Public Lecture by Prof Mike Savage: The Racial Wealth Divide, Elites and Tax Justice

Deep dive into exploding wealth inequality, its impact on society, and legal loopholes used by the ultra-rich at this eye-opening event!

Over the past decade escalating wealth inequalities are increasingly evident across the globe, and pose fundamental analytical and political issues. Analytically, these include how to measure and define wealth, how to recognise the intersectional ways that wealth reinforces racial, gender, and other divides, and how to draw out the implications of wealth for social mobility and life chances across numerous domains. Politically, there is increasing interest in exploring how to tax wealth and develop other strategies for addressing entrenched wealth inequalities. Both these issues are related to a broader interest in the formation of wealthy elites who also are coming to have disproportionate power and influence.

After unpacking these issues using recent research in the UK and South Africa, in the second part, Prof Savage focuses specifically on how legal devices underwrite wealth accumulation. Focusing specifically on the British legal conception of ‘domicile’ which originates in imperial history, Prof Savage shows how the ‘non-dom’ tax regime is now especially used by those at the top end of the UK economic distribution. This part will report original and never previously released information about the scale and significance of the non-dom phenomenon which affects top incomes and elite formation in contemporary Britain.

Mike Savage joined LSE in 2012 and is now Martin White Professor of Sociology. Between 2015 and 2020, he was Director of LSE’s International Inequalities Institute, which hosts the Atlantic Fellows programme, the largest global programme in the world devoted to challenging inequalities. Mike is the author of eight books, including most recently The Return of Inequality: Social Change and the Weight of the Past(2021).

Light refreshments will be served in the foyer at 5:30 pm, before the lecture.

*Image by Matt Withers

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:

• Registration is required for this event. 
• This event is available only for in-person attendance. 
• The event will be catered with vegan and vegetarian food with some GF options. 
  
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