Inequality in The 21st Century - Session 1 of 4 (Video + Slides)

Inequality in The 21st Century: A Day Long Engagement with Thomas Piketty - 10.15am Session 1 (Economics, Political Economy and Democracy)

Speaker(s) : David Soskice, Wendy Carlin, Bob Rowthorn, Diane Perrons, Stephanie Seguino, Lisa McKenzie, Naila Kabeer, Dr. Laura Bear, Gareth Jones, Mike Savage, Sir John Hills, Sir Tony Atkinson, Thomas Piketty

Recorded on 11 May 2015 at Old Theatre, Old Building

A day-long conference with Thomas Piketty, whose Capital in the Twenty-First Century has been of global significance in shaping debates about inequality across the globe. The workshop will be hosted by LSE's new International Inequalities Institute with the Department of Sociology at LSE and the British Journal of Sociology, which ran a special issue of reviews on Piketty’s book, several of the contributors to which will be involved in these discussions.

Thomas Piketty is a professor of economics at the Paris School of Economics, an alumnus of the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and author of Capital in the Twenty-First Century.

Suggested hashtag for this event for Twitter users: #LSEIII

Session 1, 10.15am to 11.30am, Economics, Political Economy and Democracy

Piketty raises central questions about wealth accumulation and inequality in the second half of the twentieth century and in the twenty first. But the explanatory mechanisms embodied in his three equation model are based on neo-classical growth theory developed in the 1950s. The simplicity of his basic model is stunning, but also provocative. So one main issue we want explore is how these mechanisms look from the perspectives of modern macroeconomics. The second issue is this: Piketty’s 3 equation model says nothing about political economy. This raises the interesting question of whether the grand laws of economics operate in a political vacuum. This seems difficult to sustain in decades which have seen the Thatcher revolution, as well as great differences in the degree of inequality across advanced countries, for example the Scandinavian countries in contrast to the Anglo-Saxon.

David Soskice is School Professor of Political Science and Economics at the LSE. He works on varieties of advanced capitalism, on information technology and knowledge economies, and on crime, punishment and poverty (with Nicola Lacey): with Wendy Carlin he has just published Macroeconomics: Institutions, Instability and the Financial System (OUP, 2015). He participated in the British Journal of Sociology symposium on Piketty.

Wendy Carlin is Professor of Macroeconomics at UCL, Research Fellow of CEPR, and co-editor (with Philippe Aghion) of Economics of Transition. She is a member of the Expert Advisory Panel of the UK's Office for Budget Responsibility. She is leading an international project - the CORE project - to reform the undergraduate economics curriculum. The project is funded by INET (New York) and is based at INET at the Oxford Martin School.

Bob Rowthorn is Emeritus Professor of Economics at Cambridge and a Life Fellow of Kings College, Cambridge. With his close colleague Andrew Glyn, one of the two most important economists on the ideological left in the UK in recent decades. Originally a mathematician, he has made major contributions to growth theory and macroeconomics from a left perspective, showing inter alia how important Marxist ideas can be integrated into mainstream economics. He has an article on Piketty in the Cambridge Journal of Economics (2014, Sept)