LSE100C      Half Unit
The LSE Course: How can we create a fair society?

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

Course Convenor

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LSE100 is LSE’s flagship interdisciplinary course taken by all first-year undergraduate students as part of your degree programme. The course is designed to build your capacity to tackle multidimensional problems through research-rich education, and provides you with unique opportunities to examine global challenges in collaboration with peers from other departments and leading academics from across the School. Before registering at LSE, you will have the opportunity to select one of three themes to focus on during LSE100, each of which foregrounds a complex and pressing question facing social scientists. In 2025/26, the available themes are: 

• How can we transform our climate futures? 

• How can we control AI? 

• How can we create a fair society? 

In the ‘How can we create a fair society?’ theme, you will explore the tensions between competing understandings of fairness and ask how we can draw on social scientific expertise to create a fair society. From across the boroughs of London to the precarious labour markets of the Global South, we will consider what fairness looks like in the 21st century and how we might achieve it.  

As the expanding billionaire class increasingly dominates political systems, while gender and ethnicity gaps widen, the question of how to reach a fairer world is both urgent and contentious. Entrenched inequalities demand bold strategies, but our approach depends on how we understand “fairness”. Should we redistribute global resources or level the playing field by equalising opportunities? Is revolutionising education or deploying new technologies the key to fairer societies?   

Throughout LSE100, you will investigate how systems are transforming and being transformed by complex questions of fairness. You will learn to use the tools and frameworks of systems thinking to analyse the impacts of inequalities, broaden your intellectual experience, and deepen your understanding of your own discipline as you test theories, evidence and ideas from different disciplinary perspectives. 

7.5 hours of seminars in the Autumn Term.
7.5 hours of seminars in the Winter Term.

90-minute seminars take place in alternate weeks. Students will attend an LSE100 seminar in either weeks 1, 3, 5, 7 and 9 or weeks 2, 4, 6, 8 and 10 of Autumn Term, and weeks 1, 3, 5, 7 and 9 or weeks 2, 4, 6, 8 and 10 of Winter Term.

In addition to seminars students will engage with bespoke video lectures featuring academics from across the School (approx. 20 minutes per seminar).

In seminars throughout both terms, students will practice:

1. analysing quantitative and qualitative data
2. using systems thinking and systems change tools
3. constructing and communicating evidence-based academic arguments

Teachers will provide feedback during seminars and in post-seminar communications to groups and individuals.

During the Winter Term, groups will have the opportunity to submit and receive formative feedback on a project brief, summarising their research project. Students will also try out the tools of systems thinking and systems change that they will use in their summative group research project.

The following readings are indicative of the texts students will be assigned. The total amount of reading assigned for each seminar will be a maximum of 20 pages.

• Abhijit Banerjee & Esther Duflo (2019). Good economics for hard times: better answers to our biggest problems (London: Allen Lane)
• Minouche Shafik (2021) What we owe each other: a new social contract for a better society (Princeton University Press).
• Janna Thompson (2010), “What is Intergenerational Justice?”, Future Justice, 2010:5-20
• Paul Lewis, et al. (2011) Reading the riots: investigating England's summer of disorder. (London School of Economics and Political Science and The Guardian: London, UK)
• Thomas Piketty (2015). The economics of inequality. (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press)
• Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson (2010) The spirit level: why equality is better for everyone (London: Penguin)  
• Michael Sandel (2010). ‘Justice and the common good’, in Justice: what is the right thing to do? (Penguin).
• Oran R. Young (2017). ‘The age of complexity’ in Governing Complex Systems: Social Capital for the Anthropocene (MIT Press)

Critical evaluation (50%, 1000 words)

Project (50%, 3000 words)