Inequality: Part I, Episode 28

Guests: Poornima Paidipaty (King's College, London), Pedro Ramos Pinto (University of Cambridge), Dan Hirschman (Cornell University), Christian O. Christiansen (Åarhus University) and Keith Tribe (Tartu University)



Host and Producer: Maria Bach (Centre Walras-Pareto, University of Lausanne)








In this two part series on inequality, we will be talking about moments during the history of researching inequality. In this first part, we explore different ways people have thought about inequality and how it is measured, and the possible impacts that this thinking and measurement has on our economies and policies. In part two, to be released soon, we look at why and how inequality goes up and down depending on where we look.



Poornima Paidipaty and Pedro Ramos Pinto talk primarily about their special issue on The Measure of Inequality: Social Knowledge in Historical Perspective published in 2020 in the Historical of Political Economy Journal.



To check out Dan Hirschman's approach to analysing how things are counted called knowledge infrastructures, see this article. He references the book A Vast Machine by Paul Edwards.



To find out more about Christian O. Christiansen's project on historicising global inequality, check out their website. To check out his latest book, Talking About Inequality, click here.



Keith Tribe refers to Phelps Brown at the end, see his book here.



To watch the BBC Select video on the Occupy Movement featured at the beginning, go here. And the chant "We are the 99%" was taken from this video.



Featured music (apart from the usual intro and outro music): Sounds by Dave JF, Atmosphere 12, Alyonka, Kjartan Abel, Japan Sky and BaDoink, Acoustic E Minor Jam.



Finally, thanks to David Philippy for helping with production.