LSE: Public lectures and events

Speaker(s): Heather Boushey | Do we have to choose between equality and prosperity? Many think that reducing economic inequality would require such heavy-handed interference with market forces that it would stifle economic growth. Heather Boushey, one of Washington’s most influential economic voices, insists nothing could be further from the truth. Presenting cutting-edge economics with journalistic verve, she shows how rising inequality has become a drag on growth and an impediment to a competitive United States marketplace for employers and employees alike. Boushey makes this case with a clear, accessible tour of the best of contemporary economic research, while also injecting a passion for her subject gained through years of research into the economics of work–life conflict and policy work in the trenches of federal government. Unbound exposes deep problems in the U.S. economy, but its conclusion is optimistic. We can preserve the best of our nation’s economic and political traditions, and improve on them, by pursuing policies that reduce inequality—and by doing so, boost broadly shared economic growth. Heather Boushey (@HBoushey) is President and CEO of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth and former Chief Economist on Hillary Clinton’s transition team. She is the author of Finding Time: The Economics of Work-Life Conflict and coeditor of After Piketty: The Agenda for Economics and Inequality (both from Harvard). The New York Times has called Boushey one of the “most vibrant voices in the field” and Politico twice named her one of the top 50 “thinkers, doers, and visionaries transforming American politics.” Dr Tahnee Ooms (@TahneeOoms) is a researcher at the International Inequalities Institute whose research focusses on how capital incomes feed back into rising overall income and wealth inequality, with a specific focus on the measurement of economic inequality using quantitative methods, and how to shape and communicate findings in a way they can be of practical use for policy and the real world. The International Inequalities Institute (@LSEInequalities) at LSE brings together experts from many LSE departments and centres to lead cutting-edge research focused on understanding why inequalities are escalating in numerous arenas across the world, and to develop critical tools to address these challenges.

Speaker(s): Sanchia Berg, Professor Lee Elliot Major | What can we do to improve Britain’s low social mobility - one of the most pressing issues facing young people growing up today? Boris Johnson continues a tradition that has stood for generations. Every Prime Minister since the end of World War Two who has attended an English University has attended just one institution: Oxford. Meanwhile 100,000s of children leave school each year without the basics to get on in life. Britain suffers from low social mobility. But how can we improve it? Our panel will discuss potential solutions, and you the audience will vote on the solution. To pre-order a copy of the book, which can be collected from independent bookshop Pages of Hackney at the event, please go to Social Mobility And Its Enemies. Sanchia Berg (@Sanchia7) is a senior BBC reporter/correspondent. She works on Radio 4's Today Programme and on BBC2's Newsnight, specialising in Education and Social Affairs. Lee Elliot Major (@Lem_Exeter) is Professor of Social Mobility, University of Exeter and Visiting Senior Fellow, LSE. Stephen Machin (@s_machin_) is Professor of Economics and Director of the Centre for Economic Performance, LSE. CEP (@CEP_LSE) is an interdisciplinary research centre at the LSE. Established by the ESRC in 1990, is now one of the leading economic research groups in Europe. Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSESocialMobility

