Events

Patrons, Protégés, and Peers: Workplace Mechanisms of Intergenerational Inequality
Inequalities Seminar Series 

Tuesday 27 May, 12.15pm - 1.30pm. In-person and online event. Marshall Building, 2.09. 

Speaker: 
Dr Per Engzell, Associate Professor of Sociology at UCL Social Research Institute

Intergenerational mobility, the extent to which individuals can achieve economic success regardless of their family background, is a key indicator of equality of opportunity. While labor market outcomes reflect both individual traits and firm-level pay-setting, research on intergenerational mobility has largely focused on the former. In this talk, I discuss a larger project that seeks to understand the role of employers in the inheritance of economic status. In contemporary Sweden, sorting across employers accounts for between one-quarter and two-fifths of the intergenerational correlation in labor earnings. Privileged workers tend to sort into firms that both generate higher value-added and distribute a larger share of surplus to employees. Although workers from less advantaged backgrounds benefit equally when employed by high-paying firms, they are much less likely to gain access to them. I quantify the roles of education, occupation, parental job networks, and the inheritance of industry, employer, and local labor market. I then conclude by outlining a broader research agenda using linked employer-employee data to systematically assess how workplace-level mechanisms shape inequality by social origin.

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Cumulative exposure to climate risks in Europe: A multidimensional framework for present and future vulnerabilities
Inequalities Seminar Series 

Tuesday 3 June, 12.15pm - 1.30pm. In-person and online event. Sir Arthur Lewis Building, LG.04. 

Speaker: 
Dr Amaia Palencia Esteban, Research Officer, LSE III

This study develops a multidimensional framework to assess cumulative exposure to climate-related risks across Europe, integrating health, energy, transport, and employment vulnerabilities. By mapping risk distribution across regions and measuring dependence, we capture the interconnectedness of exposures and identify key socioeconomic drivers. Our findings reveal a substantial variation in risk distribution, with no clear geographical patterns. Unsurprisingly, household income emerges as the strongest determinant of exposure, except in Italy, where regional disparities play a greater role. We extend this analysis by projecting cumulative exposure to 2050, applying climate scenarios. The results suggest gradual rather than sharp change in exposure over time.

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Inequality in the 21st century
Hosted by the Department of Sociology and International Inequalities Institute

Friday 06 June 2025 6.30pm to 8.00pm. In-person event. Old Theatre, Old Building. 

Speakers: 
Professor Gurminder K Bhambra, Professor of Historical Sociology, University of Sussex 
Professor Michèle Lamont, Professor of Sociology and of African and African American Studies and the Robert I. Goldman Professor of European Studies, Harvard University
Professor Mike Savage, Professorial Research Fellow, International Inequalities Institute

Chair:
Dr Kristin Surak, Associate Professor of Political Sociology, LSE 

We live in societies fractured from top to bottom by corrosive and scarring inequalities.

These cover multiple axes: notably including race, class, gender, sexuality, age, and geography – but this list is far from exhaustive. From its founding moments, the discipline of sociology has prized its capacity to dissect and analyse social divisions, and to understand how inequality is not just some peripheral social phenomenon but lies at the heart of social life itself. This keynote panel brings together three eminent sociologists to reflect on how we can use the sociological imagination to make sense of contemporary challenges and illuminate our current lives. 

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Banking on the Family: Using Balance Sheets as a Framework to Study Inequality in Australia’s Asset Economy
III Seminar 

Speaker: 
Monique McKenzie, Postdoctoral Research Associate in the School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Sydney

Chair: 
Sam Friedman, Professor of Sociology, Department of Sociology, LSE 

The nomenclature of the 'bank of mum and dad' has been used in public discourse to describe this growing reliance of children on their family's financial support well into adulthood. Although currently used as a metaphor for intergenerational transfers, this paper considers whether we can deploy the framing of the familial bank as an analytical framework to understand wealth inequality as a function of familial, rather than individual, wealth. By taking a sociological approach to the family as a bank, we can uncover how income, assets, risk exposures (i.e social factors: relationship breakdown, number of children, health) and operating costs (i.e cost of goods and services, housing costs) contribute to the production of wealth inequality and the ability of families to provide intergenerational transfers to younger family members. To illustrate this framework, this presentation will draw on a series of interviews with parents of young adults about the role of familial support for housing, education and employment between 2022-2023. What emerged from these interviews is that intergenerational transfers depend on whether their parent’s financial portfolios can fund both the parent’s livelihoods now and in retirement, alongside support for their adult children.

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Jobless Industrialization
Inequalities Seminar Series 

Tuesday 10 June, 12.15pm - 1.30pm. In-person and online event. Sir Arthur Lewis Building, LG0.04.

Speaker: 
Professor Marcela Eslava, Professor of Economics, Universidad de Los Andes

Less developed economies struggle to absorb large numbers of workers into ‘modern, high-paying jobs. We take advantage of a historic episode of modernization in Colombia–the peak of the industrialization process–to document jobless modernity and show that there is cross-firm heterogeneity in joblessness. We explore the contributions of different potential determinants of jobless modernity: weak human capital, labor-saving modern technologies and regulations in the labor, capital and product markets that affect different modern firms differently. We also explore whether joblessness modernity expresses growth-depressing misallocation of workers to the traditional sector. We do this through a general equilibrium occupational choice model that we inform and quantify using extremely rich micro-data for Colombia during the 1970s that is representative of all workers in the economy, including those that work for informal businesses, and all modern firms. Findings indicate that, although reducing distortions against high productivity businesses and the minimum wage reduces joblessness in the modern sector, expands the modern/formal sector, and generates growth, these policies are less powerful than interventions that effectively improve human capital useful in all occupations. Improving modern entrepreneurial talent boosts growth but only modern entrepreneurs benefit. Positive income effects of labor-saving technologies dominates job cutting effects.

