I was back in London on Monday for a day-long symposium at the LSE on Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century—this time, with Piketty in attendance. At least, he was there after his late Eurostar train got in from Paris. He missed the economics panel, but was there for the panels “Gender and everyday life” and “Accumulation and Timespaces of Class”—as well as a closing session in which Piketty and Mike Savage discussed Tony Atkinson’s work. Atkinson is one of the “godfathers,” I believe Piketty said, of inequality studies; he has a new book out—Inequality — What can be done?— with a more robust set of policy recommendations than Piketty’s.

I’ll focus on the Gender and Everyday Life panel. Stephanie Seguino raised the question, “how do we distribute the bad news of capitalism in hard times?” Answering this question brings out the relationships between economic inequality, gender inequality, and racial inequality. The first might be getting worse, but the second seems to be getting better; meanwhile, racial inequality in the US is increasingly a phenomenon not of exploitation but of exclusion. Some of women’s advancing equality, however, has come thanks to men’s worsening employment prospects—i.e. some of the fact that the gender gap is (very slowly) narrowing in wages is because of “levelling down”. And it’s possible that capitalism just trades off one inequality for another: when a country is culturally homogenous, gender inequality is higher; when a country is diverse, gender inequality lower. Suggested implication, with bitter irony: if racialized people are available to bear the brunt of “the bad news of capitalism,” women are freed from precarity and can get ahead.

Naila Kabeer followed up on the global dimension, and emphasized a pattern seen over and over again in the data from gender and development studies: it’s not about how racialized or marginalized groups (such as the Dalits in the Indian caste system) do in hard times versus how women do: the real suffering is reserved for people at the intersections—Dalit women, for example. Kabeer emphasized a set of problems of particular interest to feminist bioethics: the choice of establishing social programs as universal or as means-tested, safety-net programs is a substantial choice. While it seems sensible to put money where needs are greatest, a number of problems result. Others have observed that such programs are vulnerable at the ballot box and that they tend to be of lower quality than universal programs. Kabeer focused on they way they re-enact the power relations of society in the relationship between agency and client. Who wants to access services when the organization of those services treats you as in moralizing terms? (Nancy Fraser writes about some similar dynamics in the social state from the perspective of critical theory, in “What’s critical about critical theory?” referencing the work of Carol Brown in “Mothers, Fathers, and Children: From Private to Public Patriarchy.”) Kabeer highlighted the tension between universality in programs, and tailoring programs to need, as one of several crucial challenges in addressing inequality.

Lisa McKenzie, author of the accessible ethnographic study Getting By: Estates, Class, and Culture in Austerity Britain, stole the show with pictures and stories of life on the estate where she grew up in Nottingham. Under the current, freshly re-elected government, the long-term unemployed are now being systematically sanctioned for doing volunteer work in their communities. The message is breath-takingly clear: if you think you can disprove Thatcher’s “There is no such thing as society” by building up your community, this government is going to prove it for once and for all, even if it means making it a sanctionable offence to engage in volunteering. McKenzie highlighted the generational shift from men’s visibility in the labour movement to women’s visibility in an emerging crisis of care rebellion, citing mothers occupying empty public housing in the East End.

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There were many despairing reflections in light of last week’s UK election results—Conservatives pursuing a failing austerity agenda were returned to power, with a majority government this time. Piketty preached optimism, in this panel and throughout. Not all politics is done at the ballot box; numbers are too important to leave to economists, so social scientists and others have to engage; the history of taxation is full of surprises—100 years ago we had no certainty that there would be an income tax at all, much less all the services of the state that now constitute 25 %-35% of the economy. He emphasized that it’s through story-telling that certain levels of inequality are normalized—claimed to be necessary—and in this we see the power of ideas and where the work needs to be done to change the conversation.

The LSE is launching its International Inequalities Institute (III)—a focus for interdisciplinary research in inequalities (note the plural). The day was one of three events to launch the Institute. There’s a masters program, and funding is available for PhD students. They announced yesterday that Piketty will be among the program faculty. It’s an interdisciplinary program where you register through a home department; a number of feminist academics across the LSE (Diane Perrons included) are taking on grad students for the Institute. See the application info here.

I won’t blog the whole day! Piketty missed the session in which economists presented the criticisms from economics (does the return on capital really exceed the growth rate—the great engine of capital accumulation and so inequality on his account—if we remove the asset inflation of housing and other asset inflation from the equation? how powerful is this law in the face of political and institutional forces, like the balance of power between capital and labour?), so we missed his responses to the criticisms—and I missed hearing whether his responses are the ones I provide here. The session on “timespaces” was an interesting introduction to how Bourdieu is being used to understand the effects of global markets on people’s lives: the “fast economics” of markets; the “slow economics” of reproduction and of the infrastructure of a community. I’m not sure that the relatively abstract analysis of the rhythms of markets and lives gives us as much policy direction as the old-fashioned “who wins, who loses” story that started the day (with Bob Rowthorn, leftwing economist—his technical response to Piketty is here and a more accessible discussion here); but then, I thought, it does connect to themes of security that have driven the social state forwards in the past. (Wolff and Shalit’s philosophical treatment of Disadvantage comes in here: in discussing Nussbaum’s list of capabilities with workers and clients of the social state, they heard back that “security” is a crucial need missing from the list.)

The star of the last session was really Tony Atkinson: he modestly claimed his book was a bargain at £1 per policy idea (he has 15 of them). Piketty said he had only two criticisms. One is the book’s silence on the UK’s role in the global economy as a haven for extreme wealth. The other is the fact that Atkinson released the book too late: a week before the UK election, rather than 6 months. Atkinson lamented the unnamed newspaper that further silenced discussion of the book by purchasing exclusive rights to an interview with him in conjunction with its release—and then not publishing the resulting article, effectively silencing discussion of the book’s release. He didn’t go into the reasoning behind his (or his publisher’s publicity department) accepting the deal in the first place. As Piketty said earlier in the day, the stories we tell about wealth characterize our culture and shape our sense of what’s normal and not normal in this realm.