Wednesday 28 June 2017

After Piketty: Tackling 21st century inequality at home and abroad

Thomas Piketty’s landmark book Capital in the Twenty-First Century helped bring the issue of what drives inequality from academia to the heart of political and economic debate in the UK, Europe and the US.

The book’s lasting impact has been to trigger a range of wider debates about the new age of inequality it identified. But what, if anything, can be done to address it? Why is the inequality story so different across the developed world, let alone the global south? Should we prioritise tackling inequalities of income, wealth, age or geography, and what do these different approaches mean for local, national and transnational policy makers?

A new book, After Piketty, brings together leading social scientists from around the world to discuss these questions and a new agenda for tackling economic inequality. At an event to launch the book in London, its co-editor Heather Boushey set out the key inequality challenges and the book’s contribution to answering them. Leading experts then debated what this means for the UK, US and other countries, before taking part in an audience Q&A.