We often frame societal risks in terms of immediate, visible threats: pandemics, climate disasters, or geopolitical conflicts. Yet one of humanity’s most persistent dangers—economic inequality—rarely occupies the same urgency in public discourse.

David Lay Williams’ compelling book, The Greatest of All Plagues: How Economic Inequality Shaped Political Thought from Plato to Marx, challenges this oversight by excavating an important truth: for over two millennia, the West’s greatest minds have sounded alarms about concentrated wealth’s corrosive effects on societies.

From Plato’s warning that inequality creates “two cities — one of the rich, one of the poor, eternally at war” to Adam Smith’s fear that vast income gaps erode mutual sympathy between classes, history’s sharpest thinkers have identified economic disparity as an existential threat to justice, democracy, and human flourishing.

At this event, David Lay Williams and an expert panel discussed what we can learn from the past about the threat of economic inequality, why philosophers considered it so disruptive and destabilising, and how we can make this threat more tangible to provoke action.

Speakers:

• David Lay Williams, Professor of Political Science at DePaul University and Affiliate at the University of Chicago's Stone Center for Research on Wealth Inequality and Mobility
• Karen Rowlingson, Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences and Professor of Social Policy at the University of York
• Luke Kemp, Research Affiliate at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, Cambridge
• Will Snell, Chief Executive at the Fairness Foundation (chair)

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UK politics is focused on short-term crises, at the expense of thinking about and acting on long-term problems. Among other things, this is a barrier to building a fairer society, undermining opportunity and growth and damaging our democracy and our society more broadly. Thinking and acting in the long term is possible, as the Welsh government has proven over the last decade, and brings multiple benefits. Many of today’s thorniest political problems in the UK would have been ameliorated, if not averted, had previous government paid more attention to long term issues. There are a range of institutional, systemic and psychological barriers to thinking and acting in the long term, but there are also many practical solutions that can help to overcome those barriers.

The Fairness Foundation and two expert speakers - Derek Walker, the Future Generations Commissioner for Wales, and Cat Tully, Managing Director of the School of International Futures - discussed the need for UK politics and policymaking to focus on long-termism and on the welfare of future generations, the barriers to change, and how to overcome them.

hThis webinar marked the launch of the Fairness Foundation’s new report, Mission to the Future.

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President Trump is in power once more. His victory is complete but the business of understanding just what happened has only just begun as we seek lessons – and warnings – for UK politics and this year’s European elections.

Why were the Democrats defeated? Is America’s surging inequality the root cause of President Trump’s victory? What connections can we draw between growing inequality and the populists’ clarion call for a “revolt against elites”?

At this event as part of our Fair Society series, in partnership with the Policy Institute at King’s College London, we convened some of the leading thinkers and analysts who have studied the American campaign up close for a discussion about what is fuelling populist politics in America, what we can learn from what happened – and how the UK government should respond.

Speakers:

• Claire Ainsley, Director of the Project on Center-Left Renewal, the Progressive Policy Institute and former Executive Director for Policy for Sir Keir Starmer
• Professor Ben Ansell, Professor of Comparative Democratic Institutions, Nuffield College Oxford and author of Why Politics Fails
• The Rt Hon Liam Byrne MP, Member of Parliament for Birmingham Hodge Hill and author of The Inequality of Wealth
• Peter Hyman, Former Senior Advisor to Sir Keir Starmer
• Hamida Ali, Head of Policy and Programmes, Future Governance Forum
• Professor Bobby Duffy, Director of the Policy Institute at King’s College London (chair)

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