Inequalities Seminar Series

Poverty without poverty line

Tuesday 21 January 2025, 12:45pm – 1:45pm. In-person and online event. LSE Cheng Kin Ku Building 2.06 + Online

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Speaker:
Dr Olivier Sterck, Associate Professor, University of Antwerp & University of Oxford

I propose a new poverty measure, based on the intuitive notion that someone with half the income of another is twice as poor. Mathematically, poverty is the reciprocal of income. The resulting aggregate measure is simply the average number of days needed to reach a reference income level. The new measure captures poverty as a spectrum, not a binary status. It is additively decomposable, accounts for the depth and severity of poverty, and is robust to the choice of reference income level. Survey data shows that it aligns with how most experts and the public conceptualize poverty. I illustrate the properties of the new measure using the global distribution of individual incomes (1990-2019) and show how it can be used to monitor Shared Prosperity, one of the twin objectives of the World Bank.

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

Tuesday 28 January 2025, 12:45pm – 1:45pm. In-person and online event. LSE Cheng Kin Ku Building 2.06 + Online

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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.

(De)Mobilizing effects of misinformation: evidence from Brazil

Tuesday 4 February 2025, 12:45pm – 1:45pm. In-person and online event. LSE Cheng Kin Ku Building 2.06 + Online

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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.

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

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

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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.

The historical incarceration penalty in the U.S.

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

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.

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

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

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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.

Leaving Legacies and Liabilities: The Distribution of Wealth at Death

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

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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.

Lived experiences of financial hardship and perspectives on inequality: can Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques assist in the qualitative analysis of large sets of biographical interviews?

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

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

A challenge for qualitative researchers committed to providing insights into peoples’ experiences of financial hardship, and managing their finances, is how to represent the heterogeneity of those experiences. High-quality qualitative research requires empathising with participants and understanding the diversity and complexity of their lives (Small and Calarco, 2021). This paper aims to investigate whether recent advances in NLP can help researchers acknowledge and represent the heterogeneity of lived experiences and uncover the social narratives that underpin the testimony of interviewees.

We report on recent research that is exploring the potential of using NLP to analyse qualitative interview data. Recent advances in NLP and large language models (LLMs) offer new possibilities, such as preselecting relevant interviews or sections for deeper analysis and handling larger text corpora than before. In addition to identifying and coding themes within the data we also reflect on how the use of different tools can influence the process of qualitative analysis. The paper will also discuss the ethics and reliability of these analytic approaches.

The empirical data consists of two sets of interviews. 12 biographical scoping interviews with volunteers to the UK Voices project and 73 initial in-depth interviews conducted with people claiming benefits in the UK during the COVID-19 pandemic (2020-2021) – one component of the Welfare at a Social Distance Study. The participants are diverse in terms of age, gender, ethnicity, household type, and geographical location, and the interviews were conducted remotely via video conferencing or phone, based on participant preference (Summers et al., 2021).

The research is part of a pilot project 'UK Voices' (funded by the ESRC) which is scoping the potential for creating a large-scale mixed methods resource for social scientists.

Hope for Changemakers: Evidence and Narratives

Tuesday 25 March 2025, 12.45pm – 1.45pm. In-person and online event. LSE Cheng Kin Ku Building 2.06 + Online

Speaker:
Dr Irene Guijt, Head of Evidence and Strategic Learning, Oxfam GB

In organisations seeking progressive change - whether civil society, the UN or businesses - the default rationale involves highlighting problems. What it is, who is affected, how many and how badly. To speak about the depth and extent of systemic risks in our polycrisis is not hard - it is the stuff of headlines that dominate. It is also what is communicated most by international NGOs to appeal to citizens' deep concern for others and persuade them to act for a better world.

Despite peddling these multiple colliding disasters, the social currency of changemakers is hope. We appeal to people to have - and sustain - hope in others and organisations that they can make change happen. We suggest solutions that reduce suffering and rectify injustice.

This hope is not false hope. Evidence of all kinds exists - ideas that have scaled, individuals that have formed alliances, institutions that have dared, quantitative data on long term upward trends. But such examples are often seen as anecdotal and seem to pale into insignificance given the extent of the polycrisis. Evidence alone - whether on crisis or transformation - does not lead to change. What makes change possible is identifying and pursuing opportunities illuminated by evidence that offers grounded hope.

The seminar will explore two questions:

1. What evidence exists that can give grounded hope of progressive change?
2. How do changemakers harness hope as part of their efforts?

Art World Ethnography or How to study VIPs when you are not one

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

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.

Multiple oppressions and resistances in spaces of inequality: A study from the indigenous landscapes of eastern India

Tuesday 8 October 2024, 12:45pm – 1:45pm. In-person and online event. Marshall Building 1.09.

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Speaker: Dr Richard Toppo, Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Antwerp

This seminar primarily concerns the indigenous population in the eastern Indian state of Jharkhand. While oppression and resistance are generally inherent to unequal spaces, its specific contextual variation is important to understand the multiple ways in which domination is constructed and enforced, and the innovative ways in which such forms of dominance are resisted. In this case of Jharkhand (India), 245 villages, mostly inhabited by indigenous communities, were threatened by the state to be displaced for the purpose of setting up an army firing practice range. As a response, indigenous communities’ collective from the region (i.e., Kendriya Jan Sangharsh Samiti – which roughly translates to people’s committee of resistance), over the course of 30 long years, used varying strategies – from massive demonstrations against the state to strategically participating in state elections – in order to successfully defend their lands. This seminar is based on my ethnographic study of the evolving relations and engagements between the states and the indigenous communities facing displacement. A key aspect of this research is to understand the dialectics between indigenous identity and the indigenous movement, and how the two have re-shaped the fields of inequality and oppression in the region.

Welfare goes global: making progress and catching up

Tuesday 15 October 2024, 12:45pm – 1:45pm. In-person and online event. Marshall Building 1.09.

Speaker: Professor Richard Rose, Professor and Director of the Centre for the Study of Public Policy, University of Strathclyde

The big questions this talk raises are: What is the welfare of the eight billion people who live in the world today? How many countries not at global standards today have been making progress since 1991? Where will welfare be in 2050? The talk will present answers from the statistical analysis of the author’s specially created Global Welfare database. It focuses on six measures of health, education, and female employment in 127 developed and developing countries. There are wide variations in welfare within and between five groups of countries–Highly developed, Latin America, Middle East, South-East Asia and Africa-- as well in comparisons with China and India.

Freedom counts: cross-country empirical evidence on the ranking of opportunity sets

Tuesday 22 October 2024, 12:45pm – 1:45pm. In-person and online event. Marshall Building 1.09.

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Speaker: Professor Erik Schokkaert, Professor Emeritus of Welfare and Health Economics, KULeuven

Using a novel survey-based research design, we investigate if people reveal that freedom has intrinsic value and we classify subjects according to the theoretical rules they implicitly employ to rank opportunity sets. We do this for a total of 4902 participants across 10 distinct countries. Opportunity sets in the survey consist of a number of hospitals with varying characteristics. Surprisingly, a majority of subjects reveal to attach intrinsic value to freedom, in that they prefer larger sets even if this may entail a loss of subjective welfare. We also find that a large majority of subjects use size-based rules to rank sets in terms of freedom, while there is considerable heterogeneity in the rules that subjects employ to rank sets in terms of welfare. These results are strikingly robust across countries.

Changing children’s concentration on income distribution and its consequences for inequality and poverty

Tuesday 29 October 2024, 12:45pm – 1:45pm. In-person and online event. Marshall Building 1.09.

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Speaker: Professor Berkay Ozcan, Professor of Social and Public Policy, Department of Social Policy, LSE

We study a seldom-discussed phenomenon in OECD countries: a secular increase in the concentration of households with children at the upper parts of the (market) income distribution. Drawing upon cross-national microdata encompassing around 25 countries from the Luxembourg Income Studies, our analysis spans the past three decades, revealing a significant surge in children's concentration in such households in most countries, albeit with notable differences in trends and levels. We shed light on the implications of these findings on the estimates of household income inequality and poverty across countries. We discuss the resulting growing significance of equivalence scale adjustments as tools commonly used to adjust for "cost of children". More importantly, we discuss some of the underlying factors and broader implications for redistribution and family benefits.

The impact of extreme climate events on income distribution in Italy: a municipality-level analysis

Tuesday 12 November 2024, 12:45pm – 1:45pm. In-person and online event. Marshall Building 1.09.

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Speaker: Dr Elisa Palagi, Postdoctoral Researcher, Institute of Economics, Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies

In the seminar, research on the interaction between climate change and economic inequality will be presented. Specifically, the paper investigates the impact of extreme climate events on income distribution at the municipality level in Italy. The analysis utilizes a novel dataset on income distribution from 2000 to 2021, along with gridded climate data and geo-referenced catastrophic events. By employing panel econometric techniques, the study assesses the impact of extreme events on average income growth across different quantiles of the income distribution. The findings indicate that extreme climate events decrease income growth for lower-income groups within municipalities, while having no impact on top income earners.

Local wealth inequality fuels political protests: New big-data evidence from 89 Global South countries

Tuesday 26 November 2024, 12:45pm – 1:45pm. In-person and online event. Marshall Building 1.09.

Speaker: Dr Davide Luca, Associate Professor of Economic Geography, Department of Land Economy, University of Cambridge and Visiting Fellow, LSE III

Despite growing interest in how spatial inequality fuels political discontent in Europe and North America, dynamics across the Global South remain underexplored. Leveraging micro-estimates of relative wealth, we construct novel measures of local wealth inequality across 28,675 administrative units in 89 Global South countries. These measures are then linked to 0.67 million georeferenced protest instances, recorded daily between January 1, 2014, and December 31, 2018. By analysing monthly variations within higher-tier subnational regions, we uncover a robust link between local wealth inequality and political protests. We further match inequality and protest data with country-level characteristics. Our findings suggest that the connection between spatial wealth inequality and protests is particularly strong in countries with lower economic development, higher unemployment, stronger protections for freedom of expression, and a more robust rule of law. Overall, our results highlight how spatial inequality profoundly impacts political discontent, though its effects are not uniform across the Global South.

The sound of difference - discussing race, class and the politics of 'diversity' in classical music

Tuesday 10 December 2024, 12:45pm – 1:45pm. In-person and online event. Marshall Building 1.09.

Speaker: Dr Kristina Kolbe, Assistant Professor in Sociology of Arts and Culture, Erasmus School of History, Culture and Communication, Erasmus University of Rotterdam and Visiting Fellow, LSE III

What happens when the elitist space of 'western' classical music seeks to diversify itself? And what are the social effects worked through diversity discourses in classical music institutions? This seminar addresses these concerns by critically examining how diversity work takes shape in a cultural sector so deeply implicated in hierarchies of class, structures of whiteness, and legacies of imperialism. Drawing on her recent book The sound of difference, Kristina Kolbe talks through ethnographic and interview data to analyse how diversity discourses become constructed in the organisational and creative processes of music production. From rehearsal and performance practices to the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the sector's commitment to change, Kolbe reveals the institutional constraints and precarious labour relations that form around diversity work in classical music and the arts sector more broadly. In this way, the seminar discusses how elite- and race-making practices intersect in cultural work and considers what these processes can tell us about the reproduction of class, race, and racism today.

The Gini and the tonic: Understanding the dynamics of inequality measurement

Part of the Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 21 May 2024, 12.30am to 1:30 pm. In-person event. Sir Arthur Lewis Buildling, Room LG.04 (SAL.LG.04)

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Speaker:
Professor Sanghamitra Bandyopadhyay, Professor of Development Economics and the Deputy Director of the Centre for Globalisation Research, Queen Mary University of London and Visiting Professor, LSE III

Understanding how to accurately measure the dynamics of inequality is of utmost importance to social scientists. In this paper, for the first time, I identify which inequality measures are best suited to capture the dynamics of inequality, especially for panel regression applications. To undertake this study, I generate a dataset of twelve inequality measure types for up to 100 years across 34 countries using annual data on mortality distributions. Upon modelling inequality as a fractionally integrated process I find that inequality measures that are independent of the mean have more stationary cases, a vital requirement for regressors in panel regression analysis. Mean-dependent measures like the Gini, however, are mostly non-stationary, making them wholly unsuitable for panel regressions. This result is confirmed by estimating the "inequality and growth" relationship, where only mean-independent measures generate a stable relationship. Using a VAR approach, impulse responses show that mean-dependent measures are more likely to carry the effect of a shock, making them less suitable for panel regression analyses. Tests of normality and volatility function as excellent "marker" tests whether a chosen inequality measure is suitable for dynamic contexts. The findings suggest that no inequality measure should be used for dynamic purposes without rigorously testing their suitability.

Welfare regime hybridisation and social inequalities

Part of the Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 14 May 2024, 12.30am to 1:30 pm. In-person event. Sir Arthur Lewis Buildling, Room LG.04 (SAL.LG.04)

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Speaker:
Dr Zahid Mumtaz, LSE Fellow, LSE Department of Social Policy

The concept of hybridization in welfare regime literature denotes the presence of multiple forms of welfare regimes in a given context. This means that in any given country, some people might be successfully incorporated into state protection (welfare state regime), while others rely on community and family arrangements (informal security regime), and some are dependent on highly personalized politico-military patrons (insecurity regime).

In this study, we used a novel methodology of data collection to capture welfare regime hybridization in a low-income country like Pakistan. We identified four distinct welfare regimes within the country: Potential welfare state regime (8.2% of the sample), More Effective informal security regime (16.7%), Less Effective informal security regime (68.4%), and Insecurity regime (6.7%).

The study sheds light on the diverse spectrum of inequalities present in Pakistan. While a minority enjoys the advantages of a potentially welfare state regime, funded by substantial public resources, a significant portion of the population lacks formal support and must resort to informal means for survival. Regional disparities further compound these inequalities, with certain areas facing greater deprivation than others. Historical factors, including past conflicts and ongoing socio-political instability, exacerbate these disparities, making it even harder for vulnerable communities to access necessary services and support.

Plus ça change? Continuity and change in social attitudes and worldviews in 21st century Brazil

Part of the Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 7 May 2024, 12.30am to 1:30 pm. In-person event. Sir Arthur Lewis Buildling, Room LG.04 (SAL.LG.04)

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Speakers:

Dr Fabrício Mendes Fialho, Research Fellow, LSE III; Alberto C. Almeida, Director, Brasilis Institute

In the 21st century, Brazil has undergone rapid changes in societal attitudes towards key issues such as religiosity, race relations, and gender. At the same time, attitudes towards the rule of law and the 'Brazilian knack' have remained steady over recent decades. In this seminar, we will discuss findings from two large-scale national social surveys conducted in 2002 and 2023 to map out the paths of values change in the Brazil over the past two decades.

