Polarised: Inequality and Generation Wealth

This week on the RSA’s podcast Polarised, two great interviews on whether rising inequality and economic anxiety is to blame for everything else that’s broken in our politics.

First up, Faiza Shaheen from the think tank CLASS. Last year I produced (with Huw Jordan) a three-part miniseries for CLASS, presented by Faiza. When you edit one of these things, you end up listening to every interview over and over again, sometimes to the point you find yourself quoting guests verbatim in other conversations. CLASS on Class had that effect on me and shifted the way I thought about my own class identity.

And by coincidence I saw a preview of photographer Lauren Greenfield’s new film Generation Wealth at Sundance London the same week I was booking this episode. The film tells the story of Greenfield’s 25-year career documenting the most extreme excesses of wealth (and our obsession with it), starting in her hometown of LA but eventually taking her to China, Russia, and post-crash Iceland. It was a long-shot but I liked the idea of pairing an interview about the economics of inequality with something about how our culture has changed since the 90s – in Greenfield’s words, how “keeping up with the Joneses has literally become keeping up with the Kardashians”. I saw the film on Saturday, emailed the publicist on Tuesday, and by Friday Matthew Taylor was interviewing Lauren.