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Racial justice and wealth inequality: a call for action
Hosted by the International Inequalities Institute 

Tuesday 10 June, 6.30pm - 8.00pm. In-person and online event. Marshall Building, 2.08. 

Speakers: 
Dr Shabna Begum, CEO of the Runnymede Trust
Dr Kojo Koram, Reader in Law, Birkbeck School of Law
Professor Mike Savage, Professorial Research Fellow, LSE III
Mina Mahmoudzadeh, PhD candidate, LSE Department of Sociology
Esiri Bukata, MSc Inequalities and Social Sciences alumna

Chair: 
Dr Faiza Shaheen, Distinguished Policy Fellow at LSE’s International Inequalities Institute

Important research over the past decade has exposed stark racial inequalities in wealth ownership, pushing the racial wealth gap to the forefront of today’s inequality debates.

This event marks the launch of ‘Why the UK Racial Wealth Divide Matters: a call for action’, a major new report written by the LSE International Inequalities Institute for the Runnymede Trust. Mike Savage, Mina Mahmoudzadeh, and Esiri Bukata will share key findings from the report, highlighting the vast scale of the racial wealth divide and how it has changed in the context of the booming of wealth assets in recent decades. They will also examine the lasting influence of imperial history, the importance of viewing the UK in a global context, and how the remittance economy both reflects global inequalities and perpetuates the racial wealth divide in the UK. The event will be joined by Runnymede CEO Dr Shabna Begum and Dr Kojo Koram (Birkbeck College), who will reflect on the findings and explore their wider implications for racial justice campaigning.

Together, the speakers will open up a vital conversation on how we confront racialised wealth inequality, and what action is needed to build a fairer future.

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The Idea of Moral Socialism
Hosted by the International Inequalities Institute 

Wednesday 11 June 2025, 5.00pm - 6.30pm. In-person and online event. Sheikh Zayed Theatre, LSE Cheng Kin Ku Building. 

Speakers:
Lea Ypi, Professor of Political Theory at the London School of Economics, Fellow of the British Academy
Amartya Sen, Thomas W. Lamont University Professor, Professor of Economics and Philosophy, Harvard University, Senior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows

Chair: Nicholas Stern, IG Patel Professor of Economics and Government, Chair of the Grantham Research Institute 

Join us for this Eva Colorni Memorial Lecture with Lea Ypi and Amartya Sen. 

What is moral socialism? “If we seek an answer to the waverer who asks us whether he should be a socialist or not,” wrote the Austro-Marxist Otto Bauer more than a century ago “we do need Kant’s ethics.”

In this lecture, Lea Ypi reflects on the failures of state socialism and global capitalism in the twentieth century and suggests a new way forward. Her account seeks to revive the Enlightenment critique of technocratic reason and is grounded on a universal conception of freedom as moral agency. 

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Breaking the Jeff Bezos model of new technology
III Event for LSE Festival: Visions for the Future

Wednesday 18 June, 7.00pm to 8.00pm. In-person and online event. Marshall Building. 

Speakers:
Faiza Shaheen, Distinguished Policy Fellow at LSE’s International Inequalities Institute, and an economist, writer, and political commentator and activist
Hilary Cottam, internationally acclaimed author, innovator and change maker, Honorary Professor at the Institute of Innovation and Public Purpose, UCL
Jack Stilgoe, professor in science and technology studies, UCL 

Chair: 
Aaron Reeves, Professor of Sociology, LSE, Visiting Professor at the III 

New technology and AI are transforming the labour market at an unprecedented pace, often reinforcing existing inequalities and concentrating wealth in the hands of a few. It is widely believed that without intervention, this trend will continue, creating a society where a handful of tech billionaires thrive while countless others struggle with low wages and job insecurity. But is this future inevitable?

What are the potential scenarios going forward? How can we rethink the way technological innovation is structured to ensure its benefits are more widely shared? Is there an alternative to a winner-takes-all model which creates billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk while pushing many into low paid work?

Join us for a thought-provoking discussion on the future of technology, work, and inequality. We will explore policy solutions that can help mitigate low intergenerational social mobility and spread the gains from new technology.

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Poor Because They Want To Be: Myths of Inequality and Meritocracy
Hosted by the Atlantic Fellows for Social and Economic Equity 

Thursday 3 July 2025, 6.00pm -7.30pm. Marshall Building, MAR1.04. 

Join us for the London launch and discussion of Dr Máximo E. Jaramillo-Molina’s new book, Pobres porque quieren: Mitos de la desigualdad y la meritocracia (Poor Because They Want To Be: Myths of Inequality and Meritocracy). Máximo is a Senior Fellow of the Atlantic Fellows for Social and Economic Equity (AFSEE) programme and Associate Professor at the Centre for Social Sciences and Humanities (CUCSH), University of Guadalajara.

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