LSE sociology at the forefront of the inequalities agenda

Personal Reflections by Mike Savage It hardly needs emphasis that rising inequality within and between nations is increasingly in the public eye. The success of protest movements such as Occupy has highlighted the distinctiveness of the top ‘one per cent’. The World Economic Forum recently identified income disparity as one of its principal risks to economic and political security in the twenty-first century. International nongovernmental organisations such as Oxfam have drawn attention to the cycles of advantage transmitted across generations through opportunity capture and unequal political representation that reinforce privilege. Think tanks such as the Young Foundation have championed an ‘inequalities agenda’ and ongoing concerns with entrenched social disadvantage and declining social mobility in the UK have all pushed this question to the forefront of public debate. This is an arena where the potential of academic research to cross-fertilise with such interests to produce a genuinely public social science is huge, as testified by the remarkable interest in the work of Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson, Thomas Piketty, Danny Dorling, Owen Jones, David Graeber and others.