Speaker(s): Professor Esther Duflo | Join us for the Stamp Memorial Lecture which will be delivered by the 2019 joint winner of the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences Esther Duflo who will be speaking about her new book Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems. Most of the issues that tear us apart today (from trade to immigration to Brexit) are, fundamentally, economic issues, but no one seems to be willing to listen to economists any more. In this lecture, based on her forthcoming book with Abhijit Banerjee with the same title, Professor Duflo will outline how a humane economics, that puts the individual and its wants and needs at the centre of its intellectual project, can guide a better conversation on the core problems that our generations need to resolve, from climate change, to nationalist rivalries, to the rise in inequality. Esther Duflo is the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics in the Department of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a co-founder and co-director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL). In her research, she seeks to understand the economic lives of the poor, with the aim to help design and evaluate social policies. She has worked on health, education, financial inclusion, environment and governance. Professor Esther Duflo’s first degrees were in history and economics from Ecole Normale Superieure, Paris. She subsequently received a Ph.D. in Economics from MIT in 1999. Duflo has received numerous academic honors and prizes including the 2019 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences (awarded jointly with Abhijit Banerjee and Michael Kremer), the Princess of Asturias Award for Social Sciences (2015), the A.SK Social Science Award (2015), Infosys Prize (2014), the David N. Kershaw Award (2011), a John Bates Clark Medal (2010), and a MacArthur “Genius Grant” Fellowship (2009). With Abhijit Banerjee, she wrote Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty, which won the Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award in 2011 and has been translated into more than 17 languages. Duflo is the Editor of the American Economic Review, a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. To pre-order a copy of Esther's new book, which can be collected from independent bookshop Pages of Hackney at the event, please go to Good Economics for Hard Times. Robin Burgess is Professor of Economics in the Department of Economics at LSE and Director of the International Growth Centre. Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSEStamp This lecture is in memory of Josiah Charles Stamp who obtained a degree in economics from LSE in 1916. His thesis was published as British Incomes and Property in 1916 and launched his academic career. In 1919 he served on the Royal Commission on Income Tax and in the same year he joined Nobel Industries Ltd as secretary and director from which Imperial Chemical Industries later developed. In 1926 he became the president of the executive of the London, Midland and Scottish Railway and two years later he was appointed director of the Bank of England. He also served as a governor and vice chairman of LSE. Stamp also held lectureships in economics at several universities, including Cambridge, Oxford and Liverpool. In 1938 he was raised to the peerage as Baron Stamp of Shortlands, Kent. Stamp died on 16 April 1941. In 1942 a trust was set up jointly by the Bank of England, the London Midland and Scottish Railway, ICI and the Abbey Road Building Society to pay for the organisation of a Stamp memorial lecture.

Speaker(s): Joanna Kavenna, Dr Martin Moore, Peter Pomerantsev | Post-truth, disinformation, bots, trolls, ISIS, Putin, Trump….we live in a world of media manipulation run amock. To understand the new propaganda, and what to do about it, we need to grasp both the cultural and technological dynamics in play, which is what this panel sets out to do. Peter Pomerantsev, author of This is Not Propaganda – Adventures in the War Against Reality will be joined by Joanna Kavenna, author of new tech-dystopian novel Zed, and Dr Martin Moore of Kings College London, author of Democracy Hacked: How Technology is Destabilising Global Politics, to grapple with both the philosophical and computational dramas of the disinformation age. Joanna Kavenna is a British novelist, essayist and travel writer. She is the author of The Ice Museum, Inglorious (which won the Orange Prize for New Writing), The Birth of Love, Come to the Edge and A Field Guide to Reality. Her writing has appeared in the New Yorker, Guardian, Observer, Telegraph, Spectator, London Review of Books and New York Times and she has held writing fellowships at St Antony's College Oxford and St John's College Cambridge. In 2011 she was named as one of the Telegraph's 20 Writers Under 40 and in 2013 was listed as one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists. To pre-order a copy of Joanna's new book, which can be collected from independent bookshop Pages of Hackney at the event, please go to Zed. Martin Moore (@martinjemoore) is Senior Lecturer in Political Communication Education and Director of the Centre for the Study of Media, Communication and Power at King’s College London. Prior to this he was a Senior Research Fellow in the Policy Institute at King’s. Before joining King’s, Martin was the founding director of the Media Standards Trust (MST), an independent charity dedicated to fostering high standards in the news media, from 2006-2015. During this time the MST won a Prospect Think Tank of the Year Award (2011) and a Knight News Challenge award (2008). He completed his doctorate in the Department of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science in 2004, where he subsequently taught undergraduates in history. Before completing his doctorate, Martin spent over a decade working in media and communications – with the BBC, Channel 4, NTL, AT&T and others. Sophia Gaston (@sophgaston) is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Global Affairs, LSE. She is a social and political researcher, who conducts international projects on public opinion, specialising in both qualitative fieldwork and quantitative analysis. Sophia’s work is especially focused on social and political change, populism, the media and democracy - with a focus on threats to governance in Western nations. She is also an Academic Fellow at the European Policy Centre in Brussels, and the Managing Director of the British Foreign Policy Group. Previously, Sophia was the Director of the Centre for Social and Political Risk, and the Deputy Director and Head of International Research at Demos think tank. She has previously also held research and strategic roles in a range of UK and international NGOs, the civil service, and private sector, including working as a political speechwriter in Premier & Cabinet in Australia. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts.

