June 2026 roundup
From the impacts of extreme wealth at the very top of society, to the experiences of young people navigating an unequal economy, this month we continued to examine how wealth shapes all of our lives.
In the month where the world’s first trillionaire consolidated a fortune that defies comprehension, we published new research on how wealth inequality is shaping the world around us, and considered how a new Government might meet the challenges of wealth inequality.
Growing up in the Unequal Kingdom
This month, we published new research that brings the consequences of wealth inequality into perhaps its sharpest relief: namely, what it means for children growing up in it.
Growing Up in the Unequal Kingdom, authored by Anita Sangha, draws on a rapid review of 21 peer-reviewed empirical studies to examine what children understand about economic inequality, how they respond to it, and how those responses change with age. We find that older children, drawing on more sophisticated moral reasoning, are more likely to perceive both advantageous and disadvantageous inequalities as unfair, and are more likely to support redistributive strategies.
Meanwhile, some research suggests that children from poorer backgrounds are more critical of the rich, while other studies find that those from wealthier backgrounds are more likely to express concerns about violations of social hierarchies. When people are placed in situations where resources are distributed unequally, they tend to behave in a less generous way, donating less to those in need. Older children are less likely than younger children to act selfishly when inequality benefits them, suggesting that moral development can partially offset this effect.
All in all, the evidence suggests that economic inequality shapes moral development from an early age, and does so unequally.
Wealth and power: A view from the Resolution Foundation
This month, Will sat down for an engaging conversation with Mike Brewer, Deputy Chief Executive at the Resolution Foundation, on what we should actually be worried about when it comes to wealth inequality, and why conventional measures tell only part of the story.
For decades, relative wealth inequality in the UK has barely moved, a fact that leads some commentators to conclude there is no problem to solve. Mike’s view is that this reading misses the bigger picture: at the same time as relative inequality has been broadly static, the total amount of wealth in the economy has grown rapidly, producing a growing absolute wealth gap that definitely is a problem.
“An extremely unequal society with hardly any wealth might pose no problem at all. But a society with a lot of wealth that’s badly distributed should worry you, because the sheer size of wealth, in pounds, that rich people hold lets them do things others can’t. Wealth is only useful when you use it, so the gap that matters is the gap in spending power".
At the extreme end, Mike’s concern shifts from the distributional to the democratic. With extreme wealth comes extreme power. If your wealth is meaningful as a fraction of the economy, you can intervene in ways no one else can, through economic as well as political power. That includes the capacity to bend markets, shape competition law, and lock in the returns from rent and monopoly. AI, Mike argues, is likely to make this worse, placing even more transformative capability in the hands of those who already hold most of the assets.
Breaking the link between wealth and health
Running alongside these conversations about the concentration of wealth is the well-documented problem that where you end up in the wealth distribution has a profound effect on how long you live, and how well.
In early June, Jason wrote about why the Fairness Foundation is backing the Health Equals campaign for a strengthened Health Bill. It follows the publication of research from the Health Foundation in April revealing a fall in healthy life expectancy in the UK of about two years between 2012–14 and 2022–24. People in the poorest areas of England live around 18 fewer years in good health than those in the wealthiest areas.
These are not separate phenomena. Our Wealth Gap Risk Register documents more than 40 impacts of the wealth gap on society and the economy, the majority of which affect health directly or indirectly. For those at the bottom end of the wealth distribution, the absence of assets and the presence of poverty have acute impacts on mental and physical health through stress, poor living conditions, and exposure to financial shocks such as ill-health or redundancy. Unlike wealthier households, those with little or no wealth have no buffer, and bear the full weight of the consequences.
Our previous polling reinforces the public mandate for action: 58% of people say wealth inequality has a negative impact on physical health. The case for tackling the social determinants of health, and for doing so through a Health Bill with genuine teeth, has never been stronger.
The world’s first trillionaire
The backdrop to all of this was difficult to ignore. This month, Elon Musk became the world’s first trillionaire, a number so large that, as Will wrote for Transforming Society, is almost impossible to imagine - a trillion seconds is more than 31,000 years.
The temptation is to treat it as a curiosity, a story about one unusually driven man. Will’s argument is that it is anything but. Billionaires in the 1980s owned the equivalent of 3% of global GDP; today’s billionaires own 17%, and this share is still growing rapidly. The problem is not simply that fortunes have grown so large, but that so much of this wealth is, on examination, unearned.
A great deal of wealth accumulation in recent years has come from passive gains such as property and pension revaluations, rather than from active saving or asset acquisition. An increasing share is extracted rather than created, accruing not from adding value, but from capturing it through rent-seeking, land price inflation, and market power, trends that we have explored in recent research.
The consequences compound across every domain, from the health of our economy to the functioning of our democracy. Will’s piece sets out three types of policy response (redistribution, pre-distribution, and guardrails), and makes the case that we have no shortage of options if we truly want to tackle these challenges.
And in case you missed it…
Our Head of Politics and Advocacy Jason recently joined Vanessa Feltz on LBC to talk about Musk’s new trillionaire status and how Government can back the wealth creators while reducing inequality:
Where does inequality fit in the Burnham programme?
Finally, it’s impossible to discuss this month without touching on the Prime Minister’s resignation, and the likely arrival of Andy Burnham MP as Prime Minister. It’s encouraging that the new MP for Makerfield has put inequality at the heart of his critiques of other current assessments. There is little doubt that the next Prime Minister will want to go beyond the fact that inequality is getting worse, and grapple with why exactly that has been allowed to be the case. Our recent work explored some of the factors driving that inequality in the form of asset inflation, rentierism and the privatisation of public wealth. As we have explained, those factors are not only driving acute inequality, but also holding back growth in our economy.
Burnham’s commitment to deeper regional devolution, his desire to invest in productive capacity and make the tax system fairer, and his instincts towards the public and civic ownership of utilities, transport, and key infrastructure all have the potential to address some of the deep structural challenges facing our economy. What is needed now is a policy programme that is bold enough for the scale of those challenges, and that can be implemented with the necessary urgency. We wait with interest to see what he says on the economy in his speech today…
For more reflections from Andy Burnham MP on a fairer economy, you can also catch up with our interview from March here:
North by North Westminster
In this interview, our Advocacy Manager Jason Bunting sat down with the Mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, to talk about the devolution journey so far, and the reforms that are needed to build a fairer economy across the country. They spoke about the progress made on fiscal devolution in this Parliament, what good growth really means in practice…
If you’d like to discuss any of this month’s work, collaborate on future projects, or share your reflections, do get in touch.