The Racial Wealth Divide

Please join us for this special event hosted by the School of Social and Political Sciences
and supported by the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Inequality and Justice research priority

Speaker: Professor Mike Savage

Over the past decade, escalating wealth inequalities have become apparent across the globe. It is increasingly evident that this is driven not by anonymous forces like “globalization” or “capital”, but by elites who enjoy disproportionate power and influence. This lecture addresses the intellectual and political challenges posed by this trend. Most fundamentally, how should we define, measure, and track this wealth, given that its growth stems at least in part from elites’ ability to stay under public, scholarly, and regulatory radars? How does wealth inequality reinforce racial, gender and other divides, and how does it shape social mobility and life chances across numerous domains? And what strategies could effectively advance the growing public interest in taxing wealth as a means to address entrenched wealth inequalities? This lecture discusses how wealth accumulation is underwritten by legal devices such as the ‘non-domicile’ tax regime; shows the roots of this in British imperial history, and considers the prospects for tax justice.

Mike Savage is Martin White Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics. He has a longstanding interest in the social and historical sources of inequality, within and across nations. From 2015 to 2020 Mike was Director of the LSE’s International Inequalities Institute, and his most recent book is The Return of Inequality: Social Change and the Weight of the Past (Harvard University Press, 2021), praised by Thomas Piketty as a “major sociological contribution to the ongoing global debate on inequality and the return of social class”.