Danny Dorling

Social scientist Professor Danny Dorling imagines the lives of seven typical five-year-olds across different income brackets in the UK and finds that even the best-off of the seven is disadvantaged today.

Dorling’s children are born in 2018, when the UK faced its worst inequality since the Great Depression, and they all reach five in 2023, at the height of the cost-of-living crisis.  Dorling asks what we are missing when we focus only on the superrich and the most deprived and looks at what kinds of lives most children are living between the two extremes. He questions why most British parents are on below-average incomes and looks at how we can reverse the trend that is leaving most children worse off than their parents.

‘This searing book spells out British children’s lives, divided by the deepest inequality since the 1930s. Read it and pass it to anyone who doesn’t know how we live now.’ Polly Toynbee, Guardian columnist

Dorling is Halford Mackinder Professor of Geography at the University of Oxford. His previous books include Inequality and the 1% and All That Is Solid.