The Crypto-Utopian Occult Revival and Anti/Fascism

Part of the Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 26 March 12.30 to 1.30pm. Online and in-person public event. LSE Cheng Kin Ku Building, Room 2.04 (CKK 2.04).

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Speaker:

Erica Lagalisse, Visiting Fellow, LSE III

In 2018 Erica Lagalisse wrote Occult Features of Anarchism (2019) as a fellow of the III, and now returns to tell us about how her post-pandemic popular education tour about "conspiracy theory", which followed its launch and translation, has opened up into ethnographic research connecting contemporary New Age spirituality, the current "psychedelic renaissance" and eugenics in the 21st century. Lagalisse illustrates how cosmopolitan "digital nomads" share fears of biotechnology manipulated by occult powers, but also similar hopes in psychedelics research, cryptocurrency and technology writ large as sources of social justice.

Across this counterculture, cryptography and the blockchain are not only seen as powerful tools of social engineering and justice, but also continuous with the perennial "occult" magical tradition. Funded largely by "cryptocurrency" themselves, "media shamans" entertain occult conspiracy in government, but also a general reverence for the power of the "occult", a willingness to engage political action in the "occult" oneself, and a shared imagination that digitally perfecting the management of secrecy will somehow inaugurate social equality.

For more info on Lagalisse's podcast series 'Politics after the pandemic', see here: https://lagalisse.net/2024/01/23/podcast-politics-after-the-pandemic-at-the-sociological-review/

Behavioral responses to wealth taxation: evidence from a Norwegian reform

Part of the Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 19 March 12.30 to 1.30pm. Online and in-person public event. LSE Cheng Kin Ku Building, Room 2.04 (CKK 2.04).

Speaker:

Roberto Iacono, Associate Professor in Economics and Social Policy at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology

We analyze behavioral responses to wealth taxation, estimating the causal effects of a unique municipal wealth tax reform in Norway. We exploit variation from the single-period municipal reform reducing the marginal tax rate (MTR) on wealth exclusively in the northern Norwegian municipality of Bø from 0.85% to 0.35%, since 2021. Mimicking the behaviour of a tax haven, Bø represents the first municipality to unilaterally reduce the municipal wealth tax rate since the establishment of wealth taxation in Norway in 1892. We document a significant 66.6% increase in average taxable wealth in response to a 1 percentage point drop in the wealth tax rate. The elasticity of taxable wealth increases to 71.6% when focusing exclusively on wealth taxpayers. We also estimate a significant but more modest 10.3% jump in the weighted mass of wealth taxpayers in the treated municipality. Non-real effects of the reform dominate: mobility of wealthy taxpayers appears as the major behavioral response to the change in the net tax rate, accounting for a staggering 79% of the post-treatment total net wealth in the treated municipality (up from 19% in the pre-reform period). These results emerge in a context with third-party reported wealth data with negligible measurement error, limited evidence of bunching, highly enforced residence-based wealth taxation, and a low degree of out-migration rates.

Inequality of Opportunity and Investment Choices

Part of the Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 12 March 12.30 to 1.30pm. Online and in-person public event. LSE Cheng Kin Ku Building, Room 2.04 (CKK 2.04).

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Speaker:

Michelle Brock, Associate Director, Senior Research Economist, Office of the Chief Economist at European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD)

Inequality of opportunity (IOp) leads to misallocation of human capital and can affect economies via its impact on individual economic decision making. This paper studies the impact of IOp on investment, using a laboratory experiment. We randomized IOp, then subjects chose to invest in a risky asset or savings. Our results suggest that IOp impacts investment choices only for people who are penalized by their circumstances and only once they learn the impact of IOp on their relative position in the income distribution. This disadvantaged group more often invests and invests higher shares of their earnings than the control and advantaged groups. The fact that both IOp and knowledge of relative position need to be present, for the impact on investment to materialize, points to the importance of peer effects, and social preferences more broadly, for understanding the effects of IOp on individual decision making.

Unequal Estate Division for Wealth Perpetuation: Portfolios, Primogeniture, and Patrilineality

Part of the Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 5 March 12.30 to 1.30pm. Online and in-person public event. LSE Parish Building (PAR) Room LG.03.

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Speaker:

Dr Nhat An Trinh, Research Officer, Institute for New Economic Thinking & Department of Social Policy and Intervention, University of Oxford

Mounting research documents that wealth strongly persists across generations. Inheritances and inter-vivo gifts from parents to children are key contributors to this persistence. Intergenerational transfers are yet not only made unequally between families. It has been shown that a substantial share of intergenerational transfers is also made unequally within families. In this study, we address this puzzle of unequal division and empirically investigate the distribution of intergenerational transfers through the lens of what we call the ‘principle of dynastic succession’. This principle states that intergenerational transfers are made such that the family and its wealth are carried on into the long-lasting future, leading to unequal division. Analyzing administrative data from the German inheritance and gift tax register (2007-2020), we argue that the principle is particularly salient in the presence of structuring assets (e.g. family business) and that its application varies along the estate distribution. Going beyond individual parent-child transactional relationships, the principle of dynastic succession allows to link intra-familial disparities to long-term persistence in overall wealth inequality more broadly. Thereby, it sheds light on a so far neglected mechanism through which the family generates inequalities both within and between generations

More Unequal or Not as Rich? Dilemmas over Distributional National Accounts for Latin America

Part of the Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 27 February 12.30 to 1.30pm. Online and in-person public event. LSE Parish Building (PAR) Room LG.03.

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Speaker:

Dr Marc Morgan, Research and Teaching Fellow, University of Geneva (UNIGE)

Improving income inequality measures, so that they are more commensurate with official measures of economic growth, is high on the international statistical agenda. But how should income that is reported in commonly-used microeconomic data for inequality studies approximate income that is estimated from macroeconomic data for growth accounting? How new is this global initiative from a historical perspective, and how appropriate is it from a future perspective? This presentation will tackle these questions from the prism of progress we have made to date in Latin American countries following the international agenda. Reconciling micro and macro incomes present us with at least one dilemma: either the region is more unequal or it is not as rich as officially reported. A disaggregation of measures allows us to see what are the different contributions to distribution and redistribution in the region, both methodologically and politically. The continued pursuit of the international agenda needs to account for the wide discrepancies between data sources that we all commonly use, but until now for quite different purposes.

Then and Now: How Neighbourhood Deprivation in Youth Influences Attitudes towards Inequality

Part of the Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 13 February 12.30 to 1.30pm. Online and in-person public event. LSE Parish Building (PAR) Room LG.03.

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Speaker:

Franco Bonomi Bezzo, Post-Doctoral Researcher, La Statale, University of Milan

The purpose of this study is to reappraise what has been found in qualitative case studies through a quantitative analysis and to investigate the mechanisms linking experiences of collective material deprivation and attitudes towards inequality. These results suggest that while people who have grown up in a phase of expansion of the Welfare state may have felt lower anxiety about inequality, those who have grown up during the full expression of Thatcherism might have developed stronger feelings towards inequality.

Cultural Capital and Access to Opportunity in India

Part of the Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 6 February 12.30 to 1.30pm. Online and in-person public event. LSE Parish Building (PAR) Room LG.03.

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Speaker:

Sam Asher, Associate Professor of Economics & Public Policy, Imperial College Business School

Cultural capital -- specific human capital that allows individuals access to opportunity in stratified societies -- has long been a major field of research in sociology. Economics has been slow to study this concept in part because of the difficulty in measuring cultural capital and in finding suitable empirical settings to study its effects. Leveraging novel data on historical social norms of each one of India's 4,635 ethnic groups (castes, tribes, etc), we generate a new measure of cultural capital by calculating the cultural distance between each of India communities and the economically dominant group in every village, whose control of land gives them significant power over their neighbor's economic, social, and political lives. We use a difference-in-differences strategy that compares members of the same community experiencing differences in cultural capital due to differences in the dominant community across villages. We find that individuals living in communities with culturally distant dominant groups experience large reductions in educational attainment, anthropometric outcomes, consumption and income per capita.

How Do Inheritances Shape Wealth Inequality? Evidence from India

Part of the Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 30 January 12.30 to 1.30pm. Online and in-person public event. LSE Parish Building (PAR) Room LG.03.

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Speakers:
Kalaiyarasan Arumugam, Assistant Professor, Madras Institute of Development Studies, Chennai
Vikash Vaibhav, Assistant Professor, Jindal School of Liberal Arts and Humanities (JSLH)

Drawing on the three decades of All India Debt and Investment Survey (AIDIS) dataset, the paper maps the drivers of wealth inequality across caste, class and region in India. While studies have examined patterns of inequality in household consumer expenditure, incomes, and wages, wealth inequality particularly of its driving factors has not received much attention, especially during the high economic growth period since the 1990s. Using decomposition analysis, the paper first examines evolution of different components of wealth contributing to overall wealth inequality in India. It further decomposes aggregate wealth inequality into two main components: price and quantity effects. Since the inherited land and building accounts the large of portion of wealth for average Indian household, distinguishing the land value that results from increased land price or changing quantity acquires significance.

Inequality measurement for bounded variables

Part of the Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 23 January 12.30 to 1.30pm. Online and in-person public event. LSE Parish Building (PAR) Room LG.03.

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Speaker:
Suman Seth, Leeds University Business School

We propose a novel approach to measure inequality for variables with fixed lower- and upper bounds. Inequality assessment with such variables is different from that with variables lacking fixed upper bounds. The maximum-inequality distributions of non-bounded variables always feature every element, but one, equal to their lower bounds, and many existing inequality measures rank them equally. However, the maximum-inequality distributions of bounded variables contain different proportions of elements being equal to the lower bound. We normatively justify a novel axiom requiring maximum-inequality distributions of bounded variables to be ranked equally, irrespective of their means. Our axiomatically characterised indices measure inequality as the observed proportion of the maximum attainable inequality for a given mean. We also characterise a subset of measures that yield consistent inequality comparisons when switching between attainment and shortfall representations. In our empirical illustration, a starkly different picture emerges when traditional inequality indices give way to our approach.

Do low-quality jobs pay more? Poor-Quality Employment in Europe

Part of the Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 16 January 12.30 to 1.30pm. Online and in-person public event. LSE Parish Building (PAR) Room LG.03.

Speakers:
Mauricio Apablaza, Universidad del Desarrollo, Chile
Gaston Yalonetzky, University of Leeds

In recent decades, much social science attention has focused on the quality of jobs, in particular on those that could be described as poor-quality employment, measured by means of a multidimensional methodology (e.g. Sehnbruch et al. (2020), Florisson (2022), Stephens (2023)). Technical questions about the construction of how multidimensional employment indices can be constructed, however, remain. Similarly, traditional theories of labour economics may question whether deprivation in the labour market is not measured better by simply looking at low-wage employment.

How women win the Latin American presidency

Part of the Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 5 December 12.30 to 1.30pm. Online and in-person public event. LSE Centre Building (CBG), Room 2.04.

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Speaker:
Dr Catherine Reyes-Housholder, Assistant Professor, Instituto de Ciencia Política, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile

The most difficult kind of political power for women to obtain arguably is the most important: the presidency. How do women win presidential elections? I answer this question by turning to Latin America, a region characterized by powerful presidents and democratic competition. This talk, in turn, develops a two-stage theory of how women win the presidency. I maintain that party nominations (Stage 1) constitute the central black box of women’s victories. Candidates’ traits, which are often gendered, play a crucial role in parties’ decision-making over who to nominate for president. Once the nominations are fixed, presidential elections for women generally function as referendum on parties in power (Stage 2). The key to understanding how women win the presidency therefore lies in understanding how they secure the nomination of major political parties.

Reconciling equality of opportunity and aversion to income inequality

Part of the Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 28 November 12.30 to 1.30pm. Online and in-person public event. LSE Centre Building (CBG), Room 2.04.

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By using an axiomatic approach, the paper studies different ways to reconcile the principle of equality of opportunity and the aversion to income inequality. Moreover, it characterizes a partial ordering based on the priority of opportunity egalitarianism over income egalitarianism

Speaker:
Professor Vito Peragine, Professor of Economics, University of Bari

Chair:
Professor Francisco H. G. Ferreira, Amartya Sen Professor of Inequality Studies and Director of LSE International Inequalities Institute

Sketching the world elite database

Part of the Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 21 November 12.30 to 1.30pm. Online and in-person public event. LSE Centre Building (CBG), Room 2.04.

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In societies wrought by inequalities, elites matter because of the prominent positions they occupy and the considerable resources at their disposal. These positions and resources imply that their practices, preferences and beliefs have collective implications. That is why no comprehensive understanding of governance and society today can ignore those who occupy positions of extreme prominence and power, and more specifically positions of significant economicpower. Comparable datasets are arguably prerequisite for establishing patterns of regularity, suggesting counterfactuals, and formulating ideas to be tested. The World Elite Database (WED) is a collective endeavour, which aims at directly addressing this challenge. In this presentation, on behalf of the WED participants, Christoph Houman Ellersgaard (CBS) and Paul Lagneau-Ymonet (Paris Dauphine – PSL) will present preliminary results.

Speakers:
Dr Paul Lagneau-Ymonet, Assistant Professor of Sociology, Université Paris Dauphine-PSL

Dr Christoph Houman Ellersgaard, Associate Professor, Cophenhagen Business School

Chair:
Dr Michael Vaughan, Research Officer, LSE III

Can Economics help us to understand and address inequalities?

Part of the Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 14 November 12.30 to 1.30pm. Online and in-person public event. LSE Centre Building (CBG), Room 2.04.

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This Seminar will present potential shortcomings of Economics as a discipline to discuss and address inequalities (of income, gender and race) in our society. Emphasis will be given on the existence of different ways to do economics, grouped under the heterodox economics umbrella, and how these shortcomings can be overcome with an openness to a plurality of methods and theory.

Speaker:
Dr Carolina Alves, Associate Professor in Economics, UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose

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

The role of admission criteria in reducing gender imbalances in higher education

Part of the Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 7 November 12.30 to 1.30pm. Online and in-person public event. LSE Centre Building (CBG), Room 2.04.

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Speaker:
Dr Valentina Contreras, Research Officer, LSE III

Chair:
Dr H. Xavier Jara, Research Officer, LSE III

This seminar exploits the sudden timing of a reform in the Chilean centralized university admission system to analyze the role of structural factors, such as admission criteria, in the gender imbalances in higher education. The reform introduced a new admission criterion that improved the application scores for students who graduate with a GPA higher than their high school average. In addition, the reform lowered the weight given to high-stakes measures of achievement, such as standardized admission tests. It finds that the reform raised the application scores of women relative to men, and impacted students' career choices.

Do changes in communication systems matter to the politics of inequality?