Speaker(s): Dr Ann Pettifor | To protect the systems that sustain life on earth, we need to do more than just reimagine the economy – we have to change everything. From one of the original thinkers of the program that helped ignite the US Green New Deal campaign, Ann Pettifor explains how we can afford what we can do. We have done it before – and can do it again. Ann Pettifor (@AnnPettifor) is the Director of Prime, an Honorary Research Fellow at City University, a Research Associate at SOAS and a Fellow of the New Economics Foundation. Her new book is The Case for the Green New Deal. To pre-order a copy of the book, which can be collected from independent bookshop Pages of Hackney at the event, please go to The Case for the Green New Deal. Sam Fankhauser is Director of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment. The Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment (@GRI_LSE) was established by the London School of Economics and Political Science in 2008 to create a world-leading centre for policy-relevant research and training on climate change and the environment, bringing together international expertise on economics, finance, geography, the environment, international development and political economy. Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSEPettifor This event forms part of the “Shape the World” series, held in the run up to the LSE Festival, a week-long series of events taking place from Monday 2 to Saturday 7 March 2020, free to attend and open to all, exploring how social sciences can make the world a better place. The full programme will be available online from January 2020.

Speaker(s): Professor Catherine Barnard, Vicky Pryce, Sir Ivan Rogers, Professor Tony Travers | October 31st has been set as the new deadline by which the UK will formally cease being a member of the European Union. By this stage, we may have a new Brexit agreement or a “no-deal”. This panel will assess developments to this point and the implications for the UK going forward. The panellists will bring together a range of expertise, covering British politics, knowledge of Whitehall, the economy, and UK-EU law. Catherine Barnard (@CSBarnard24) is Professor of European Union and Labour Law at Trinity College, University of Cambridge. Vicky Pryce (@realVickyPryce) is Chief Economic Advisor, Centre for Economics and Business Research and former Joint Head of the UK Government Economic Service. Sir Ivan Rogers is the former UK Permanent Representative to the EU. Tony Travers is Associate Dean of the School of Public Policy, LSE. Kevin Featherstone is Professor in European Politics and Director of the Hellenic Observatory, European Institute, LSE. The LSE European Institute (@LSEEI) is a centre for research and graduate teaching on the processes of integration and fragmentation within Europe. In the most recent national Research Excellence Framework (REF 2014) the Institute was ranked first for research in its sector. The LSE School of Public Policy (@LSEPublicPolicy) is an international community where ideas and practice meet. Our approach creates professionals with the ability to analyse, understand and resolve the challenges of contemporary governance. Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSEBrexit

Speaker(s): John Maeda | From data bias, to political meddling and self-learning algorithms – machines are more powerful than ever in today’s society. But so few of us understand how these systems work. A leading thinker on the crossover between design, technology and business, reveals how essential it is that we educate ourselves about the laws of our digital age, and how to do just that. John Maeda (@johnmaeda) is Chief Experience Officer at Publicis Sapient. An engineer, computer scientist and designer by training, Maeda is also the former president of the Rhode Island School of Design, was Head of Computational Design and Inclusion at Automattic and a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the venture capitalist firm. His Ted talks on design are hugely popular, and he is the author of the books The Laws of Simplicity and Redesigning Leadership. His new book is How to Speak Machine: Laws of Design for a Computational Age. Dr Carsten Sørensen is an Associate Professor (Reader) of Information Systems and Innovation at LSE’s Department of Management. The Department of Management (@LSEManagement) is a world class centre for education and research in business and management. At the heart of LSE’s academic community in central London, we are ranked #2 in the world for business and management studies. Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSEMaeda This event forms part of the “Shape the World” series, held in the run up to the LSE Festival, a week-long series of events taking place from Monday 2 to Saturday 7 March 2020, free to attend and open to all, exploring how social sciences can make the world a better place. The full programme will be available online from January 2020.

