What’s on : Lectures

The Enemy Between Us: The Impact of Inequality.

Lectures
Date
9 Mar 2021
Start time
7:30 PM
Venue
Speaker
Professor Kate Pickett & Professor Richard Wilkinson
The Enemy Between Us: The Impact of Inequality.

Event Information

The Enemy Between Us: The Impact of Inequality.
Professor Kate Pickett & Professor Richard Wilkinson

The talk will focus on how less equal societies fare worse than more equal ones, across everything from education to life expectancy. It will explain how inequality affects us individually, how it alters how we think, feel and behave. It will set out the overwhelming evidence that material inequalities have powerful psychological effects: when the gap between rich and poor increases, as does the tendency to define and value ourselves and others in terms of superiority and inferiority.

Image credit: Flickr/mSeattle. CC BY 2.0.

This lecture will be held on Zoom and YPS members will be sent login details a few days before the event.

Please note this lecture has been postponed from 21st April 2020

Member’s report

The premiss of this talk was that there is a correlation between inequalities of wealth and social status, and how well or badly a society fares. Data sets from many different sources, using different data points to demonstrate this tendency in a broad-brush overview, were presented in a series of graphs. One, for example, showed crime statistics, another demonstrated how equality of income appeared to converge with increased trade union membership and to diverge again when it ceased. Others showed less easily measured questions, like bullying in society (a self-reported statistic) and social or income mobility. The most indisputable related to mortality statistics and the number of people in prison. The USA, the UK and Portugal appeared to have highest levels of inequality with correspondingly poor outcomes in many aspects of life.

Carole Smith