Part of the Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 24 October 12.30 to 1.30pm. Online and in-person public event. LSE Centre Building (CBG), Room 2.04.

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Speaker:
Dr Michael Vaughan, Research Officer, LSE III

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

Communication is a key link in the problematic relationship between economic inequality and democratic responsiveness – from shaping individual-level information and attitudes, to structuring public sphere dynamics. How, then, do changes in communication systems (e.g. digitalisation and hybridisation) matter to the politics of inequality? This seminar approaches the question from two perspectives. Firstly, a systematic literature review on the topic of communication about economic inequality will highlight which elements of evolving communication systems are emphasised in current research trends, and which are not. Secondly, a case study of discussion around the "billionaire space race" across legacy and social media will illustrate some of the ways in which changing inequality dynamics and changing media systems intersect.

A far-right frontrunner in the 2023 Argentina’s general election: Who are Javier Milei’s supporters?

Part of the Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 17 October 12.30 to 1.30pm. Online and in-person public event. LSE Centre Building (CBG), Room 2.04.

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Speaker:
Valeria Ana Brusco, Adjunct professor, Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Argentina

Chair:
Dr Fabricio Mendes Fialho, III Research Fellow

After a decade of political polarization, a marginal candidate, Javier Milei, defies stable coalitions in Argentina. With the rise of post-partisan identities and long-term negative economic results, the ramping uncertainties in Argentina’s political scenario has made the country ripe for the far-right libertarian Milei to use frustration and anxiety to mobilise voters. On the even of the 2023 national election, a crucial question to be answered is: Who are the Milei’s supporters? Our novel survey data shows that Milei’s supporters are not ideologically consistent (regarding issues such as climate change and inequality between men and women, for example) and even though they are homogeneously distributed across regions and socioeconomic levels, they are predominantly young and male.

The evolution of the income floor in Great Britain, 1991-2021: a comparison of cross-sectional and longitudinal estimates

Part of the Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 10 October 12.30 to 1.30pm. Online and in-person public event. LSE Centre Building (CBG), Room 2.04.

Speaker:
Dr H. Xavier Jara, Research Officer, LSE III

Chair:
Professor Francisco H. G. Ferreira, Amartya Sen Professor of Inequality Studies and Director of LSE International Inequalities Institute

Relative poverty rates in the UK have been remarkably flat despite significant economic downturns and regressive policy changes over the past two decades. Yet, traditional headcount measures do not necessarily reflect the conditions of the poorest. To overcome this limitation, Ravallion (2016) proposed a measure of the floor – the lower bound of permanent consumption or income – to evaluate progress against poverty. This paper studies the evolution of the income floor in the UK over the past three decades (1991-2021).

The century of the citizen?

Part of the Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 3 October 12.30 to 1.30pm. Online and in-person public event. LSE Centre Building (CBG), Room 2.04.

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Speaker:
Dr Dhananjayan Sriskandarajah, Chief Executive of Oxfam GB and Visiting Senior Fellow, LSE III

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

This should be the Century of the Citizen. For most of human history, we’ve been subjects and then consumers, but the end of the Cold War, rising incomes and the arrival of the internet was heralded as the dawn of an emancipatory era. Or so we thought. Instead, poverty and inequality are again on the rise, civic freedoms are under threat almost everywhere, and the digital world seems just as unequal and oppressive – perhaps even more so – than the real world. In this seminar, Dr Sriskandarajah will draw on his experience as a civil society leader and on some research he conducted while a Visiting Fellow at the III to outline how we might reverse these trends and still make this the Century of the Citizen.

Understanding vulnerabilities of countries for enabling resilient, inclusive and sustainable development

Part of the Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 26 September 12.30 to 1.30pm. Online and in-person public event. LSE Centre Building (CBG), Room 2.04.

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Speaker:
Dr Ruth Kattumuri, Founder and Co-Chair of the India Observatory

Chair:
Professor Kirsten Sehnbruch, British Academy Global Professor and Distinguished Policy Fellow, LSE III

The vulnerability of a country is defined as a risk of exogenous shocks of various origins, such as economic, climatic, or societal disruptions. The shocks could vary in form, origin and intensity, the effect of which is contingent on a country’s specific characteristics and features, including its ability to respond to shocks as reflected in its level of resilience. The Commonwealth Universal Vulnerability Index (UVI), which has informed the forthcoming UN Multidimensional Vulnerability Index (MVI), shows that the Least Developed Countries (LDCs) and Small Island Developing States (SIDS) are most vulnerable to exogenous shocks. Further the understanding of the vulnerabilities of countries contributes to an urgent need for a new financial architecture that is not limited to GDP per capita criteria eligibility to provide access to development finance and involves equitable financing mechanisms that are responsive to the specific needs and contexts of vulnerable countries.

Aid and the Transnational Extraction of Care

Part of the Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 30 May 12.30pm to 1.30pm. Online and in-person public event. The Marshall Building - MAR 1.09.

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Speaker:
Dr Dinah Hannaford, Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Houston

Chair:
Dr Shalini Grover, Research Fellow, LSE III

Hiring domestic workers is a routine part of the expat development lifestyle. Though nearly every expat aid worker in the developing world has local people working within the intimate sphere of their homes—as maids, nannies, security guards, gardeners, and chauffeurs—these relationships are seldom, if ever, discussed in analyses of the development paradigm and its praxis. Examining aid workers as employers of domestic labor provides an opportunity to reach a deeper understanding about the function of development both as an industry and as an orienting framework in our contemporary world, as well as a means to consider the role of aid workers as post-colonial subjects in Africa.

Job Insecurity, Savings and Consumption: an Italian experiment

Part of the Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 23 May 12.30pm to 1.30pm. Online and in-person public event. The Marshall Building - MAR 1.09.

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Speaker:
Professor Conchita D’Ambrosio, Professor of Economics, Université du Luxembourg

Chair:
Professor Francisco H. G. Ferreira, Amartya Sen Professor of Inequality Studies and Director, LSE III

Job insecurity has consequences outside of the labour market. Using the 2012 Fornero reform as a natural experiment, a difference-in-differences framework based on a firm-size discontinuity and individual data coming from the Italian Survey on Household Income and Wealth, our results suggest that greater job insecurity reduces consumption and increases savings. We also show that the changes in consumption and savings are a function of the family structure and of the rank in the household income distribution. Last, greater job insecurity reduces all types of consumption except food expenditures and the extra-savings are either invested in safe assets or kept on savings account.

Assessment of Individual Income Growth with Relative Concerns

Part of the Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 16 May 12.30pm to 1.30pm. Online and in-person public event. The Marshall Building - MAR 1.09.

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Speaker:
Professor Elena Bárcena Martín, Professor of Applied Economics, University of Malaga

Chair:
Professor Facundo Alvaredo, Professorial Research Fellow, LSE III and Co-Director of the World Inequality Database and the World Inequality Lab

We assess individual income growth providing a framework in which each individual accounts for own income growth and for the growth of each individual’s reference group. We take as a starting point the concept of relative deprivation, in which an individual compares with those who are better off, and interpret it as the extent to which an individual is left behind. In this line, we propose that individuals evaluate own income and compare it with income growth of other people in society, which are taken as a sort of benchmark. After some computation, progressive growth and re-ranking are identified at the individual level, and the first component is broken down into one term that captures growth self-concern and another that accounts for growth with respect to others, or relative concerns. The empirical application to Spain over the past ten years shows that this measure supplements the analyses based on common metrics of income distribution and how it helps to identify the different aspects of income growth assessment.

The Dynamics of Lifetime Incomes in France

Part of the Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 9 May 12.30pm to 1.30pm. Online and in-person public event. The Marshall Building - MAR 1.09.

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Speaker:
Professor Cecilia García-Peñalosa, Professor of Economics, Aix-Marseille School of Economics

Chair:
Dr H. Xavier Jara, Research Officer, LSE III

This seminar examines the evolution of lifetime earnings in France. We have access to complete earnings histories that allow us to compute lifetime earnings for the cohorts born between 1942 and 1962. The data show that after increasing for several cohorts, median incomes have been flat, although we do not find the decline in median lifetime earnings observed in the US. Lifetime earnings inequality exhibits small changes across cohorts, following a U-shaped pattern but without the marked increase observed in the US. The stability of lifetime inequality seems to be the result of a period of declining dispersion in annual (cross-sectional) earnings and a subsequent decrease in earnings mobility over the lifetime. These results point towards both institutions, such as the minimum wage, and social norms related to female participation as important factors in shaping lifetime earnings dispersion.

Oligarch Sanctions: policies, evasion strategies and side effects

Part of the Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 2 May 12.30pm to 1.30pm. Online and in-person public event. The Marshall Building - MAR 1.09.

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Speaker:
Dr Elisabeth Schimpfössl, Senior Lecturer in Sociology, Aston University and Visiting Senior Fellow, LSE III

Chair:
Dr Armine Ishkanian, Executive Director of AFSEE programme and Associate Professor, Department of Social Policy

Individual sanction policies have yet to deliver. In the EU and the UK in particular, legal loopholes and gentle sanction designs have given sanctioned oligarchs ample opportunities and time rearrange and evacuate their assets and non-sanctioned, and lesser-known rich to reinvent themselves as longtime Kremlin critics. Compared to the EU and the UK, where a year into the war more than half a dozen of the 20 richest Russians were missing, the US list is less patchy, but it too skipped the name ranked no 1 by Forbes Russia from April 2022. Once it was clear that the war would drag on, Western wealth industries changed tune and declared oligarch boycotts to a core corporate principle. This seminar attempts to take stock of responses to international individual sanction policies since February 2022.

Job loss and earnings inequality: Distributional effects from re-employment in Chile

Part of the III Inequalities Seminar Series

Thursday 23 March 12.00pm to 1.00pm. Online and in-person public event. The Marshall Building - MAR 1.09.

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Speaker:
Dr Rafael Carranza, Postdoctoral Research Officer at INET Oxford and the Department of Social Policy and Intervention, University of Oxford and Visiting Fellow, LSE III

Chair:
Dr Berkay Ozcan, Associate Professor, LSE Department of Social Policy and Faculty Associate, LSE III

Existing research has shown that job displacement leads to significant and persistent earnings losses in Global North countries, but evidence for Global South countries is scarce. Using administrative data for Chile, this seminar will analyse the effects of formal job loss on workers’ subsequent wages. It provides evidence of the costs of losing formal employment in a country that has become a high-income country in recent years but with a weak labour protection system and high earnings inequality. Second, it examines the effect of job separation on earnings distribution using conditional quantile regressions.

The Changing Nature of Global Economy: Digital Technology, Labour and Inequality

Part of the III Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 14 March 12.00pm to 1.00pm. Online and in-person public event. The Marshall Building - MAR 1.09.

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Speaker:
Professor Kaushik Basu, C. Marks Professor of International Studies and Professor of Economics, Cornell University

Chair:
Professor Francisco H. G. Ferreira, Amartya Sen Professor of Inequality Studies and Director, LSE III

The lecture will review the recent global experience and discuss the new challenges not just for economic theory, but for regulation, law and policies to curb inequality. This bend in the road of the global economy is bound to bring about new winners and new losers among nations, in the same way that the Industrial Revolution had done. The lecture will also peer into the future and speculate about who the winners and the losers might be.

Viable Lives: Life beyond survival in rural North India

Part of the III Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 7 March 12.00pm to 1.00pm. Online and in-person public event. The Marshall Building - MAR 1.09.

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Speakers:
Professor Craig Jeffrey, Professor of Human Geography, University of Melbourne
Associate Professor Jane Dyson, Associate Professor of Human Geography, University of Melbourne

Chair:
Dr Shalini Grover, Research Fellow, LSE III

Many minoritized and marginalised populations, including young people, are debating what constitutes a ‘survivable life’ and, in turn, how life can be arranged so that it is more than just survival. In this process they are often analysing how to conceptualise ‘life’. Notwithstanding these trends, however, there is little scholarly work on local discourses and practices of life and viability. This seminar contributes to redressing the balance by examining the spatial and temporal process through which young people imagine and build viable lives in an area of the Indian Himalayas.

Qualitative analysis at scale: An application to aspirations in Cox's Bazaar, Bangladesh

Part of the III Inequalities Seminar Series

Monday 13 February 12.00pm to 1.00pm. Online and in-person public event. New Academic Building 1.14.

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Speakers:
Dr Vijayendra (Biju) Rao, Lead Economist in the Development Research Group of the World Bank
Dr Julian Ashwin, Post-doctoral Researcher, London Business School

Chair:
Dr Paolo Brunori, Assistant Professorial Research Fellow, LSE III

This seminar presents a framework with which to extend a small set of hand-coding to a much larger set of documents using natural language processing and thus to analyse qualitative data at scale. The seminar shows how to assess the robustness of this approach and demonstrates that it can allow the identification of meaningful patterns in the data that the original hand-coded sample is too small to identify. The approach is applied to data collected among Rohingya refugees and their Bangladeshi hosts in Cox’s Bazaar, Bangladesh, to build on work in anthropology and philosophy that distinguishes between ambition and navigational capacity.

Analysing intergenerational mobility with oriented measures and mobility curves

Part of the III Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 7 February 12.00pm to 1.00pm. Online and in-person public event. The Marshall Building - MAR 1.09.

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Speaker:
Professor James Foster, Professor of International Affairs and Professor of Economics, George Washington University

Chair:
Professor Kirsten Sehnbruch, British Academy Global Professor and Distinguished Policy Fellow, LSE III

This seminar studies oriented measures of intergenerational mobility that differentiate between upward and downward mobility, including headcount ratios that give the incidence of upward (or downward) movements and mobility gaps that gauge the average gain (or loss). We define oriented mobility curves that graphically indicate when mobility comparisons are unambiguous and unanimity partial orderings generated by axiomatically defined classes of oriented measure.

Dynastic measures of intergenerational mobility

Part of the III Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 31 January 12.00pm to 1.00pm. Online and in-person public event. The Marshall Building - MAR 1.09.

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Speaker:
Dr Flaviana Palmisano, Associate Professor of Public Economics, Sapienza University of Rome

Chair:
Dr Pedro Salas-Rojo, Research Officer, LSE III

This seminar suggests a simple and flexible criterion to assess relative intergenerational mobility. It accommodates different types of outcomes, such as (continuous) earnings or (discrete and ordinal) education levels, and captures dynastic improvements of such outcomes at different points of the initial distribution. We suggest an application on Indonesia. Using the IFLS data, we match parents observed in 1993 to their children in 2014, providing one of the rare intergenerational mobility analyses based on a long panel in the context of a developing country.

The role of social norms in shaping collective action

Part of the III Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 24 January 12.00pm to 1.00pm. Online and in-person public event. The Marshall Building - MAR 1.09.

