The III at 10: New Directions in Inequality Research

The III celebrated its 10^th anniversary with a two-day conference called ‘The III at 10: New Directions in Inequality Research,’ which was held on 18 – 19 September 2025 at LSE. The conference featured 2 keynote lectures, 72 research presentations, a poster session and an evening panel discussion with over 100 attendees across the conference and over 800 members of the public attending the keynotes both online and in-person.

Sessions on the programme were filled with papers selected from submissions to a widely circulated call for papers, and organized around the four ongoing research programmes at the III: Wealth, Elites and Tax Justice; Gender Justice & the Wellbeing Economy; Opportunity, Mobility and the intergenerational Transmission of Inequality; Perceptions of Inequality, as well as the Global Inequalities Observatory and our four research networks, Global Economies of Care; Public Economies of Inequality; Politics of Inequality; and Cities, Jobs, and Economic Change.

Our overarching goal was to use the conference as an opportunity to help chart a path forward for research on inequality that places rigour, interdisciplinarity and an international scope at its heart.

The programme

The programme consisted of 24 broadly thematic sessions, organised around nine tracks corresponding with the III’s research agenda. Papers were selected from over 165 submissions to our call for papers issued in February 2025 and gathered researchers at the early stages of their careers as well as senior academics from around the world. Topics covered in these sessions included work on elites and tax justice, intergenerational mobility, inequality of opportunity, the dimensions of race, gender, and caste, and advancements in measurement and methods in inequality research.

We were honoured to be joined by Professors Leslie McCall (Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality, CUNY) and Thomas Piketty (Paris School of Economics) to deliver our two keynote lectures. Prof McCall opened the conference with her talk ‘If not government, then what? A three-part typology of redistributive preferences’, presenting findings from a global study of public preferences for government redistribution through income taxes and transfers.

In ‘Global inequality in historical and comparative perspective’, Prof Piketty presented preliminary results from the Global Justice Project, building on analysis and proposals set out in his book A Brief History of Equality, extending them into a broader and more comprehensive global framework. The keynote was open to the public, amassing 400 in-person guests and over 550 online attendees.

A panel discussion on the future of inequalities research brought together Professors Facundo Alvaredo (LSE, Paris School of Economics), Anne Phillips (LSE), Steven Durlauf (Stone Center for Research on Wealth Inequality and Mobility, University of Chicago), Larry Kramer (LSE), and chair Armine Ishkanian (LSE). Each panellist offered an intervention on what they view as the main priorities for the development of inequalities research, as well as the gaps in existing approaches in the field, before opening a wide-ranging discussion with the audience.

In bringing together researchers from a variety of disciplines and cultural contexts, the conference highlighted the importance of collaboration and meaningful, sustained engagement to better identify effective strategies to reduce inequality.