Inequality in The 21st Century – Session 4 of 4

Inequality in The 21st Century: A Day Long Engagement with Thomas Piketty – 15.30 Session 4 (The policy implications)

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 4, 3.30pm to 4.45pm, The policy implications

Piketty bravely directly enters into discussions about policy, notably through his concerns with the wealth tax. What other kinds of interventions might be possible? What are the wider ramifications of his arguments and those of related researchers?

Chair and introduction: Prof John Hills.


Professor Sir John Hills is Professor of Social Policy and Director of the Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion (CASE) at the London School of Economics. His research interests include income distribution and the welfare state, social security, housing and taxation. He was Chair of the National Equality Panel (2008-2010).His book Good Times, Bad Times was published in 2014 to major acclaim.

Professor Sir Tony Atkinson is Centennial Professor, LSE, and Honorary Fellow, Nuffield College Oxford. He is an academic economist particularly concerned with issues of social justice and the design of public policy. He has been writing on economics since the 1960s, when his first book was on poverty in Britain and his second on the unequal distribution of wealth. He is currently working on top incomes, and is jointly responsible for the World Top Incomes Database. His book, Inequality – What Can Be Done?, published in April 2015, sets out fifteen concrete measures as to how the present high levels of economic inequality can be reduced, based on a distinctive view of its causes.

Thomas Piketty is Professor of Economics at the Paris School of Economics. He is the author of numerous articles published in journals such as the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Journal of Political Economy, the American Economic Review and the Review of Economic Studies, and of a dozen books. He has done major historical and theoretical work on the interplay between economic development and the distribution of income and wealth. In particular, he is the initiator of the recent literature on the long run evolution of top income shares in national income (now available in the World Top Incomes Database). He is also the author of Capital in the 21st century. These works have led to radically question the optimistic relationship between development and inequality posited by Kuznets, and to emphasize the role of political and fiscal institutions in the historical evolution of income and wealth distribution.