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Speaker:
Professor Roberto González, Professor of Social Psychology, P. Universidad Católica de Chile (PUC)

Chair:
Dr Armine Ishkanian, Executive Director of AFSEE programme and Associate Professor, LSE Department of Social Policy

This seminar will address how social norms shape collective action aimed at social change. Based on Social identity and normative conceptual frameworks, we will discuss why it is important to consider this rather neglected topic in the collective action literature by presenting and discussing recent experimental and longitudinal studies supporting the importance of doing it.

Estimating Labour Supply and Informality Elasticities Using Tax-benefit Variation in Latin America

Part of the III Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 6 December 12.30pm to 1.30pm. Online and in-person public event. 32 Lincoln's Inn Fields G20

Speakers:
Dr Xavier Jara, Research Officer, LSE III
Professor Olivier Bargain, Professor of Economics, University of Bordeaux

Chair:
Professor Francisco H. G. Ferreira, Amartya Sen Professor of Inequality Studies and Director, LSE III

Tax systems are already in place in Latin America and are constantly expanding in order to finance increasing public spending. Numerous cash transfer programs also exist and social programs are being scaled up in many places. However, these countries face the constraint of a large and persistent informal sector. Compared to Western countries where redistributive systems may discourage employment (relative to living on welfare), direct progressive taxation in Latin America may reinforce the disincentives to work formally and might reduce the tax base. Social insurances or benefits that are universal and not attached to formal employment may also reduce the necessity to be formally employed. This talk suggests a large-scale investigation of the employment response in general, and the informal employment response in particular, to tax-benefit policies using spatial and time variation in Latin American redistributive systems.

The emergence of a social decolonisation: the question of social change in the French West Indies after World War II

Part of the III Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 29 November 12.30pm to 1.30pm. Online and in-person public event. LSE Centre Building, Room 2.05.

Speaker:
Dr Maël Lavenaire, Research Fellow, LSE III

Chair:
Dr George Kunnath, Assistant Professorial Research Fellow, LSE III

The social change which takes place in the French West Indies after World War II is essentially generated by a sociohistorical interaction between various elements of change observed from 1946 to 1961. Here we refer to the new political status of French Department allowed by a global context, the outbreak of social movements involved in the process of decolonisation, public policies and a specific planning of "economic and social development" as well as the population growth with the emergence of a new generation from a sociological viewpoint. This interactionist process conducts to the new type of society emerging in the French West Indies since the 1960’s, without drastically changing their colonial social structure and racial inequalities. This singular transformation is characterised by new social frustrations, while maintaining existing frustrations that stemmed from slavery legacies in spite of the overall significant improvement of the living conditions.

The Impact of Caste and Untouchability: A Missing Link in the Literature on Stunting in India

Part of the III Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 22 November 12.30pm to 1.30pm. Online and in-person public event. LSE Centre Building, Room 2.05.

Speaker:
Professor Ashwini Deshpande, Professor of Economics and Founding Director, Centre for Economic Data and Analysis (CEDA), Ashoka University, India

Chair:
Professor Naila Kabeer, Professor of Gender and Development, Department of Gender Studies, LSE

India is home to nearly a third of all stunted children. Previous research has overlooked the critical role of caste and the stigmatizing practice of untouchability in shaping incidence of stunting: upper caste (UC) Hindu children are 57% less likely to be stunted than the low-ranked Scheduled Caste (SCs) children. We document the strong negative correlation between the prevalence of the self-professed practice of untouchability and gaps in stunting rates between the UC-Hindu and SC children. The historical geographical span of Hinduism was bounded to the south by the Vindhya Mountain range. Hence, untouchability and caste practices were more rigid to the North of the Vindhya range, directly under the influence of the Indo-Aryan social order. Our estimates show that the SC children living to the south of the Vindhya range are around 30% taller, and have 40% lower levels of stunting, than their counterparts living to the north.

Social Reproduction and Domestic Service: An International Comparison

Part of the III Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 15 November 12.30pm to 1.30pm. Online and in-person public event. LSE Centre Building, Room 2.05.

Speaker:
Dr Marion Lieutaud, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, LSE Department of Methodology and Visiting Fellow, LSE III
Dr Paul Segal, Reader in Economics of Development, Department of International Development, Kings College London and Visiting Fellow, LSE III

Chair:
Dr Shalini Grover, Research Fellow, LSE III

Across the world, over 75 million people are domestic workers for private households (ILO 2021). Previous scholarship has unveiled their working conditions and transnational lives, and how domestic work is built on global inequalities (Parreñas 2015). This paper looks at the households who employ these workers, to understand the context, conditions and inequalities that make it possible for some families to purchase the reproductive labour (housework and carework) of others. Households divide this labour between family, community, the market, and the state. How they do this depends on factors including the extent of state provision of care services, and the degree of economic inequality. In order to identify and weigh these different dimensions, we consider a sample of 8 countries (4 Western European countries; 3 Eastern European countries including Russia; and Mexico) and we use a combination of time-use and expenditure data from cross-national surveys and national surveys.

Multidimensional measurement tool for social security framework assessment: Conceptualisation, construction and comparison

Part of the III Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 8 November 12.30pm to 1.30pm. Online and in-person public event. LSE Centre Building, Room 2.05.

Speaker:
Dr Ashish Dongare, Sir Ratan Tata Postdoctoral Fellow, LSE III

Chair:
Professor Francisco H.G. Ferreira, Amartya Sen Professor of Inequality Studies and Director, LSE III

Needless to mention that there exists a strong interconnectedness between various social security programs and their outcomes are also interlinked. Thus, a holistic approach for review and assessment of social security framework is of vital importance. This research aims at providing a measurement tool for assessment of social security framework to enable optimal allocation and utilisation of available resources.

It involves conceptualisation of Multidimensional Social Security Index (MSSI) covering various aspects of social protection including income security, health security, education security. For this purpose, sub-indices representing broader areas of social security are constructed and indicators are curated to evaluate such sub-indices on the basis of parameters like adequacy, coverage, etc. The sensitivity analysis for robustness check of this newly constructed index has been conducted. Further, a case study of India has been undertaken to check the practical application and to assess the status of safety net at selected states in India.

Using Machine Learning to Decompose Inequality: The Case of Opportunity in South Africa

Part of the III Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 25 October 12.30pm to 1.30pm. Online and in-person public event. LSE Centre Building, Room 2.05.

Speaker:
Dr Pedro Salas-Rojo, Research Officer, LSE III

Chair:
Dr Paolo Brunori, Assistant Professorial Research Fellow, LSE III

According to a widespread view a society achieves equality of opportunity when individuals exerting the same effort obtain the same outcomes regardless of circumstances that they cannot control such as gender, race, and socioeconomic background. This view was formalized by John Roemer in a number of influential contributions. We illustrate an exact analogy between how the phenomenon of inequality of opportunity may be measured and how transformation trees - a machine learning algorithm developed by Hothorn and Zeileis (2021) predicts an output variable based on a set of features. Then, we use data from South Africa (2017) to analyze inequality of opportunity. Our estimates show that the magnitude of this phenomenon is much greater than what has been suggested in the past. Limiting the analysis to only three circumstances - race, parental education and occupation - the Gini of inequality of opportunity ascends to 0.45, twice as large as previously estimated.

Challenges Facing Liberal Democracies: Citizenship and civil society confronting growing inequality

Part of the III Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 18 October 12.30pm to 1.30pm. Online and in-person public event. LSE Centre Building, Room 2.05.

Speaker:
Professor Thomas P. Boje, Professor, Department of Social Science and Business, Roskilde University

Chair:
Dr Armine Ishkanian, Executive Director of the Atlantic Fellows for Social and Economic Equity Programme, LSE III, Associate Professor in the Department of Social Policy

Some of the crucial challenges facing all liberal democracies in their aspiration for social cohesion and solidarity are how to provide the conditions for individuals to be active, participative citizens. In other words, how to provide opportunities and frameworks for citizens to be involved in mutual social and cultural relationships and for society and the collective to show solidarity with disadvantaged groups. In this seminar, Professor Thomas P. Boje will discuss some of the major challenges facing today’s liberal democracies when it comes to growing inequality, restrictions on citizenship rights, growing polarization in civic activism and the impact of globalization on citizens’ empowerment.

Mobilising Productive Subjectivities: Transnational production and social reproduction in unequal Europe

Part of the III Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 11 October 12.30pm to 1.30pm. Online and in-person public event. LSE Centre Building, Room 2.05.

Speaker:
Dr Ania Plomien, Associate Professor, Department of Gender Studies, LSE

Chair:
Dr Shalini Grover, Research Fellow, LSE III

Drawing on an ongoing collaborative project (with Dr Gregory Schwarz) on transnational labour mobility with Polish and Ukrainian migrants working in the food, housing and care sectors in Germany, Poland, and the UK, this event interrogates the dialectical relationship between (global) forces of production and (local) necessities of social reproduction.

The event focuses on the gendered lived experiences of labouring subjectivities of transnational workers, as they confront the necessities of provisioning in a field increasingly dominated by market (vis-à-vis state and household) resourcing. Plomien considers the role that different historico-culturally constituted ‘productive subjectivities’ play in facilitating the social reproduction of European capitalism and draw out the implications for gender inequality, the extent to which inequalities are being accommodated and re-inscribed, rather than transformed.

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Evaluating Allocations of Opportunities

Part of the III Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 4 October 12.30pm to 1.30pm. Online and in-person public event. LSE Centre Building, Room 2.05.

Speaker:
Dr Francesco Andreoli, Associate Professor of Economic Policy, University of Verona

Chair:
Professor Johannes Spinnewijn, Public Economics of Inequality Research Programme Leader, LSE III and Professor of Economics, LSE

This event will provide a robust criterion for comparing lists of probability distributions - interpreted as allocations of opportunities - faced by different social groups. Borrowing from decision making under objective ambiguity, we argue in favour of comparing those collections of probability distributions on the basis of a uniform - among groups - valuation of the expected utility associated to these distributions. We identify an empirically implementable criterion for comparing these lists of probability distributions - conic extension of Zonotope inclusion - that is agreed upon by all conceivable such valuations that exhibit aversion toward inequality of opportunities. We illustrate our criterion by evaluating allocations of educational opportunities among castes and genders in different Indian states.

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Understanding Inequality in India

Part of the III Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 27 September. In-person and online public event.

Speaker:
Professor Reetika Khera, Narendra and Chandra Singhi Chair Professor, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi.

Chair:
Professor Sumi Madhok, Professor of Political Theory and Gender Studies, LSE

The difficulties in measuring inequality in India, given the paucity of data and the compounding effects of social inequality on economic inequality, have been commented upon. Given these constraints, several scholars have documented the very high, and possibly rising, levels of economic inequality in India.

This talk turns the focus to the lack of recognition of the scale of the problem, especially among the rich/ elite in India. The issue requires urgent attention because the proliferation of digital technologies in basic education and health care is likely to exacerbate inequalities in the long run. The widespread misperception among India's rich/ elite that they are 'middle class' contributes to the lack of policy action, including action on fairer taxation policies in the country.

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Of Victims, Sisters and Caring: Anti-trafficking, State and the Sex Workers’ Movement in Sonagachi

Part of the III Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 7 June 2022, 12:30 to 1:30pm. Online public event.

Speakers:
Dr Simanti Dasgupta, Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Dayton
Dr Samita Sen, Vere Harmsworth Professor of Imperial and Naval History, Faculty of History, University of Cambridge

Chair:
Dr Shalini Grover, Research Fellow, LSE III

Based on ethnographic work with Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee (Durbar), a grassroots female sex work organization in Sonagachi, Kolkata, this seminar will examine the politics of care in anti-trafficking work. While anti-trafficking (specifically, the Immoral Trafficking Prevention Act, ITPA), as a state surveillance apparatus, is ostensibly rooted in caring about and for ‘victims’, the legal construction of the victim itself, within a carceral framework, is often tantamount to the violence of care. However, the care work that has emerged in the Self-Regulatory Board founded by Durbar in 1997 to prevent trafficking in Sonagachi is based on the sex workers’ shared experiences of rural-urban migration, forced displacement and, above all, labour and the search for livelihood. Yet, such spaces of care are both hidden and even devalued in terms of social reproduction.

Prioritarianism in Practice

Part of the III Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 31 May 2022, 12:30 to 1:30pm. Online public event.

Speakers:
Professor Matthew Adler, Richard A. Horvitz Professor of Law and Professor of Economics, Philosophy and Public Policy, Duke University
Professor Francisco Ferreira, Amartya Sen Professor of Inequality Studies and LSE III Director

Chair:
Professor Kirsten Sehnbruch, Distinguished Policy Fellow, LSE III and Global Professor, British Academy

"Prioritarianism in Practice" is an international group of scholars who aim to develop the theory and application of prioritarianism. This group has just published a substantial volume, Prioritarianism in Practice, including both theoretical chapters and chapters covering the application of prioritarianism to various policy domains (taxation, health care, fatality risk regulation, climate change, education, and the COVID-19 pandemic) and its use in measuring social progress. Professor Adler, one of the volume’s editors, will give an overview of the book. Professor Ferreira, a co-author of the chapter on "Equality of Opportunity," will discuss how prioritarianism can be extended to take account of individual responsibility.

Social reproduction and care: what’s in a name?

Part of the III Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 24 May 2022, 12:30 to 1:30pm. Online public event.

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Speaker:
Sara Farris, Reader in Sociology, Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths

Discussant:
Professor Naila Kabeer, Faculty Associate, III and Professor of Gender and Development, Department of Gender Studies and Department of International Development, LSE

Chair:
Professor Alpa Shah, Professor of Anthropology, Department of Anthropology and , LSE III

In the last few years, and particularly during the pandemic, the concept of care and the concept of social reproduction have come to the front of feminist and political debates. Both concepts are often used as synonyms to refer to the type of labour undertaken by racialised women in European societies. Yet, the two concepts do not describe exactly the same thing; some of the scholars that use them are keen to draw distinctions. Against this background, Sara Farris will present an initial review of the debate and argue that one of the main distinctions between the two lies in the ways in which these frameworks view, or instead disavow, antagonism and ambivalence, as well as negative affect, in the context of capitalist social formations.

Citizenship 4 Sale: Millionaires, Microstates, and Mobility

Part of the III Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 17 May 2022, 12:30 to 1:30pm. Online public event.

