Suppose you chose seven typical children to represent today’s UK. Who would they be? What would they reveal?
Seven Children is about hidden realities of injustice and hope. In his highly original, thought- provoking new book, inequality writer Danny Dorling 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 children 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 prevail, and change is possible.
Immersive and intimate, this book gets to the heart of post-pandemic Britain’s most pressing economic, social and political 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 those two extremes? Who are today’s real middle class? And what if tomorrow’s challenge isn’t spiralling inequality, but how to reverse the new trend that leaves all children worse off than their parents?
About the author
Danny Dorling is a social scientist whose books include
Inequality and the 1%
and
All That Is Solid
. He is the Halford Mackinder Professor of Geography at the University of Oxford, and a patron of Road Peace, Comprehensive Future and Heeley City Farm. In his spare time, he makes sandcastles.
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