Danny Dorling Seven Children Q&A readers #Short

Who will read Seven Children – and what misconceptions about children‘s lives might they have?

University of Oxford geographer Danny Dorling talks about what people might not know about the everyday reality of inequality that his new book describes. Seven Children: Inequality and Britain's Next Generation is out on 26 September, published by Hurst.
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The biggest misconception readers will have is that most children in Britain will be quite similar to theirs. Being able to afford a book, being having time to read a book is a privilege.

We have some information. Not a lot – it's kept secret. There are marketing companies that look at book sales. They know how many people are in social class A and B who buy books, but they don't actually put that data on the web. Books like this are purchased by people in the very highest proportions of society, the best-off 20 – 25%, often people who've got more time, more women than men – and incidentally, we do get that that data.

The book tries to show that the kind of people who buy books, and your lives, the kind of people who go to book festivals, the kind of people who go to worthy talks on these things, really is very different from what is typical. It's not just that you're better off than the average. You're very likely to be better off than the best child out of seven of a typical set of seven children in Britain, spread out by income.

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