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Speaker:
Dr Kristin Surak, Assistant Professor in Sociology, Department of Sociology, LSE

Chair:
Professor Mike Savage, Martin White Professor of Sociology, Department of Sociology and Convenor , LSE III

Citizenship is often seen as a sacred bond between sovereign and subject, a key locus of identity in the modern world. Yet over the past ten years, several small countries have begun to sell it outright – and for remarkable sums – through formal, government-run programs. Yet why would anyone want to put down $2 million for membership in a microstate? We may think of citizenship as fundamentally about rights and identity, but for many, citizenship is a ticket. It’s not about the privileges it secures within the granting state, but those it brings rights outside it, usually in visa-free travel, business opportunities, and sometimes residence option in other countries. The result gives powerful third countries considerable sway over the value of what is at heart a sovereign prerogative. It also makes for a rollercoaster of a market in citizenship, for not only politics but – more often than not – geopolitics determines its dynamics. Drawing on five years of fieldwork in sixteen countries on four continents, this talk traces the emergence and operation of this intriguing global scene.

The Evolution of Black Neighborhoods in the U.S., 1970-2020

Part of the III Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 10 May 2022, 12:30 to 1:30pm. Online public event.

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Speaker:
Professor Michael Lens, Associate Professor of Urban Planning and Public Policy, Luskin School of Public Affairs, UCLA

Chair:
Professor Neil Lee, Professor of Economic Geography, Department of Geography and Environment and Convenor, , LSE III

Although there is an extensive literature on racial segregation in the United States, and a number of chronicles of Black life in American cities, there are few quantitative studies of Black neighborhoods. In this seminar, Professor Lens discusses his project which aims to fill these gaps by systematically describing the characteristics and trajectories of predominantly Black neighborhoods in the United States, beginning in 1970 — a key inflection point for the Black neighborhood and urban America more broadly.

‘The Library Is like a Mother’: arrival infrastructures and migrant newcomers in East London

Part of the III Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 22 March 2022, 12:30pm to 1:30pm. Online public event.

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It is often assumed that migrants settle into contexts populated by national majorities or co-ethnics. Yet new migrants often move into ‘arrival areas’ settled by previous migrants from various backgrounds. Such arrival areas can typically be found at the margins of ‘arrival cities’ which have seen immigration (and emigration) over many decades. Past movements bequeath a wealth of ‘arrival infrastructures’, consisting of institutions, organisations, social spaces and actors which specifically facilitate arrival. These include, for example, shops as information hubs, religious sites, language classes, and hairdressers, often established by people with migration backgrounds.

This seminar develops the idea of arrival infrastructures as local ‘social infrastructure ecosystems’ in which knowledge and resources between long-established residents (including migrants) and newcomers are exchanged. It looks at the interactions and transfer of knowledge and resources between long-established migrants and more recent newcomers through arrival infrastructures and how these shape migrant inclusion and exclusion. By drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in East London (UK), the seminar investigates how newcomers access settlement information and the role played by arrival infrastructures in this process. It aims to open up debate about arrival infrastructures, their manifestation in different urban contexts, and their relation to migrant social mobility.

Speaker: Professor Susanne Wessendorf (Centre for Trust, Peace and Social Relations, Coventry University)

Chair: Professor Alpa Shah (Department of Anthropology and Convenor Research Theme, LSE III)

Multidimensional Quality of Employment (QoE) Dynamics: evidence from men and women in Chile

Part of the III Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 15 March 2022, 12:30pm to 1:30pm. Online public event.

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Speaker: Dr Joaquin Prieto-Suarez (Research Officer, LSE III)

Chair: Dr Berkay Ozcan (Department of Social Policy, LSE)

In recent years, conventional labour market studies have focused not only on the number of jobs and their employment and unemployment indicators, but also on identifying whether jobs are good or bad. Scholars have raised the relevance of studying the quality of employment in emerging countries based on the realisation that economic growth alone does not necessarily improve employment conditions and that social insurance systems cannot be built on precarious labour markets.

This seminar proposes a framework to analyse the quality of employment (QoE) from a multidimensional (income, stability and conditions) and longitudinal perspective. A dynamic analysis of the QoE provides an understanding of which workers appear to become "stuck" in poor quality jobs and which workers succeed in moving into higher-quality jobs. It also enables examining whether the QoE dynamics of men and women differ.

Crunch Time: how married couples confront unemployment

Part of the III Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 8 March 2022, 12:30pm to 1:30pm. Online public event.

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In this talk, based on her book, Crunch Time, Aliya Hamid Rao gets up close and personal with college-educated, unemployed men, women, and spouses in the U.S. to explain how comparable men and women have starkly different experiences of unemployment. Traditionally gendered understandings of work—that it’s a requirement for men and optional for women—loom large in this process, even for marriages that had been not organized in gender-traditional ways. These beliefs serve to make men’s unemployment an urgent problem, while women’s unemployment—cocooned within a narrative of staying at home—is almost a non-issue. Crunch Time reveals the minutiae of how gendered norms and behaviours are actively maintained by spouses at a time when they could be dismantled, and how gender is central to the ways couples react to and make sense of unemployment.

Speaker: Dr Aliya Rao (Department of Methodology, LSE)

Chair: Dr Shalini Grover (Research Fellow, LSE III)

Mountain Tales: love and loss in the municipality of castaway belongings

Part of the III Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 8 February 2022, 12:30pm to 1:30pm. Online public event.

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Speaker: Saumya Roy (Co-Founder, Vandana Foundation)

Discussant: Dr George Kunnath (Research Fellow, LSE III)

Chair: Dr Shalini Grover (Research Fellow, LSE III)

In this event, author, journalist and activist Saumya Roy will discuss her new book, Mountain Tales, which explores the "noxious and wonderful world" of Maximum City's rising mountains of garbage and the waste pickers who trawl through them.

The towering garbage mountains are reflections of modern India and provide a window into local and global inequalities that arise from overconsumption, pollution, climate change and poverty. Saumya Roy will be in conversation with Dr George Kunnath about the truths that are unravelled through the stories of the small, forgotten community that lives and works amongst Mumbai's castaway belongings.

Global Wealth, Gender and Carbon Injustice: new findings from the World Inequality Report 2022

Part of the III Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 1 February 2022, 12:30pm to 1:30pm. Online public event.

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The presentation will discuss the key findings of the World Inequality Report 2022, by the report's lead author, Lucas Chancel. The report draws from the work of a network of over 100 researchers affiliated with the World Inequality Database, who track economic inequality in its various forms. The 2022 edition presents novel results on global wealth inequalities, gender gaps and ecological inequalities.

"Read this report, shout out its messages, find ways to act upon it." - Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo.

"If one lesson emerges from the richness of the data presented in this report, it is that human societies can choose how much inequality they generate through social and public policy. The report is a world map and a roadmap as to how." - Emmanuel Saez.

Speaker: Dr Lucas Chancel (World Inequality Lab, Paris School of Economics)

Chair: Professor Francisco Ferreira (Amartya Sen Professor of Inequality Studies and LSE III Director)

The Impact of COVID-19 on Global Inequality and Poverty

Part of the III Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 25 January 2022, 12:30pm to 1:30pm. Online public event.

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COVID-19 has had catastrophic economic consequences worldwide. This presentation tries to quantify the consequences of the pandemic on global inequality and poverty in 2020.

To this end, a combination of data sources is used including (i) actual income data from National Statistical Offices, (ii) high-frequency phone surveys, (iii) estimates from literature, and (iv) sectoral and aggregate GDP growth forecasts from national accounts. Results suggest that the world in 2020 witnessed the largest increases to global inequality and poverty since at least 1990. These findings are primarily driven by country-level shocks to average incomes and an increase in between-country inequality. Increases in between-country inequality are driven by the finding that middle-income countries were hit hardest. Changes in within-country inequality were relatively modest, particularly in high-income countries, many of which saw inequality decline in 2020.

Speaker: Dr Nishant Yonzan (Poverty and Inequality team, World Bank Group)

Chair: Dr Paolo Brunori (Assistant Professorial Research Fellow, LSE III)

Unfair Health Inequalities in the UK

Part of the III Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 18 January 2022, 12:30pm to 1:30pm. Online public event.

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In this seminar, Dr Paolo Brunori will discuss his recent paper in which he measures unfair health inequality in the UK using a novel data-driven empirical approach. He shows that unfair inequality is a substantial fraction of the total explained health variability (health variability being the result of circumstances beyond individual control and health-related behaviours). This finding holds no matter which exact definition of fairness is adopted: using both the fairness gap and direct unfairness measures, each evaluated at different reference values for circumstances or effort.

Speaker: Dr Paolo Brunori (Assistant Professorial Research Fellow, LSE III)

Chair: Professor Francisco Ferreira (Amartya Sen Professor of Inequality Studies and LSE III Director)

Is there a 'Grand Gender Convergence' in 21st Century Canada? The Jury is still out

Part of the III Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 7 December, 12:30pm to 1:30pm. Online public event.

Gender equity in the labour market has been an issue in western economies since the mid 19th century. Much progress has been made since that time and has been dubbed the "The Grand Gender Convergence". However, recently concern has been expressed as to whether the progress has stalled. In the absence of gender discrimination within the context of an equal opportunity paradigm, if willingness to work and acquire human resources is similarly distributed across the gender divide, females and males with similar human resource stocks should have similar income distributions. Here, new techniques are introduced for examining the convergence of male and female resources and outcomes which are exemplified in an analysis of gender convergence in Canada’s 21st Century labour market

Speaker: Professor Gordon Anderson (University of Toronto)

Chair: Professor Francisco Ferreira (Amartya Sen Professor of Inequality Studies and LSE III Director)

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Does Dual Citizenship Reproduce Inequalities?

Part of the III Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 30 November, 12:30pm to 1:30pm. Online public event.

Robtel Neajai Pailey grapples with this question and more in her engaging monograph Development, (Dual) Citizenship and Its Discontents in Africa: The Political Economy of Belonging to Liberia (Cambridge University Press, 2021). Hers is the first book to evaluate domestic and diasporic constructions and practices of Liberian citizenship across space and time and their myriad implications for development.

In this seminar drawing on rich life histories from over two hundred in-depth interviews in West Africa, Europe, and North America, Pailey uses a contested dual citizenship bill, introduced in Liberia in 2008 but never passed, as an entry point to ask broader questions about how citizenship is differentiated by class, gender, race, ethnicity, etc, and whether dual citizenship actually reproduces inequalities. She develops a new model for conceptualising citizenship within the context of ‘crisis’-affected states while offering a compelling critique of the neoliberal framing of diasporas and donors as the panacea to post-war reconstruction.

Speaker: Dr Robtel Neajai Pailey (Department of Social Policy, LSE)

Chair: Dr Sara Camacho Felix (Assistant Professorial Lecturer for the Atlantic Fellows in Social and Economic Equity programme, LSE III)

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Shackled in Debt: Global Capitalism, Economic Crisis and Penal Politics in Greece

Part of the III Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 23 November, 12:30pm to 1:30pm. Online public event.

An important body of scholarly work has been produced over the last two decades to explain variation in levels and patterns of state punishment across and within different countries around the world, especially with regard to imprisonment policies and practices. Two variables that have evaded systematic attention in this regard are, first, the orientation of incumbent governments along the political spectrum, and second, the experience and fiscal implications of national economic downturn. Although recent years have seen both variables receive somewhat greater consideration, there is still precious little research into the effects on state punishment that they have in interaction with one another. Because the few available studies touching on the matter have been preoccupied with the Anglo-American sphere and only in the context of recent decades at that, even less is known either about the implications that different types or experiences of economic crisis carry for state punishment, or about the influence exerted in this respect by government political orientations other than those found in established long-established democracies. Irrespective of geographical or temporal scope, moreover, the impact that different extranational factors and actors may have in terms of economic, political or directly penal matters domestically is still poorly understood.

In addressing this gap in the literature, this seminar identifies the direction and assesses the extent of influence exerted by government political orientation and by economic downturn upon the evolution of incarceration and other forms of state punishment in the context of two economic crises in Greece: the first experienced in the late 1920s and early 1930s, and the second one in the 2010s.

Speaker: Dr Leonidas Cheliotis (Department of Social Policy, LSE)

Chair: Dr Fabrício Mendes Fialho (Research Officer, LSE III)

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New Estimates of Inequality of Opportunity Across European Cohorts

Part of the III Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 16 November, 12:30pm to 1:30pm. Online public event.

This seminar, based on a study of the same name, provides a set of new estimates of inequality of opportunity (IOp) in Europe, using the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Condition (EU-SILC). Unlike previous research, inequality of opportunity is estimated within birth cohorts, which is argued to be the appropriate population level for inequality of opportunity analysis. Most IOp measures require estimation of the conditional distribution of the outcome of interest given circumstances. With multiple circumstances and the sample sizes available in EU-SILC, distribution regression methods are used and combined with local kernel weighting to show how these can be used to estimate a large set of IOp measures. Endowed with cohort-level estimates of IOp, the relationship between educational policy variables measured at the time of parental education and offspring generation inequality of opportunity in adulthood are examined. A negative relationship between the duration of compulsory education of the parents and IOp among offspring is found, but the relationship is weak.

Speaker: Professor Philippe Van Kerm (University of Luxembourg)

Chair: Dr Paolo Brunori (Assistant Professorial Research Fellow, LSE III)

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Political Equality: what is it and why does it matter?

Part of the III Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 9 November, 12:30pm to 1:30pm. Online public event.

Commentators and researchers have largely studied inequality, both theoretically and empirically, using a distributional framework. In economics, the focus has mainly been on differences in income and wealth, thus putting the distribution of utility or welfare, and its dependence on material factors, front and centre. This has motivated much statistical work on the measurement of inequality, such as changes in the Gini coefficient or ratios of resource ownership between groups (e.g. 90:10 ratios). In political philosophy and political science, the emphasis in studies of (political) inequality has been on analysing the skewed distribution of power in society, although no parallel literature on measurement has emerged to date. This too is consequently a study of distribution, thereby creating a common thread across the social sciences.

Our focus in this paper is on equal consideration as an ideal for political equality. This is distinct from economic equality and has parallels to discussions of relational equality. We argue that political inequality is a distinctive type of inequality. First, it cannot be reduced to the factors that routinely go into thinking about economic inequality. Second, its currency is performative, not distributive and is fundamentally about the nature and quality of social relations; politics is intrinsically process-oriented, comprising various "political transactions" between citizens, representatives, and interest groups, among others. Thus, to understand political equality, we need to appreciate how individuals relate to one another through the democratic process. We argue that there are two core dimensions that can usefully be studied to bring these ideas to life empirically: patterns of political participation and political representation. Studying these reinforce the idea that, even in advanced democracies, politics is an elite activity concentrated among the educated and those with material resources. We then unpack when this is damaging to achieving "equal consideration" and discuss a range of reforms throughout history that have been proposed to promote political equality through this lens.

Please note that this event will not be recorded.

Speaker: Professor Tim Besley (Department of Economics, LSE)

Chair: Professor Alpa Shah (Convenor Research Theme and Professor in Anthropology, Department of Anthropology)

Is Inequality a Side Effect of Central Bank Independence?

Part of the III Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 26 October, 12:30pm to 1:30pm. Online public event.

