Professor Facundo Alvaredo will explain how we cannot properly interpret and understand inequalities without a general theory that develops the concepts of commodity, money, capital, power, and history.

There is a broad agreement that there should be more taxation and redistribution, but we lack a serious discussion about why we expect this to come from the “state”, or why we stick to the illusion of the “state” as the sphere of common good that can and should tame capital and foster development through properly evaluated parliament-decided public policies.  It is usually expected that redistribution will take place within a democratic framework with strict regard for due process of law, but this pre-conception takes for granted something that has not yet been established: the compatibility between democracy and the continuing developments of capitalism.

In this event, Professor Alvaredo will argue that only the continuation of the living yet dormant Political Economy scientific project offers the keys to apprehend the challenges of contemporary capitalism (including our particular focus of concern: socioeconomic inequalities), where the main conflict is ‘who plans whom,’ and where the concept of capital differentiation explains all the social differentiations we observe (of labor, social classes, nation states, currencies, wealth, incomes).

Meet our speaker and chair

Facundo Alvaredo is a Professor at the Paris School of Economics and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Professorial Research Fellow at the III, and a Co-Director of the World Inequality Database (formerly The World Top Incomes Database, which he created with colleagues in 2011) and the World Inequality Lab. He is a Researcher of IIEP-UBA-Conicet, Senior Fellow of INET@Oxford, and a panel member for the newly launched Latin American and Caribbean Inequality Review (LACIR). He focuses his research on the fields of public economics, the inequality of income and wealth, and the economic history of capitalism. 

Francisco Ferreira (@fhgferreira) is the Amartya Sen Professor of Inequality Studies and Director of the International Inequalities Institute at LSE.

More about this event

The International Inequalities Institute (@LSEInequalities) at LSE brings together experts from many of the School's departments and centres to lead cutting-edge research focused on understanding why inequalities are escalating in numerous arenas across the world, and to develop critical tools to address these challenges.

This event will have live captioning.

The Twitter hashtag for the event is #LSEInequalities.