantly amplify terminal wealth inequality.

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Lived experiences and identities of welfare claimants: can Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques assist in uncovering social narratives?
Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 18 March 2025, 12.45pm – 1.45pm. In-person and online event. Room 2.06, Cheng Kin Ku Building. 

Speaker:
Professor Jane Elliott, Professorial Research Fellow, LSE III

This seminar presents a novel approach to reconstructing high-frequency historical income distributions, by combining an extensive historical microdata collection with modern microsimulation techniques. The Historical Household Budgets (HHB) project’s dataset is the largest historical micro-dataset assembled for post-Unification Italy, spanning 1861-2021 (to date, it comprises 260,000 observations, harmonized to modern survey data). The proposed approach involves constructing nationally representative datasets from historical household budgets for benchmark years, and exploring the use of static microsimulation models to fill in the gaps. This produces annual estimates of the distribution of household income, yielding not only estimates of inequality and absolute poverty indices at unprecedented temporal resolution, but also an account of gains and losses across the whole distribution. We argue that this method enables a more nuanced understanding of the distributive effects of both systemic and idiosyncratic shocks that took place in the past, revealing previously unobservable medium- and short-run distributional dynamics.

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Inequalities Seminar with Irene Guijt (title TBC)
Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 25 March 2025, 12:45pm – 1:45pm. In-person and online event. Room 2.06, Cheng Kin Ku Building. 

Speaker:
Dr Irene Guijt, Head of Research, Oxfam GB

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Inequalities Seminar with Leili Sreberny-Mohammadi (title TBC)
Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 1 April 2025, 12.45pm – 1.45pm. In-person and online event. Room 2.06, Cheng Kin Ku Building. 

Speaker:
Dr Leili Sreberny-Mohammadi, LSE Fellow in Culture and Society, Department of Sociology

A multi-sited ethnography of the art world may include art world actors working across various professions, such as artist or dealer, and in different spaces, such as studios and galleries. The art world is informal but also very hierarchal, with power differences baked into various kinds of events such as private dinners and VIP tiers at art fairs. Art collectors occupy the top tier of this world. What methods can researchers employ to capture the lifeworld’s of art world VIPS, in the ethnographic tradition? In this talk I will discuss the various methods I have employed to “study up” in the art world and the implications and limitations for ethnography rooted in participant observation. I consider the complex researcher position in regards to wealth, the practical impact of limited research budgets and the potential strategies for occupying the spaces where art world interlocutors gather. I propose a “methodological wealth” and unpack the various ways I performed wealth in order to access elite spaces. Alongside this I will discuss the routes, through introductions and relationships with other art worlds interlocutors such as dealers and critics, that helped navigate my access to collectors.

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