Since the 1980s, income inequality has increased substantially in several countries. This event is based on a paper that builds a theory linking these dynamics to central bank independence. We posit the existence of three mechanisms that indirectly tie central bank independence to inequality. First, central bank independence constrains fiscal policy and weakens a government's ability to engage in redistribution. Second, central bank independence incentivizes governments to deregulate financial markets, which generates a boom in asset values and increases non-wage returns. Third, to contain unemployment, governments actively promote policies that weaken the bargaining power of workers. Together, these policies strengthen secular trends towards higher within-country inequality.

Empirically, the analysis finds a strong relationship between central bank independence and inequality, as well as a varying degree of support for each of the three mechanisms. From a policy perspective, our findings contribute to knowledge on the undesirable side effects of central bank independence.

Speaker: Dr Andreas Kern (Georgetown University)

Chair: Dr Joaquin Prieto (Research Officer, LSE III)

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Feminist Readings of COVID-19: a conversation

Part of the III Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 19 October, 12:30pm to 1:30pm. Online public event.

The rise of the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted profoundly the ways in which we labour and live. It has revealed the centrality of care and social reproduction for the functioning of our economy. Moreover, it has clearly revealed the strength of feminist understandings of the world economy, including their focus on the world of work, households and care, and collective action.

This panel is organised as a conversation exploring the gendered impact of COVID-19 on livelihoods, life-making sectors, the world of work. Themes explored include the differential impact of the pandemic on women, the restructuring of social reproduction, and the rise of novel work dichotomies such as 'essential' and 'non-essential' work. The panel will also explore which policies and practices are likely to centre the post-pandemic recovery on gendered labour, care, and social reproduction.

Speakers: Professor Naila Kabeer (Department of Gender Studies, LSE), Dr Alessandra Mezzadri (Department of Development Studies, SOAS) and Dr Sara Stevano (Department of Economics, SOAS)

Chair: Shalini Grover, (Research Fellow, LSE III)

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Researching Race and Racial Inequality in the UK Film Industry

Part of the III Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 12 October, 12:30pm to 1:30pm. Online public event.

The growth of the cultural and creative industries (CCIs) over the past 20 years has coincided with an increased awareness of and research on prevalent racial inequalities in the sector. This has included studies on how Black and ethnic minority people are included in, represented by and experience the UK film industry in particular. Using a unique dataset, major new research undertaken by Dr Clive Nwonka (University College London) and Professor Sarita Malik (Brunel University London) in collaboration with the British Film Institute is exploring the relationship between racial inequality, diversity and cultural policy in the UK film sector by researching through both quantitative and qualitative modes how factors such as regionality, genre have challenged how we must interpret data-led approaches to the study of racial and ethnic difference within the sector and the role of testimony in understanding the nature of discriminatory institutional cultures and practices.

Arguing for a social policy approach to how we understand racial inequalities in the UK film sector and its connected industries, this seminar presentation allows for an exploration of how a mixed methodological approach drawing from film studies, cultural studies, media and communications as well as sociological frames are crucial to a critical understanding of the multi-dimensional forms of racial inequality in the UK film industries. The seminar will also consider the historical significance of British film culture and industry as a site of racial struggle and contestation, the political discourses the language and practice of ‘cultural diversity’ and ‘structural racism’ have and continue to be embedded in, and the various ways in which current research seeks to decouple ‘diversity work’ from anti-racism and the implications of such a critical shift in informing inclusion policy strategies.

Speakers: Dr Clive Nwonka (Visiting Fellow, LSE III; University College London) and Professor Sarita Malik (Brunel University London)

Chair: Dr Luna Glucksberg (Research Fellow, LSE III)

Caste, Class and Social Mobility in Palanpur

Part of the III Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 28 September, 12:30pm to 1:30pm. Online public event.

Since its independence (1947), India has undergone profound social, political and economic transformations driven by the agrarian reforms in the 1950s, the Green Revolution in the 1970s and the neoliberal turn in the 1990s. While these changes have contributed to the economic development of the country, it is less clear to what extent better opportunities for social mobility opened up to individuals, particularly those from groups historically disadvantaged by their caste position. Previous large-scale studies of social mobility in India have been limited by the lack of intergenerational data and the impossibility to disaggregate administrative caste categories into jatis (birth-ascribed endogamous groups).

This talk is based on a study that partly overcomes these limits using unique individual-level data for the entire population of Palanpur (a North Indian village surveyed seven times from 1958 to 2015). Combining a quantitative analysis of trends, patterns and determinants of social mobility across three generations of individuals with a qualitative analysis of 102 semi-structured interviews carried out in 2018 during six-month fieldwork, the study aims at verifying whether social mobility has increased over time and whether caste, at the jati level, continues to be a determinant factor of social (im)mobility.

Speaker: Dr Floriane Bolazzi (Università degli Studi di Milano)

Chair: Professor Nicholas Stern (Chair of the Grantham Research Institute, LSE)

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Intergenerational Transfers, Wealth and Gender in Britain

Part of the III Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 25 May 2021, 12:30pm to 1:30pm. Online public event.

This talk will investigate the impact of intergenerational wealth transfers on wealth levels and inequality, exploiting rich household survey data. It will analyse patterns of intergenerational transfer receipt by gender, and assesses the extent to which differences in the scale and nature of these receipts contribute to the gender wealth gap.

Speakers: Brian Nolan (Professor of Social Policy, Department of Social Policy and Intervention, University of Oxford) and Juan Palomino (Research Officer, Department of Social Policy and Intervention, University of Oxford)

Chair: Professor Francisco Ferreira (Amartya Sen Professor of Inequality Studies and LSE III Director)

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Faces of Inequality: a mixed methods approach to multidimensional inequalities

Part of the III Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 18 May 2021, 12:30pm to 1:30pm. Online public event.

This paper, co-authored with Dr Ingrid Bleynat, presents a new mixed methods approach to measuring and understanding multidimensional inequality, and applies it to new data for Mexico City. Quantitative and qualitative dimensions of inequality are incorporated, integrating the concerns of both economists and sociologists.

This portrayal of inequality combines the representativeness of quantitative approaches with the depth and nuance of qualitative analyses of lived experience, habitus, and social relations.

Speaker: Paul Segal (Reader in Economics of Development, Department of International Development at King's College London)

Chair: Dr Tahnee Ooms (Research Officer, LSE III)

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Refusing Discriminatory Technologies of Power: racial justice and the challenge of hi-tech policing

Part of the III Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 11 May 2021, 12:30pm to 1:30pm. Online public event.

From informational capitalism to biased code, technological systems increasingly form part of larger structures of oppression and domination. This talk tackles the topic of technology, injustice, and inequity with a focus on bottom-up practices of resistance, rejection, and refusal of digital and automated systems that increasingly govern people’s lives.

Drawing from examples of data-driven policing in Europe and the United States, this talk explores the narrative, technical, and political challenges faced by members of affected communities - especially minoritised and racialised communities - in countering these discriminatory technologies of power. Given these challenges, what can affected communities learn from other practices of technological refusal?

Speaker: Dr Seeta Peña Gangadharan (Associate Professor, Department of Media and Communications, LSE)

Chair: Professor Ellen Helsper (Research Theme Convenor (); Professor in Digital Inequalities, Department of Media and Communications, LSE)

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Homoploutia: Top Labor and Capital Incomes in the United States, 1950-2020

Part of the III Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 4 May 2021, 12:30pm to 1:30pm. Online public event.

Homoploutia describes the situation in which the same people are rich in the space of capital and labor income. In this talk, survey and administrative data is combined to document the evolution of homoploutia in the United States since 1950, finding that the increase in labor income inequality contributed to the rising homoploutia, which in turn explains 20% of the increase in interpersonal income inequality since 1986.

Speaker: Yonatan Berman (Research Fellow, London Mathematical Laboratory)

Chair: Dr Nora Waitkus (Research Officer, LSE III)

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Anonymous and Non-Anonymous Growth Incidence Curves in the United States, 1968-2016

Part of the III Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 30 March 2021, 12:30pm to 1:30pm. Online public event.

This paper combines cross-sectional and longitudinal labor income data to present a comparison between anonymous and non-anonymous growth incidence curves in the United States during the past 50 years. If anonymous growth incidence tend to be upward sloping because of increasing inequality during that period, the same is not true of non-anonymous curves, which prove to be at or non-significantly downward sloping, suggesting some neutrality of growth when initial income positions are accounted for. This is true when using either the PSID data or synthetic panels based on CPS data and one-parameter functional representations of income mobility. Flat non-anonymous curves are observed even in periods of increasing cross-sectional income inequality. Differences between anonymous and non-anonymous curves thus matter for the interpretation of inequality changes, social welfare and policy.

Speaker: Professor François Bourguignon (Emeritus Professor of Economics, Paris School of Economics)

Chair: Professor Francisco Ferreira (Amartya Sen Professor of Inequality Studies and LSE III Director)

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When Violence Endures: inequality, resistance, and repression in India's Maoist guerrilla zones

Part of the III Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 23 March 2021, 12:30pm to 1:30pm. Online public event.

This paper engages with the concept of violence in the context of the ongoing Maoist insurgency and counterinsurgency in India. During the five-decade-long armed conflict involving the Maoist guerrillas and the landless/poor peasants on the one side, and the state security forces and upper-caste/private militias on the other, violence has taken multiple forms. It has spiralled, giving rise to new formations and new theatres of war, especially in the forested areas which are home to indigenous populations. In this paper, I attempt to conceptualise this enduring violence and reflect on the possibility of resolutions, drawing on twenty years of my research in conflict-affected regions in India, and recently in Colombia. Employing the framework of the ‘Spiral of Violence’ developed by Helder Camara (1909–1999), a Brazilian liberation theologian, I explore the many faces of violence as manifested in a continuum of structural inequality, resistance and repression. As there has been no meaningful transition from violence to peace in India’s guerrilla zones, I draw on a comparative model, and discuss the insights that the 2016 peace agreement in Colombia might provide for India. In Colombia, also ravaged by the cycle of violence, the peace agreement between the FARC and the state facilitated the end of a similarly long-lasting armed conflict. The comprehensive peace process in Colombia, in spite of its setbacks, has demonstrated that without addressing the persisting inequalities, the spiral of violence cannot be broken. What could India learn from the achievements and pitfalls of the Colombian model?

Speaker: Dr George Kunnath (Research Fellow, LSE III)

Chair: Professor Ellen Helsper (Research Theme Convenor () and Professor in Digital Inequalities at the Department of Media and Communications)

Households, Inequalities and Care: lockdown experiences from the UK, New Zealand and India

Part of the III Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 09 March 2021, 12:30pm to 1:30pm. Online public event.

This event will explore how the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed the need to centre an understanding of the household in policy-making and politics if we are to mitigate inequalities. It will do so by unveiling the insights of immersive anthropological research on the impact of the COVID-19 lockdowns as experienced in the UK, New Zealand and India. It will explore the inequalities, in particular an informal and formal care deficit generated by UK national and local lockdowns, along with the problematic assumptions about the household and community in COVID-19 policy interventions in the UK. It will analyse the success, but also the limitations, of bubble policies in the New Zealand as a strategy for allowing citizens to support loved ones living beyond their immediate residence whilst nevertheless preventing the spread of COVID-19. And it will highlight the significance of the spatio-temporal division of households that were at the heart of the plight of the hundreds of thousands of migrant labourers who took to their feet and marched home when the lockdowns were called in India. Overall, we will suggest alternative approaches to policy and politics grounded in anthropological insights and methods.

Speakers: Dr Alpa Shah (Associate Professor of Anthropology; Research Theme leader of ‘Global Economies of Care’, III, LSE), Professor Laura Bear (Professor of Anthropology, LSE), Dr Nick Long (Associate Professor of Anthropology, LSE)

Chair: Dr Insa Koch (Associate Professor of Law and Anthropology)

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Find Laura Bear's report summary here

Find Nick Long's report here

Find Alpa Shah's article here

The Changing Geography of Social Mobility in the United States

Part of the III Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 16 February 2021, 12:30pm to 1:30pm. Online public event.

New evidence shows that intergenerational social mobility – the rate at which children born into poverty climb the income ladder – varies considerably across the United States. Is this current geography of opportunity something new or does it reflect a continuation of long-term trends? We answer this question by constructing new data on the levels and determinants of social mobility across American regions over the twentieth century. We find that the changing geography of opportunity-generating economic activity restructures the landscape of intergenerational mobility, but factors associated with specific regional structures of interpersonal inequality that have "deep roots" generate persistence. This is evident in the sharp decline in social mobility in the Midwest as economic activity has shifted away from it, and the consistently low levels of opportunity in the South even as economic activity has shifted toward it. We conclude that the long-term geography of social mobility can be understood through the deep roots and changing economic fortunes of places.

Speaker: Dr Dylan Connor (Assistant Professor at School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning, Arizona State University)

Chair: Dr Neil Cummins (Associate Professor of Economic History, LSE)

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The Economic Consequences of Major Tax Cuts for the Rich

Part of the III Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 02 February 2021, 12:30pm to 1:30pm. Online public event.

The last 40 years have seen a substantial fall in taxes on the rich across the OECD countries. This coincided with a period of rising income inequality, especially in the Anglo-Saxon countries. Given the difficulties of establishing causality from cross-country panel studies, however, the extent to which tax cuts on the rich have driven up income inequality remains an open empirical question. This paper aims to fill that gap in the literature by using new matching techniques for panel data to estimate the causal effect of major tax cuts on the rich on income inequality. As proponents of tax cuts on the rich often argue for their beneficial effects on economic performance due to efficiency gains and the reduction of behavioural distortions, we also estimate the effects of major tax cuts on the rich on economic growth and unemployment. Our analysis finds strong evidence that cutting taxes on the rich increases income inequality but has no effect on growth or unemployment. Overall, this new research suggests that lower taxes on the rich have made a significant contribution to increased income inequality in the OECD countries since the 1980s, with no offsetting gains in economic performance.

Speakers: Dr David Hope (Department of Political Economy, Kings College London, Visiting Research Fellow, International Inequalities Institute), Dr Julian Limberg (Department of Political Economy, Kings College London)

Chair: Dr Luna Glucksberg (Research Fellow, LSE III)

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The unintended consequences of quantifying quality: Does ranking school performance shape the geographical concentration of advantage?

Part of the III Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 26 January 2021, 12:30pm to 1:30pm. Online public event.

Based on a paper of the same name, this talk will investigate whether quantifying school performance can have the perverse consequence of increasing the spatial concentration of advantage.

Combining research on residential segregation with the sociology of quantification, the writers argue that ranking school performance may induce affluent parents to sort into areas with higher ranked schools. This hypothesis is explored by analysing whether the introduction of league tables measuring school performance in the early 1990s in the UK affected the spatial concentration of advantage. The writers find that quantifying school quality has the unintended consequence of increasing the geographical concentration of advantage, potentially entrenching poverty and inequality.

