Seven Children: Inequality and Britain’s Next Generation w/ Danny Dorling & Melissa Benn

Social scientist and inequality expert Danny Dorling discusses his latest work, Seven Children—an immersive and highly original study of child inequality—in conversation with Melissa Benn at Cambridge Literary Festival.

About the book

If we found seven typical 5-year-olds to represent today’s UK, who would they be? What would their stories reveal?

Seven Children is about injustice and hope. Danny Dorling’s highly original book 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 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 endure.

Immersive, surprising and thought-provoking, Seven Children gets to the heart of post-pandemic Britain’s most pressing 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 the extremes? Why are most British parents on below-average income? Who are today’s real middle class? And how can we reverse the trends leaving all children worse off than their parents?

About the speakers

Danny Dorling is a social scientist and author whose books include Inequality and the 1%, All That Is Solid and Shattered Nation, among many others. He has written numerous op-eds and long reads for the Guardian, New Statesman, Financial Times, and Telegraph. Dorling is Harold Mackinder Professor of Geography at the University of Oxford, and a patron of RoadPeace, Comprehensive Future and Heeley City Farm.

Dorling will be in conversation with Melissa Benn. Benn is a writer, journalist, and campaigner. Her essays and journalism have appeared in a wide range of publications, including The Independent, The Times, LRB, Cosmopolitan, and elsewhere. She is a regular contributor to The Guardian and New Statesman. She has published eight books, including two novels. One of Us, published in 2008, was widely praised and shortlisted for a British Book Award in 2008. In September 2013 she published What Should We Tell Our Daughters? The Pleasures and Pressures of Growing Up Female, an exploration of young women’s lives from the perspective of a mother and feminist in mid-life, which was shortlisted for a Politico’s Book of the Year in 2014.

This event will be followed by a book signing.