Connecting the Dots: Global inequality, poverty and wellbeing
David Pilling, Kate Pickett, Danny Dorling, Dianne Willcocks and Jonathan Derbyshire (Chair)

• Friday 15 June 2018, 10.30AM to 12.15pm
• Free admission
  Booking required
  Book tickets
• Ron Cooke Hub, University of York (map|getting to campus)
• Wheelchair accessible

Event details

Why in the 21st century do we have a more unequal society than ever before? Our Focus Day explores the relationship between economic and political decision-making and the impact of those decisions on the most vulnerable in our society.

We are delighted to welcome three world-leading experts to present compelling evidence about inequality and its impact. Join us as David Pilling, Africa Editor of the Financial Times and author of The Growth Delusion; Kate Pickett, author of The Inner Level, sequel to the acclaimed The Spirit Level; and Danny Dorling of the University of Oxford, author of Peak Inequality: Britain’s Ticking Time Bomb, kick off a day exploring new and radical ideas of how to solve poverty and inequality.  

Our Focus Day is introduced by Dianne Willcocks, Deputy Chair of Trustees of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, and the session is chaired by Jonathan Derbyshire of the Financial Times.

About the speakers

Jonathan Derbyshire is Executive Opinion Editor at the Financial Times. He was previously Managing Editor of Prospect, Britain’s leading monthly magazine of politics and ideas, and Culture Editor of the New Statesman. 

Danny Dorling is a Professor of Human Geography at the University of Oxford. He went to university in Newcastle upon Tyne and grew up in Oxford. With the help of many colleagues, often in collaboration, he has published over 40 books including many atlases and Injustice in 2015; A Better Politics in 2016; The Equality Effect in 2017; and in 2018 Peak Inequality.

Kate Pickett trained in biological anthropology at Cambridge, nutritional sciences at Cornell and epidemiology at UC-Berkeley. She is currently Professor of Epidemiology in the Department of Health Sciences, University of York, and the University's Research Champion for Justice and Equality.  Kate was an UK NIHR Career Scientist from 2007-12, is a Fellow of the RSA and a Fellow of the UK Faculty of Public Health. She is co-author, with Richard Wilkinson, of The Spirit Level and the recently published The Inner Level. The Spirit Level was chosen as one of the Top Ten Books of the Decade by the New Statesman, winner of Publication of the Year by the Political Studies Association and translated into 25 languages. Kate is a co-founder and trustee of The Equality Trust. 

David Pilling has been a prize-winning reporter and editor with the Financial Times for 25 years. Throughout most of his career he has been a foreign correspondent and has worked and reported from Asia to America and from Africa to Latin America. Currently the Africa Editor for the Financial Times, he was previously the Asia Editor, running coverage across the continent, while for the past decade, he has also been one of the newspaper's featured columnists. He has conducted dozens of interviews with world leaders, business executives, economists, artists and novelists from around the world. 

David is the winner of several journalistic prizes, including Best Commentator prize by the Society of Publishers in Asia in both 2011 and 2012 and Best Foreign Commentator for 2011 in the UK's Editorial Intelligence Comment Awards for coverage of China, Japan and Pakistan. His first book, Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival (Allen Lane, 2014), received outstanding reviews. His latest book is The Growth Delusion: The Wealth and Well-Being of Nations (Bloomsbury 2018).

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