Speakers: Dr Aaron Reeves (Associate Professor in the Department of Social Policy and Intervention at Oxford University, and a Visiting Senior Fellow in the International Inequalities Institute), Daniel McArthur (Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Politics and International Relations at Oxford University)

Chair: Dr Nora Waitkus (Research Officer, LSE III)

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Read the slides here

Apocalypse or new dawn? Social mobility, inequality and education in the post-COVID era

Part of the III Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 19 January 2021, 12:30pm to 1:30pm. Online public event.

What are the prospects for social mobility in the wake of the Covid pandemic? Britain’s first Professor of Social Mobility will assess the future implications of growing educational and societal inequalities, drawing on evidence from the latest research and his new book.

Social mobility can be defined in many ways, but however conceived the dials appear to be pointing in the wrong direction, particularly for ‘Generation Covid’, the under 25s. We are failing the basic fairness test in society: with inequalities so extreme those on the lower rungs of the economic or social ladder face an impossible task in forging a decent life, let alone climbing the ladder. The Covid crisis has highlighted the escalating expectations placed on teachers, and the education system more widely, to solve all of society’s ills.

Building a more mobile and equal society will require radical long-term reforms both outside and inside the school gates, including a one-off progressive wealth tax; guarantees for decent and valuable jobs across all regions of the country; a credible vocational stream linking education and work; more resources for schoolsto tackle social welfare alongside teaching and learning; and a step change in the social mobility approach within universities.

Some scholars predict that society will eventually unravel as the disenfranchised rise up against the elites. But the Covid crisis also offers an historic opportunity to reset society and create a fairer and more sustainable future for all.

Speaker: Professor Lee Elliot-Major (Professor of Social Mobility, University of Exeter)

Chair: Dr Sara Camacho-Felix (Assistant Professorial Lecturer, LSE III)

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The Effects of Cash Transfers on Formal Labor Markets: evidence from Brazil

Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 1 December 2020, 12:30pm to 1:30pm. Online public event

Speaker: Dr Joana Naritomi (Assistant Professor, Department of International Development, LSE)

Chair: Dr Armine Ishkanian (III Research Theme Convenor (), Executive Director AFSEE programme and Associate Professor at the Department of Social Policy, LSE)

Cash transfers have expanded widely in developing countries, and have been credited for a sizable reduction in poverty rates. Yet, the potential unintended consequences of these programs for labor markets have spurred a heated policy debate. Our results highlight the importance of accounting for both individual and aggregate effects of welfare programs in policy debates.

Found in Translation? Language Legislation and Pro-Social Preferences

Part of the III Seminar Series

Tuesday 17 November 2020, 12:30pm to 1:30pm. Online public event

Speaker: Frank A. Cowell (Department of Economics, LSE)

Chair: Professor Francisco Ferreira (Amartya Sen Professor of Inequalities, Director International Inequalities Institute

Language plays a central role in shaping people's identities. In multilingual countries, the legal recognition of a language increases its status; this may influence attitudes towards others and their preferences for redistribution. This paper studies the effect of the progressive introduction of official language recognition (OLR) in Indian states, on pro-social behaviour, including tolerance, willingness to redistribute and unselfishness. The exposure to OLR increases has a significant impact on pro-social behaviour, one that is modified by factors such as whether respondents are Hindi speakers.

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Lives and Livelihoods: estimates of the global mortality and poverty effects of the COVID-19 pandemic

Part of the III Seminar Series

Tuesday 27 October 2020, 12:30pm to 1:30pm. Online public event

Speaker: Dr Benoit Decerf (University of Namur)

Chair: Professor Kirsten Sehnbruch (Distinguished Policy Fellow, LSE III)

This event will evaluate the global welfare consequences of increases in mortality and poverty generated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Increases in mortality are measured in terms of the number of years of life lost (LY) to the pandemic.

Three main findings arise. First, as of early June 2020, the pandemic (and the observed private and policy responses) has generated at least 68 million additional poverty years and 4.3 million years of life lost across 150 countries. The ratio of PYs to LYs is very large in most countries, suggesting that the poverty consequences of the crisis are of paramount importance. Second, this ratio declines systematically with GDP per capita: poverty accounts for a much greater share of the welfare costs in poorer countries. Finally, the dominance of poverty over mortality is reversed in a counterfactual "herd immunity" scenario: without any policy intervention, LYs tend to be greater than PYs, and the overall welfare losses are greater.

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Culture Is Bad for You: inequality in the cultural and creative industries

Part of the III Seminar Series

Tuesday 13 October 2020, 12:30-1:30pm. Online public event

Speaker: Dr Dave O'Brien (Chancellor’s Fellow, Cultural and Creative Industries, University of Edinburgh)

Chair: Dr Sara Camacho Felix (Assistant Professorial Lecturer, LSE III)

This talk introduces themes from the book Culture is bad for you. The book analyses some of the connections between culture and social inequality. It presents the first large-scale study of social mobility into cultural and creative jobs, along with hundreds of interviews with cultural workers, and new analysis of secondary datasets. It uses this data to show that who works, and who engages, in culture is deeply unequal.

Alongside these themes, the talk addresses the intersection between class, race and gender underpinning exclusions from the workforce and the audience, demonstrating how women, people of colour, and those from working class origins are systematically excluded.

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Why do people stay poor?

Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 29 September 2020, 12:30pm to 1:30pm. Online public event

Speaker: Professor Oriana Bandiera (Sir Anthony Atkinson Chair in Economics, Director of STICERD)

Chair: Dr Tahnee Ooms (Research Officer, III)

There are two broad views as to why people stay poor. One emphasizes differences in fundamentals, such as ability, talent or motivation. The other, poverty traps view, differences in opportunities stemming from differences in wealth.

This study exploits a large-scale, randomized asset transfer and panel data on 6000 households over an 11 year period to test between these two views. The data supports the poverty traps view - identifying a threshold level of initial assets above which households accumulate assets, take on better occupations and grow out of poverty. The reverse happens for those below the threshold. The findings imply that big push policies which transform job opportunities for the poor might represent a permanent solution to the global mass poverty problem.

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Racial Capitalism, Resurgent Populism, and the Politics of Rightsfocus
Inequalities Seminar Series

25th February 2020, 12.30 to 1.45pm, FAW 9.05

Speaker: Professor Michael McCann is Gordon Hirabayashi Professor for the Advancement of Citizenship at the University of Washington in Seattle, WA. McCann is author of over sixty article-length publications and author, co-author, editor, or co-editor of eight books, including authoring the multi-award winning monographs Rights at Work: Pay Equity Reform and the Politics of Legal Mobilization (Chicago, 1994) and (with William Haltom) Distorting the Law: Politics, Media, and the Litigation Crisis (Chicago, 2004). His newest book, with George Lovell, is Union by Law: Filipino American Labor Activists, Rights Radicalism, and Racial Capitalism (Chicago 2020). McCann was the founding director of the Law, Societies, & Justice Program as well as the Comparative Law and Society Studies (CLASS) Center at UW; he was also one of the faculty co-founders for the UW Center for Human Rights and a two-term director of the Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies. McCann is winner of multiple teaching and mentoring awards. He also was a President of the U.S. based international Law and Society Association (2011-13).

Chair: Professor Mike Savage (Director, International Inequalities Institute, LSE).

Scholars on both sides of the Atlantic have identified, often with some alarm, the ways that new populist forms of governance are posing challenges to the liberal rule of law that has constituted regimes in North America, Europe, and beyond in the post-WW II era. The presentation focuses on populist threats to the fundamental rights of persons – both established rights and opportunities for political advocacy of new or "novel’ egalitarian rights. McCann argues that the new populism resurrects illiberal, racist, and patriarchal social and legal norms – what we label as relations enforced by "repressive law" – that coexisted with and undercut liberal norms, institutional arrangements, policies, and elite defenders before the mid-century "racial break." Because the new populism tens to eschew or scorn even abstract deference to liberal universalist ideals, the politics of rights advocacy, especially for the most vulnerable persons, today faces new types of challenges.

The dog that didn’t bark? Income inequality and the absence of a Tawney moment in the mass media
Inequalities Seminar Series

18th February 2020, 12.30 to 1.45pm, FAW 9.05

Speakers: Dr Patrick McGovern (Director of the MSc International Migration and Public Policy and an Associate Professor, Reader, in the Department of Sociology), Dr Sandra Obradovic (LSE Fellow in the Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science), Professor Martin W. Bauer (Director of MSc Social & Public Communication, Professor of Social Psychology Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science)

Have rising levels of income inequality been recognized as a scandalous social problem that requires radically different kinds of policy responses? Or has the topic failed to gain enough attention to be considered as a new social problem with the result that it has become subsumed within existing discussions of economic policy? Drawing on an analysis of UK and US newspapers we find that the coverage of income inequality came in three phases; an initial surge in the 1990s, followed by a decline in the early 2000s, and a second surge that takes off after the economic crisis of 2008. Despite this surge in media attention, the problem of inequality seems to have remained an academic concern as it does not appear to have resonated more widely.

Across the three periods, we observe a shift in framing, some diversity in frame sponsors and a shift in political slant, yet public attitudes towards inequality remain stable across this same time-period. Our argument is that social inequality has not become a mobilizing social problem, at least as reflected in the print media.

First, the dominant frames were centred on seemingly natural or inevitable processes of globalization, market forces and technological change rather than a new sense of economic injustice. Secondly, the sponsors remained as a relatively narrow group of academic and applied economists with some eventual interest from politicians. Finally, resolutions of the problem were subsumed within existing approaches to economic policy that included arguments for raising taxation, increasing the minimum wage or else accepting the rise in economic inequality as a necessary evil that provided rewards for hardworking people. Furthermore, these findings are consistent with system justifying attitudes.

In sum, the academic interest in income inequality has failed to ignite a ‘Tawney moment’, by which we mean, a public discourse that recognizes inequality as a scandalous evil, and names it as such.

Dr Patrick McGovern is Director of the MSc International Migration and Public Policy and an Associate Professor (Reader) in the Department of Sociology.

Dr Sandra Obradović is an LSE Fellow in the Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). She obtained her BA in Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), her MSc in Social and Cultural Psychology and her PhD in Psychology at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).

Professor Martin W. Bauer is the Director of MSc Social & Public Communication, Professor of Social Psychology Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science.

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It’s Slippery at the Top: churn and anxiety amongst elite families
Inequalities Seminar Series

4th February 2020, 12.30pm to1.45pm, FAW 9.05

Speaker: Dr Luna Glucksberg (Research Fellow, LSE International Inequalities Institute)

Chair: Dr Nora Waitkus (Research Officer, LSE International Inequalities Institute)

This paper takes as a starting point the apparent paradox in the behaviour of elite families who strive to accumulate more and more wealth, fearing to lose their position at the top and slip down the inequality curve. To unpack this contradiction the paper explores the fundamental problem that all elite families face, or rather are told they face, by their advisers: the issue of ‘generational algebra’.

Luna Glucksberg is Research Fellow at III. She is an urban anthropologist looking at inequality and socio-economic stratification in contemporary society. She has worked extensively on elites and how they reproduce; on the roles of women and family offices in the reproduction of dynastic families; and on how philanthropy can be used by elites to strengthen their own family dynamics.

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The Wealth Inequality of Nations: exploring and explaining cross-national differences in wealth
Inequalities Seminar Series

21st January 2020, 12.30pm to 1.45pm, FAW9.05

Speaker: Dr Nora Waitkus (Research Officer, LSE International Inequalities Institute)

Chair: Dr Luna Glucksberg (Research Fellow, LSE International Inequalities Institute)

Comparative research on income inequality has produced several coherent frameworks to study the institutional determinants of income stratification. In contrast, no such framework and much less empirical evidence exist to explain cross-national differences in wealth inequality. This situation is particularly lamentable as cross-national patterns of inequality in wealth diverge sharply from those in income. This talk seeks to pave the way for new institutional explanations of cross-national differences in wealth inequality by tracing them to the influence of different wealth components.

Nora Waitkus is a researcher at the International Inequalities Institute and is a sociologist looking at inequality and socio-economic stratification in contemporary capitalist societies.

Aristocratic, Highbrow and Ordinary: Shifting Modes of Elite Distinction 1897-2016

3rd December 2019, 12.30 to 1.45, FAW 9.05

Speaker: Dr Sam Friedman (Director, MSc Inequalities and Social Science and Associate Professor Department of Sociology)

Chair: Professor Mike Savage (III Director)

How do elites signal their superior social position through the consumption of culture? In this paper we answer this foundational question by drawing on 120 years of ‘recreations’ data (N = 71,393) contained within Who’s Who – a unique catalogue of the British elite. Our results reveal three distinct stages of elite culture. First, a dominant mode of aristocratic practice forged around the leisure possibilities afforded by landed estates which waned significantly in the late 19th century. Second, a highbrow mode dominated by the fine arts which increased sharply in the early 20th century before gently receding in the most recent birth cohorts; and, third, a contemporary mode characterised by the blending of highbrow pursuits with more everyday forms of cultural participation, such as spending time with family, friends and pets. These shifts not only reveal changes in the contents of elite culture but also in the nature of elite distinction – in particular; 1) how the applicability of emulation and misrecognition theories has changed over time, 2) the emergence of a contemporary mode that publicly emphasises everyday cultural practice (to accentuate ordinariness, authenticity and cultural connection) while at the same time retaining many tastes that continue to be misrecognised as legitimate.

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Who Cares in a Shrinking State? Responsibility and Respectability Reconsidered

19th November 2019, 12.30-1.45 & a further workshop from 2.15 till 4pm, FAW 9.05

Speakers: Professor Mary Evans (LSE Centennial Professor at the Department of Gender Studies Department of Gender Studies), Professor Beverley (III Research Theme Convenor and AFSEE Academic Advisor International Inequalities Institute), Dr Insa Koch (Associate Professor of Law and Anthropology Department of Law)

As the state in the UK shrinks its responsibility for social care who will provide for the children, the elderly, the less able and those who need care. You may have heard about the "care sandwich" as mothers have to give up work to care for their elderly family members as well as their very young family members and in between the sandwich of young and old is all the regular car that they disperse daily. We used to talk about women’s double burden of domestic and paid work, but this has extended radically. Not only are many women subject to a "triple whammy" through austerity cuts to supportive benefits, with BME women hit the hardest, they now have many more responsibilities as state services in education and health are also cut, and what was once part of the welfare state becomes "women’s work" once more. In this seminar Dr Insa Koch will discuss the nature of the shrinking state, drawing on the impact of the shrinking state on local populations from her empirical study, in the UK published as Personalizing the State: An Anthropology of Law, Politics, and Welfare in Austerity Britain. Professor Mary Evans who is undertaking a project on the nature of respectability. Mary asks "who is responsible?" and how? , what forms of deserving and undeserving distinctions are drawn between women when the state abdicates its responsibility. The event will be chaired by Professor Beverley Skeggs, academic advisor to the III Global Economies of Care research theme and she will be joined by the "Care Collective", a research group that aims to generate new challenges to the current caring politics. The lunchtime seminar will be followed by a meeting of the research theme to which people are also invited.