Speaker(s): Professor Lauren Kassell, Professor Richard Pettigrew, Dr Nisha Ramayya | Join us as we delve into the mystic just in time for Halloween. Philosophy often presents itself as founded on logic and rationality, but even the most rigorous of us must concede that the world can be a strange place. So how does philosophy contend with the mysterious and the inexplicable? Can it really be logic all the way down, or might rationality stand on something a little spookier? Lauren Kassell is Professor of History of Science and Medicine, University of Cambridge. Richard Pettigrew is Professor of Philosophy, University of Bristol. Nisha Ramayya is Lecturer in Creative Writing at QMUL. Shahidha Bari (@ShahidhaBari) is a Fellow at the Forum for Philosophy and Professor of Fashion Cultures, UAL.

Speaker(s): Dr Gro Harlem Brundtland, Juan Manuel Santos Calderón | Around the world we see stark reminders of increasing division within and between nations and a vacuum of moral leadership committed to addressing the root causes of democratic deficits. Join us as we explore how this generation of rising grassroots leaders are tackling our challenges through collective purpose, changing culture and policy, and how leaders from across the generations can support and amplify them. Gro Harlem Brundtland was the first woman Prime Minister of Norway, serving for more than 10 years over three terms until 1996. Following this she was Director-General of the World Health Organization from 1998-2003 and UN Special Envoy on Climate Change from 2007-2010. She is a member of the Elders serving as Deputy Chair from 2013-2018, and is an Honorary Fellow of LSE. Juan Manuel Santos Calderón (@JuanManSantos) is the former President of the Republic of Colombia, serving two terms, from 2010 to 2018. Throughout his public sector career, President Santos has held important ministerial roles. He was Colombia’s first Foreign Trade Minister, has been Minister of Finance and before being elected President, was Minister for National Defence. Prior to entering politics, President Santos was deputy director of El Tiempo newspaper, and wrote a weekly opinion column. He was awarded with the King of Spain International Journalism Award and named president of the Freedom of Expression Commission for the Inter American Press Association (IAPA). In 2016 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. He is a member of The Elders and a Honorary Graduate of LSE. President Santos studied for a Master of Science in the Department of Economics at LSE in 1975. Minouche Shafik is Director of the London School of Economics and Political Science. Prior to this she was Deputy Governor of the Bank of England. An economist by training, Dame Minouche Shafik has spent most of her career straddling the worlds of public policy and academia. After completing her BSc in economics and politics at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, she took an MSc in economics at LSE before completing a DPhil in economics at St Antony’s College at the University of Oxford.

Speaker(s): Professor Cathie-Jo Martin | Cathie-Jo Martin examines differences in literary narratives on education, the individual and society, and its influence on education policy choices in Britain and Denmark. Differences in literary narratives about education, the individual, and society influence education policy choices in Britain and Denmark. British narratives helped to construct an individualistic educational culture (initially for upper- and middle-class youth) by portraying schooling as essential to individual self-development. Re-formers later sought general, rather than vocational, secondary schools to assure equality of educational opportunity across classes. Conversely, Danish narratives nurtured a collectivist educational culture that posited schooling as crucial for building a strong society. Early mass education constituted social investment, and differentiation of secondary education tracks was necessary to meet diverse societal needs. Writers are political agents in this story. They collectively debate is-sues in their works and thereby convey their views to political leaders in predemocratic regimes prior to reform episodes. They rework cultural symbols and themes from an earlier age to address new challenges, and embed assumptions about education, the individual, and society in their stories. Authors’ narratives contribute to cognitive frames about social and economic problems and help other elites to formulate preferences regarding education options. Fiction is particularly well-suited to imbuing issues with emotional salience, as readers are moved by the suffering and triumphs of protagonists in ways that scholarly essays find difficult to achieve. Thus fiction may enhance the emotional commitment to schooling and influence assessments of marginal groups. Writers’ depictions are not deterministic, but like political policy legacies, the cultural touchstones of these created worlds constrain political institutional development. Cathie-Jo Martin is Professor at Boston University and Director, BU Center for the Study of Europe. David Soskice is School Professor of Political Science and Economics and Research Director of the International Inequalities Institute at LSE. The International Inequalities Institute (@LSEInequalities) at LSE brings together experts from many LSE departments and centres to lead cutting-edge research focused on understanding why inequalities are escalating in numerous arenas across the world, and to develop critical tools to address these challenges. Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSEIII

Speaker(s): Professor Marion Fourcade | Join us for the annual British Journal of Sociology Lecture. The expansion of social citizenship in the 20th century mitigated the brute effects of economic inequality in people’s lives. The institutionalization of universal rights and entitlement programs recognised that access to a “civilized” life should not depend on wealth only. Economic and social difference did not disappear—far from it—but it could now legitimate itself through the opportunities offered by, among others, the educational system. The new rights also created new social divisions, however, separating citizens according to their ability to do well through them. In this lecture, Professor Fourcade will explore how these twin dynamics of inclusion and stratification play out in the 21st century. As digital technologies have enabled a broadening of economic and social incorporation, the possibilities for classifying, sorting, slotting and scaling people have also grown and diversified. New ways of measuring and demonstrating merit have sprung up, some better accepted than others. Institutions, both market and state, find themselves compelled to build up and exploit this efficient, proliferating, fine-grained knowledge in order to manage individual claims on resources and opportunities. This process, she argues, creates new social demands for self-care and individual fitness that possibly erode the universal and solidaristic basis upon which the expansion of citizenship historically thrived. Marion Fourcade is Professor of Sociology at the University of California at Berkeley. She received her PhD from Harvard University (2000) and taught at New York University and Princeton University before joining the Berkeley sociology department in 2003. A comparative sociologist by training and taste, she is interested in variations in economic and political knowledge and practice across nations. Her first book, Economists and Societies, explored the distinctive character of the discipline and profession of economics in three countries. A second book, The Ordinal Society (with Kieran Healy), is under contract. This book investigates new forms of social stratification and morality in the digital economy. Other recent research focuses on the valuation of nature in comparative perspective; the moral regulation of states; the comparative study of political organization (with Evan Schofer and Brian Lande); the microsociology of courtroom exchanges (with Roi Livne); the sociology of economics, with Etienne Ollion and Yann Algan, and with Rakesh Khurana; the politics of wine classifications in France and the United States (with Rebecca Elliott and Olivier Jacquet). A final book-length project, Measure for Measure: Social Ontologies of Classification, will examine the cultural and institutional logic of what we may call "national classificatory styles" across a range of empirical domains. Fourcade is also an Associate Fellow of the Max Planck-Sciences Po Center on Coping with Instability in Market Societies (Maxpo), and a past President of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (2016). The Department of Sociology (@LSEsociology) seek to produce sociology that is public-facing, fully engaged with London as a global city, and with major contemporary debates in the intersection between economy, politics and society – with issues such as financialisation, inequality, migration, urban ecology, and climate change. Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSEBJS

Speaker(s): Professor Marion Fourcade | Join us for the annual British Journal of Sociology Lecture. The expansion of social citizenship in the 20th century mitigated the brute effects of economic inequality in people’s lives. The institutionalization of universal rights and entitlement programs recognised that access to a “civilized” life should not depend on wealth only. Economic and social difference did not disappear—far from it—but it could now legitimate itself through the opportunities offered by, among others, the educational system. The new rights also created new social divisions, however, separating citizens according to their ability to do well through them. In this lecture, Professor Fourcade will explore how these twin dynamics of inclusion and stratification play out in the 21st century. As digital technologies have enabled a broadening of economic and social incorporation, the possibilities for classifying, sorting, slotting and scaling people have also grown and diversified. New ways of measuring and demonstrating merit have sprung up, some better accepted than others. Institutions, both market and state, find themselves compelled to build up and exploit this efficient, proliferating, fine-grained knowledge in order to manage individual claims on resources and opportunities. This process, she argues, creates new social demands for self-care and individual fitness that possibly erode the universal and solidaristic basis upon which the expansion of citizenship historically thrived. Marion Fourcade is Professor of Sociology at the University of California at Berkeley. She received her PhD from Harvard University (2000) and taught at New York University and Princeton University before joining the Berkeley sociology department in 2003. A comparative sociologist by training and taste, she is interested in variations in economic and political knowledge and practice across nations. Her first book, Economists and Societies, explored the distinctive character of the discipline and profession of economics in three countries. A second book, The Ordinal Society (with Kieran Healy), is under contract. This book investigates new forms of social stratification and morality in the digital economy. Other recent research focuses on the valuation of nature in comparative perspective; the moral regulation of states; the comparative study of political organization (with Evan Schofer and Brian Lande); the microsociology of courtroom exchanges (with Roi Livne); the sociology of economics, with Etienne Ollion and Yann Algan, and with Rakesh Khurana; the politics of wine classifications in France and the United States (with Rebecca Elliott and Olivier Jacquet). A final book-length project, Measure for Measure: Social Ontologies of Classification, will examine the cultural and institutional logic of what we may call "national classificatory styles" across a range of empirical domains. Fourcade is also an Associate Fellow of the Max Planck-Sciences Po Center on Coping with Instability in Market Societies (Maxpo), and a past President of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (2016). The Department of Sociology (@LSEsociology) seek to produce sociology that is public-facing, fully engaged with London as a global city, and with major contemporary debates in the intersection between economy, politics and society – with issues such as financialisation, inequality, migration, urban ecology, and climate change. Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSEBJS

Speaker(s): Dr Zanna Clay, Dr Simone Schnall, Professor Philip Pettit | Where do our ideas of right and wrong come from? Can the evolutionary processes that produced human beings explain the moral frameworks adopted by human societies? And what can developmental biology tell us about the emergence of ethical behaviour in children? From anthropology to cognitive science, philosophy to evolutionary biology, we shed some light on the complex story of Homo moralis. Zanna Clay is Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Durham University. Simone Schnall is Reader in Experimental Social Psychology, University of Cambridge. Philip Pettit is LS Rockefeller University Professor of Politics and Human Values, Princeton University. Clare Moriarty (@quiteclare) is a Fellow at the Forum for Philosophy. Founded in 1996, the Forum for Philosophy (@forumphilosophy) is a non-profit organization that has gained widespread recognition for its work as initiator and sponsor of engaging and thoughtful events that facilitate wider participation in academic philosophy. Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSEForum This event forms part of the “Shape the World” series, held in the run up to the LSE Festival, a week-long series of events taking place from Monday 2 to Saturday 7 March 2020, free to attend and open to all, exploring how social sciences can make the world a better place. The full programme will be available online from January 2020.

Speaker(s): Professor Ervand Abrahamian | The Iranian Revolution shook the world, but left little lasting impact outside Iran. Ervand Abrahamian will address this puzzling paradox of modern Iranian history in this Annual Gulf History Lecture. Ervand Abrahamian is Professor Emeritus of History at Baruch College and the Graduate Center in the City University of New York, and author of Iran Between Two Revolutions. Roham Alvandi is Associate Professor of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science and Director of the LSE IDEAS Cold War Studies Project. He is the author of Nixon, Kissinger, and the Shah: The United States and Iran in the Cold War. The LSE's Department of International History (@lsehistory) teaches and conducts research on the international history of Britain, Europe and the world from the early modern era up to the present day. Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSEIran

Speaker(s): Professor Branko Milanovic | We are all capitalists now. For the first time in human history, the globe is dominated by one economic system. In his book Capitalism, Alone, which he will discuss in this lecture, economist Branko Milanovic explains the reasons for this decisive historical shift since the days of feudalism and, later, communism. Surveying the varieties of capitalism, he asks: What are the prospects for a fairer world now that capitalism is the only game in town? His conclusions are sobering, but not fatalistic. Branko Milanovic explains how capitalism gets much wrong, but also much right—and it is not going anywhere. Our task is to improve it. Branko Milanovic (@BrankoMilan) is Visiting Presidential Professor and LIS Senior Scholar at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. He will join the International Inequalities Institute at LSE in 2020 as Centennial Professor. Minouche Shafik is Director of the London School of Economics and Political Science. Prior to this she was Deputy Governor of the Bank of England. An economist by training, Dame Minouche Shafik has spent most of her career straddling the worlds of public policy and academia. After completing her BSc in economics and politics at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, she took an MSc in economics at LSE before completing a DPhil in economics at St Antony’s College at the University of Oxford. The International Inequalities Institute (@LSEInequalities) at LSE brings together experts from many LSE departments and centres to lead cutting-edge research focused on understanding why inequalities are escalating in numerous arenas across the world, and to develop critical tools to address these challenges. Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSEWealth This event forms part of the “Shape the World” series, held in the run up to the LSE Festival, a week-long series of events taking place from Monday 2 to Saturday 7 March 2020, free to attend and open to all, exploring how social sciences can make the world a better place. The full programme will be available online from January 2020.