Dates: June 17-18, 2024
Venue: Research Centre Conference Suite, 9th Floor, Fawcett House, LSE.
The conference was organised by the LSE Phelan US Centre, Professor David Soskice (Department of Government), Professor Michael Storper (Department of Geography and Environment) and Professor Neil Lee (Department of Geography and Environment). It was sponsored by the LSE Phelan US Centre and the LSE International Inequalities Institute.
Europe has an innovation problem. It has been a second-mover in innovation since the 1970s. Over the past half century, America has become the absolute leader in the development of disruptive, market and lifestyle-defining, general-purpose technologies. The US has reaped the benefits of this leadership through overall economic growthand the creation of the world’s most highly capitalised firms. High shares of very high-wage and high-skill employment have also led to the accumulation of personal wealth for many. This leadership has also reinforced investor dominance in leading-edge US start-ups.
But the US is also the developed country with the highest level and greatest recent growth in interpersonal and interregional economic inequalities. While America is an innovation leader, its social progress in many ways has stalled, with sharp inequalities in social mobility, education, and health outcomes. Europe, including the UK, represents a different pathway to the New Economy. Much of this difference in inequality is due to the contrasting institutions and policies of welfare statism and guided economies of the two continents. A great deal can also be linked to differing occupational structures, between the US and Europe, shaped by their innovation profiles.
For the US, we must ask whether its radical innovation leadership can be sustained with lower wage premiums for skilled occupations in general, and for new work in particular. We do not know the degree to which these features of the American economy are productive or rent extracting. Understanding the precise relationship between inequalities and the social models which have been adopted, and radical innovation, has now become urgent because of a changing world context and how it affects Europe’s future.
This two-day conference hosted by the Phelan US Centre, brought together leading thinkers from academia and policy to discuss these issues. With contributions from leading researchers, the conference aimed to focus the research agenda by establishing existing knowledge and knowledge gaps in this area. The conference also began the process of building a coalition of researchers working on these questions in both the US and Europe. One of the conference’s potential outputs is an edited collection of contributions on these topics with a high-profile press.
Header Image: Photo by Matt Ridley on Unsplash