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Superstar cities and left-behind places: A long-run perspective on U.S. interregional inequality

29th October, 12.30 to 1.45pm, FAW 9.05

Speaker: Dr Tom Kemeny (Visiting Fellow at the International Inequalities Institute)

Around 1980, interregional income inequality in the US began to grow, as it did in a wide range of other countries. In the US, some people moved to opportunity, newly concentrated in a limited subset of urbanized locations, but overall migration rates shrunk. As a consequence, many Americans have become stuck in places that offer few opportunities. This shift is economically important, and it also appears to be related to the recent upsurge in populist politics. And yet divergence is not a constant or necessary feature of the space-economy. Indeed, it strongly contrasts with patterns experienced during the mid-20th century, where people were more mobile and gaps between places diminished. And partly because many of our core theories of urban growth and change are premised on the record of this earlier period, we face real challenges to explain what we see today, and to design policies that address the fallout. All of this points to an urgent need to (a) better understand the current moment, and in light of this (b) retheorize urban growth. In my talk, I will attempt to do both. I will propose a ‘structural’ theory featuring regular, alternating patterns of convergence and divergence. Major, disruptive technology shocks – or industrial revolutions – regulate this ‘wave’ pattern, increasing the gaps between places, and then later diminishing them. I will sketch mechanisms that could generate these facts, and provide descriptive evidence in support of these ideas by analyzing information on US regional economies since 1860.

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Between Communism and Capitalism: Long-Term Inequality in Poland, 1892-2015

15th October, 12.30 to 1.45pm, FAW 9.05

Speaker: Pawel Bukowski (Research Officer, LSE)

How has Polish inequality evolved between communism and capitalism to reach one of the highest levels in Europe today? To address this question, we construct the first series on the long-term distribution of income in Poland by combining tax, household survey and national accounts data. We document a U-shaped evolution of inequalities from the end of the 19th century until today: (i) inequality was high before WWII; (ii) abruptly fell after the introduction of communism in 1947 and stagnated at low levels during the whole communist period; (iii) experienced a sharp rise with the return to capitalism in 1989. Between 1989 and 2015 the top 10% income share increased from 23% to 35% and the top 1% income share from 4% to 13%. Frequently quoted Poland’s transition success has largely benefited top income groups.

We find that inequality was high in the first half of the 20th century due to strong concentration of capital income at the top of the distribution. The secular fall after WW2 was largely to a combination of capital income shocks from war destructions with communist policies both eliminating private ownership and forcing wage compression. The rise of inequality after the return to capitalism in the early 1990s was induced both by the rise of top labour and capital incomes. We attribute this to labour market liberalisation and privatisation. However, the strong rise in inequality in the 2000s was driven solely by the increase in top capital incomes, which is likely related to current globalization forces. Yet overall, the unique Polish inequality history speaks about the central role of policies and institutions in shaping inequality in the long run.

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The life and times of categorical inequality: class, gender and race in long term historical perspective

1st October, 12.30 to 1.45pm, FAW 9.05

Speaker: Professor Mike Savage (Director, International Inequalities Institute, LSE)

Chair: Dr Luna Glucksberg (Research Fellow at the International Inequalities Institute)

This talk will reflect on the current ‘state of the debate’ about inequality. Although inequality is increasingly widely recognised to be a major concern which requires the kind of interdisciplinary initiatives that the III facilitates, a number of major challenges have come to the fore. This talk will reflect on one of these, how to link analyses of income and wealth distributions, which the economists have brought to the fore, with the categorical analyses of gender, race and class which other social scientists emphasise, and which raise major questions of political action. Drawing on Mike Savage's forthcoming book, The challenge of inequality: social change and the return of history I will speculatively lay out recent trends in inequality along axes of gender, race and class to show how they both disrupt, but also might empower, an overarching account of the intensification of inequalities.

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Can public consensus identify a ‘riches line’?

Speakers: Dr Katharina Hecht (LSE, III) and Abigail Davis (Loughborough University)

21st May, 12.30-1.45pm, Fawcett House (FAW), Room 9.05

While frequently discussed in the media and in popular discourse, so far not much attention has been paid to defining, and analysing public views towards, ‘the rich’ or ‘riches’ in the social sciences. In addition to addressing a gap in our research knowledge, this pilot study addresses an urgent everyday issue, at a time in which resources accruing to the very rich are ever-increasing, while many are suffering the consequences of austerity policies, including extreme food and housing insecurity.

There is a well-established research tradition that aims to build a definition of a Minimum Income Standard (MIS) based on public consensus. Our novel study seeks to draw on public consensus methods, but deploy them at the other end of the income and wealth distributions, to understand how ‘riches’ or ‘the rich’ might be defined.

The study is a first step in exploring whether members of the public in London can reach a consensus about whether there is a threshold above which people could be considered to have too much, akin to how a poverty line signifies a threshold below which people do not have enough. Specifically, it aims to analyse whether a negotiated consensus among groups of members of the public on different levels of income, can develop such a concept. The findings provide novel insights into people’s views on what it means to have high levels of income and wealth and what different levels of richness entail (description), as well as unpacking people’s judgements about different forms of wealth and the uses to which it is put (normative evaluation).

The open-and-shut case of inequality
Speaker: Dr Jan Vandemoortele

7th May, 12.30-1.45pm, Fawcett House (FAW), Room 9.05

The latest evidence shows that people in countries with low inequality are amongst the happiest and healthiest. In those countries, economic growth, education and social mobility tend to be high, whilst social ills such as gender discrimination, crime, fraud, corruption, alcohol and drugs abuse, bullying at school are less. People there tend to use less water, produce less waste and emit less CO2; thus leaving a smaller ecolo gical footprint. Hence, the world is not facing two separate challenges, one ecological and the other socioeconomic; but one complex and inter-connected challenge in which inequality plays a central role. The impact of inequality on how people feel, reason and act is grossly underestimated. The first step in reducing inequality is to fully understand its harmful effects, rather than to deepen our analysis of its causes and potential remedies. The article aims to contribute to such increased awareness. It draws together the latest evidence from a wide range of disciplines. It clarifies four conceptual dichotomies that are important in elucidating the debate about inequality. It reviews the concerns expressed by historians, philosophers and political scientists about inequality. In concluding, it makes a concrete proposal for enhancing our comprehension of the impact of inequality.

A tale of two towns: what the fortunes of Oldham and Oxford tell us about spatial inequality in Britain
26th March 2019

Speaker: Dr Mark Fransham (International Inequalities Institute, LSE)

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Adventures in Anarcolandia: the complexities and contradictions of transnational anarchist social movements
12th March 2019

Speaker: Dr Erica Lagalisse (International Inequalities Institute, LSE)

Contemporary anarchist activists aim to manifest non-hierarchical social relations within their own social milieu, as well as topple the social hierarchies that characterize the dominant society, such as white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism: Anarchists observe the importance of "means" matching "ends" and work to bring about "a new world in the shell of the old". I argue however that anarchist activism in North America does not entirely subvert the logic of neoliberalism. Colonial property relations, bureaucratic legalism, and statistical fantasies of the sovereign state (among other linear equations) continue to inflect anarchist politics and self-making projects: the rhizome is re-territorialized.

My multi-sited ethnography explores anarchist networks that cross Québec, the United States and Mexico to demonstrate how anarchist practice is mired in contradiction, especially to the extent that this practice is shaped by notions of self and property (propriety) dominant in English-speaking North America. My comparative study illustrates similarities and differences among diverse anarchist scenes, throwing into relief the particular practices of university-educated Anglo American leftists, and draws on anthropological, feminist and critical race theory to show how they have preempted the black feminist challenge of "intersectionality" by recuperating its praxis within the logic of neoliberal self-making projects and property relations, a particular economy of value in which certain identities are foregrounded and others—especially that of class—are effectively concealed. Ultimately the anarchists are presented as a limit case: even within their "autonomous" everyday practices, the propertizing self prevails in what I call the game of "good politics" - the Bridge of all prestige games, and one which structures much contemporary critical academic scholarship as well.

How the Reification of Merit Breeds Inequality: theory and experimental evidence
Tuesday, 26th February, 2019

Speaker: Dr Fabien Accominotti (Department of Sociology, LSE)

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The Missing Billions: Measuring Top Incomes in the UK Tuesday, 5th February, 2019

Speaker: Dr Andrew Summers (Department of Law, LSE)

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The Paradox of Inequality: income inequality and belief in meritocracy go hand in hand
Tuesday, 22nd January, 2019

Speaker: Dr Jonathan Mijs (International Inequalities Institute, LSE)

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The ‘Essex Hijab’. Fitting into the diverse city: social exclusion, symbolic boundaries and convivial labour in East London
Tuesday, 4th December, 2018

Speaker: Dr Susanne Wessendorf

This paper addresses how long-established ethnic minorities in East London react to new immigration. By drawing on ongoing ethnographic fieldwork, it looks at how long-term experiences of stigmatisation among ethnic minorities impact on their perceptions of newcomers, and how, in the context of socio-economic precariousness, these perceptions are characterized by a combination of empathy and resentment.

Experiences of money from the perspectives of London’s ‘rich’ and ‘poor’
Tuesday, 20th November, 2018

Speakers: Dr Kate Summers and Dr Katharina Hecht

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Tackling ethnic disparities using websites
Tuesday, 30th October, 2018

Speaker: Zamila Bunglawala, Visiting Fellow III and Deputy Director - Strategy and Insight, Race Disparity Unit, Cabinet Office

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Inclusive Growth in cities: a sympathetic critique Tuesday, 16th October, 2018
Speaker: Dr Neil Lee

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Ethnographic exploration of the socio-economic transformation of the Basque country
Tuesday, 2nd October, 2018
Speaker: Dr Luna Glucksberg

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Gender Inequalities in India
Tuesday, 29th May 2018
Speakers: Dr Naila Kabeer and Nivedita Narain (PRADAN)

Recasting the UNDP's Human Development Measures
Tuesday, 8th May 2018
Speaker: Professor Sudhir Anand
Chair: Dr Aaron Reeves

Great Expectations: Is the IMF turning words into action on inequality?
Tuesday, 1st May 2018
Speaker: Chiara Mariotti (Inequality Policy Manager, Oxfam)

The Effects of Welfare Programs on Formal Labour Markets in Middle-Income Countries: Evidence from Conditional Cash Transfers in Brazil
Tuesday, 20th March 2018
Speaker: Dr Joana Naritomi (LSE International Development)

The stakes of trade policy: global and domestic inequalities
Tuesday, 20th February 2018
Speaker: Dr Sarah Goff (LSE Government)

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Selective schooling and its relationship to private tutoring: lessons from South Korea
Tuesday, 30th January 2018
Speaker: Dr Sonia Exley (LSE Social Policy)

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Income Inequality and Welfare Systems in the Yugoslav Successor States
Tuesday, 23rd January 2018
Speakers: Dr Will Bartlett (LSEE Research on South East Europe), Dr Nermin Oruč (Center for Development Evaluation and Social Science Research, Sarajevo), Dr Jelena Žarković Rakic (University of Belgrade) and Dr Gorana Krstić (University of Belgrade)

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Economic and Racial Drivers of Toxic Inequality in the United States: Two Narratives, One Story
Tuesday, 16th January 2018
Speaker: Professor Thomas Shapiro (Brandeis University)

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Inequality as Service
Tuesday, 28th November 2017
Speaker: Dr Paul Segal (King's College London; LSE III)

Can Social Landlords Make Private Renting Work Better?
Tuesday, 4th November 2017
Speaker: Professor Anne Power

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Do Firms Manage Pay Inequality?
Tuesday, 24th October 2017
Speaker: Professor Paul Willman

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The Decline and Persistence of the Old Boy: Private Schools and Elite Recruitment 1897-2016
Tuesday, 10th October 2017
Speakers: Dr Aaron Reeves (LSE III) and Dr Sam Friedman (LSE Sociology)
Chair: Professor Mike Savage (LSE III)

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Inequalities Seminar: Intersecting inequalities and the Sustainable Development Goals: insights from Brazil
Tuesday, 9th May 2017
Speaker: Professor Naila Kabeer (LSE Gender Instittue and Department of International Development)

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Inequalities Seminar: Post-Industrialisation in the East Midlands: ethnographic narratives from the communities that were thrown under the Brexit bus
Tuesday, 2nd May 2017
Speaker: Dr Lisa Mckenzie (LSE Sociology)

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Health and Income Inequality Aversion: results from a UK survey experiment
Tuesday, 25th April 2017
Speaker: Dr Joan Costa-i-Font (LSE Social Policy and European Institute)

Dynamics of Democracy and Inequality in the context of Globalization
Tuesday, 21st March 2017
Speaker: Dr Dena Freeman (Senior Visiting Fellow in the Department of Anthropology, LSE and an Associate of the III)

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Adressing recognition gaps: destigmatization processes and the making of inequality
Tuesday, 7th March 2017
Speaker: Professor Michele Lamont (Harvard University)

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Older peoples' experiences of dignity and nutritional support during hospital stays
Tuesday, 21st February 2017
Speaker: Dr Polly Vizard (LSE CASE)

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Regional Inequality and Preferences for Market-Promoting Land Law Reform: Kenya Pilot Study
Tuesday, 31st January 2017
Speaker: Professor Catherine Boone (LSE Departments of Government and International Development)

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Who are the Global Top 1%?
Tuesday, 17th January 2017
Speaker: Dr Paul Segal (Senior Lecturer in Economics at Kings College London, Visiting Fellow at the III)

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Support for Redistribution: preferences for reducing economic inequality in the US and Sweden
Tuesday, 29th November 2016
Speaker: Professor Leslie McCall (Northwestern University)

The Strength of Weak Performance: a relational theory of executive pay
Tuesday, 8th November 2016
Speaker: Professor Thomas A. DiPrete (Columbia University)

The Organizational Production of Earnings Inequalities
Tuesday, 25th October 2016
Speaker: Professor Donald Tomaskovic-Devey (UMASS)

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Top Incomes and the Gender Divide
Tuesday, 27th September 2016
Speakers: Professor Alessandra Casarico (Bocconi) and Dr Sarah Voitchovsky (University of Melbourne)

Read the Working Paper