Why should we care about inequality? With Professor Danny Dorling

[upbeat music] I'm Conor Nachan, senior researcher at the Intergenerational Foundation. We're a research charity fighting for a fairer deal for younger and future generations in the UK. We work on some of the big policy challenges shaping the lives of younger people, from housing and taxation to student finance, the labor market, and the environment. Our work focuses on exposing intergenerational unfairness and trying to propose practical, evidence-based reforms. In this new podcast series, we'll be speaking to some of the UK's leading experts about the issues that matter most to younger and future generations. My guest today is Danny Dorling, Professor of Human Geography at the University of Oxford. Danny has written extensively on inequality, housing, poverty, health, and social justice. Some of his books include Inequality and the One Percent, Shattered Nation, and most recently, Seven Children and The Next Crisis: What We Think About the Future. Today, we'll be speaking with Danny about a topic that runs through a lot of his work, which is inheritance and the way that family background shapes inequality in the UK. Danny, thank you for joining me. So I thought to start, it would be good to ask you about why you got interested in inequality in the first place. Because often in your work, when you talk about inequality, you bring in lots of different strands, whether that's geography, health, housing, education, and politics. So how did you first come to the issue as a geographer, and why has inequality been such a central focus of your work?

It wasn't a plan to be working on inequality. What I did my first research on was computer mapping. That's where I began in my PhD, and I needed a really big dataset. And the big dataset I had, this was in the late '80s I was doing this, was the nineteen seventy-one census and then the nineteen eighty-one census. It had data for a hundred thousand areas, and I wanted to draw pictures of this. And it was exciting to be able to see the first pictures of this kind of data. But I noticed something. I noticed that the patterns in nineteen eighty-one were slightly more concentrated, slightly better defined in terms of differences between people's life chances by geographic area compared to nineteen seventy-one. And then we got the nineteen ninety-one census, and it had become more acute again, much more acute by nineteen ninety-one. And slowly, I was drawn into looking at rising inequality because that was what the geographical data was showing us was happening. People were living parallel lives in Britain increasingly. Where you grew up began to matter more and more for your chances in life. London was becoming more divided in particular. It had the greatest concentration of poverty in Western Europe at the time, and the greatest wealth. And th- this was just increasing and increasing and increasing over the years and the decades. And so around about two thousand and eight, two thousand and nine, I switched from basically being a computer graphics person to being somebody who looked at the statistics of inequality.

Fascinating. Fascinating. Were many of your colleagues surprised by the transition?

Yes, I think