Danny Dorling on Seven Children: Inequality and Britain's Next Generation
Friday 6th September
Topping & Company Booksellers of Edinburgh, 2 Blenheim Place, Edinburgh EH7 5JH
7pm
7.30pm
Suppose you chose seven typical children to represent today's UK. Who would they be? What would they reveal?
Danny Dorling is a social scientist whose books include Inequality and the 1% and All That Is Solid. He is the Halford Mackinder Professor of Geography at the University of Oxford, and a patron of RoadPeace,
Comprehensive Future and Heeley City Farm.
He joins us for his thought-provoking new book Seven Children, about the hidden realities of injustice and hope.
In Seven Children, Dorling constructs seven 'average' children from millions of statistics-each child symbolising the very middle of a parental income bracket. From the poorest to the wealthiest, Dorling's seven children were born in 2018, when the UK faced its worst inequality since the Great Depression and became Europe's most socially divided nation. They turned 5 in 2023, amid a devastating cost- of-living crisis. Their country has Europe's fastest- rising child poverty rates, and even the best-off of the seven is disadvantaged. Yet aspirations prevail, and change is possible.
Immersive and intimate, this book gets to the heart of post-pandemic Britain's most pressing economic, social and political issues. What do we miss when we focus only on the superrich and the most deprived? What kinds of lives are British children living, between those two extremes? Who are today's real middle class? And what if tomorrow's challenge isn't spiralling inequality, but how to reverse the new trend that leaves all children worse off than their parents?