Aug 10, 2026 · 41 min · 10 segments
It's still a sad fact that where you are born in Britain, and which family you are born into, determines too many of your life's outcomes. Conor sits down with one of the UK's most eminent academics…
Danny DorlingGuestConor NachanHost
And the big dataset I had, this was in the late '80s I was doing this, was the nineteen seventy-one census and then the nineteen eighty-one census.
It had data for a hundred thousand areas, and I wanted to draw pictures of this.
And it was exciting to be able to see the first pictures of this kind of data.
I noticed that the patterns in nineteen eighty-one were slightly more concentrated, slightly better defined in terms of differences between people's life chances by geographic area compared to nineteen seventy-one.
And then we got the nineteen ninety-one census, and it had become more acute again, much more acute by nineteen ninety-one.
And slowly, I was drawn into looking at rising inequality because that was what the geographical data was showing us was happening.
It had the greatest concentration of poverty in Western Europe at the time, and the greatest wealth.
And th- this was just increasing and increasing and increasing over the years and the decades.
And so around about two thousand and eight, two thousand and nine, I switched from basically being a computer graphics person to being somebody who looked at the statistics of inequality.
I, they, I think they sort of see it as, as overtly political sometimes because the world of cartography is kind of fairly apolitical.
But of course, across the country at this time, the issue was just beginning to be raised.
It may be hard to imagine this, but in the nineteen eighties, we weren't allowed to use the word poverty if we wanted government-funded research.
You know, poverty didn't officially exist, and the word inequality was very controversial in the nineteen nineties.
And the big dataset I had, this was in the late '80s I was doing this, was the nineteen seventy-one census and then the nineteen eighty-one census.
It had data for a hundred thousand areas, and I wanted to draw pictures of this.
And it was exciting to be able to see the first pictures of this kind of data.
I noticed that the patterns in nineteen eighty-one were slightly more concentrated, slightly better defined in terms of differences between people's life chances by geographic area compared to nineteen seventy-one.
And then we got the nineteen ninety-one census, and it had become more acute again, much more acute by nineteen ninety-one.
And slowly, I was drawn into looking at rising inequality because that was what the geographical data was showing us was happening.
It had the greatest concentration of poverty in Western Europe at the time, and the greatest wealth.
And th- this was just increasing and increasing and increasing over the years and the decades.
And so around about two thousand and eight, two thousand and nine, I switched from basically being a computer graphics person to being somebody who looked at the statistics of inequality.
I, they, I think they sort of see it as, as overtly political sometimes because the world of cartography is kind of fairly apolitical.
But of course, across the country at this time, the issue was just beginning to be raised.
It may be hard to imagine this, but in the nineteen eighties, we weren't allowed to use the word poverty if we wanted government-funded research.
You know, poverty didn't officially exist, and the word inequality was very controversial in the nineteen nineties.
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