Partecipanti: Pier Francesco Asso (University of Palermo), John A. Davis (University of Connecticut and University of Warwick), Robert H. Wade (London School of Economics), Michele Alacevich, Chair (University of Bologna), Massimo Augello (University of Pisa), Fabrizio Bientinesi (University of Pisa), Raffaella Gherardi (University of Bologna), Daniela Giannetti (University of Bologna), Mirek Tobiáš Hošman (Masaryk University), Antonio Magliulo (University of International Studies of Rome), Manuela Mosca (University of Salento), Sebastiano Nerozzi (Catholic University of Milan), Gianfranco Tusset (University of Padua), Loris Zanatta (University of Bologna)
Economic inequality has become a defining issue of our times, both domestically and globally. Not only has economic inequality affected the lives of individuals, but it has been so prolonged, deep and widespread a phenomenon that it is starting to disrupt the social fabric of democratic societies. Domestic economic inequality always goes together with inequality in other dimensions—gender, race, education, intergenerational relations, health, mobility, and so on—in a perverse, self-reinforcing loop. Increasing domestic economic inequality, moreover, renders unsustainable efforts on the part of less developed countries to grow in the medium- and long-term. Non-democratic regimes will have to negotiate a difficult balance between consensus, political stability, economic growth, and inequality. The study of inequality dynamics is thus fundamental to understanding the economic, political and social development of countries such as China and India in the next decades.
International inequality has also been on the rise, and it explains the migratory pressures that we witness all around the world, such as in the Mediterranean Sea, on the borders between Mexico and the United States, and between India and Bangladesh. International inequality also reinforces political crises and cultural conflicts, and thus helps explain the barriers and controls that have been erected against the movement of people between Israel and the Palestinian territories, Saudi Arabia and Yemen, North and South Korea, Bulgaria and Turkey, and in the Strait of Malacca between Indonesia and Malaysia.
These dynamics have a history and specific mechanisms that must be understood if we want to examine and react to inequality issues, both domestically and internationally, in the near future. Though the discipline of economics has often neglected inequality as a relevant issue, the history of economic thought, in conversation with other social sciences, can help understand how the inequality discourse has developed (or has been marginalized) in different epochs and under different intellectual and ideological perspectives.
The Italian Association for the History of Economic Thought (AISPE) invites historians of economic thought, global historians, political scientists, sociologists, economists, as well as other social scientists and scholars of the humanities, to contribute to an interdisciplinary conversation about the evolution of economic inequality and of its analysis in historical perspective.