May 2026 roundup
From lived experience to economic diagnosis to learning from cutting-edge research, this month’s work explored what fairness really looks like, and what it would take to build it
This month we ranged across three distinct but connected aspects of the fairness debate. Our new report, Takers, made the public and political case for action on wealth extraction, arguing that Britain’s economy has drifted from rewarding contribution to rewarding the ownership of assets. A second guest piece by Charlie Chan challenged the stories that professionals tell about places, and what we miss when we look at communities. And a dispatch from the University of Bristol offered eleven findings from the frontier of research into how people actually think about fairness and inequality.
May saw our publication of Takers, a report that sets out the scale of the public and political mandate for action against wealth extraction and examines the policy arguments in detail. Released the day after the Sunday Times Rich List, we showed that not all wealth is made equal and that the public, and our policymakers, have very strong perceptions about what constitutes fair wealth.
The report built on Will Hutton’s paper from March, Escaping the State We’re In, which made the case for rediscovering the distinction between value-adding wealth creation and value-draining wealth extraction. We argued that Britain’s economy has, over decades, shifted away from rewarding productive contribution, innovation and entrepreneurship, and towards rewarding the ownership of assets and the extraction of rents. The four pillars of this extraction economy (asset inflation, rentierism, market concentration and financialisation) have combined to create an economy that no longer works for working people.
The report draws on original polling that we commissioned earlier this year to show that the public already grasps this distinction. Voters do not treat all fortunes as equivalent, but instead support the idea that genuine innovation and entrepreneurship should be rewarded, while wealth accumulated through the ownership of scarce resources, whether housing, land, infrastructure, is a different matter. That dividing line in public attitudes, the report argues, can be harnessed by any political party that is willing to build a serious policy agenda around it.
Takers reinforces the arguments in the recent Labour Growth Group report An Honest Day, which convincingly articulated the need to back those who contribute to society and restore the link between effort and reward.
This month we also published a second article from Charlie Chan, Director of United Communities, which reflects on her own experiences and documents the personal impacts of policy decisions. Charlie’s first piece for us, Policy is personal, was published last month, and traced the intersections of housing benefit, tax credits and statutory maternity pay as experienced from the inside, and reminded us that fairness, in the end, is judged from the perspectives of those most affected by policy. Her second piece, The stories (not) told about places, explores her own experience in honest emotional depth.
Charlie recounts her experience of being forced by the prospect of eviction to accept a property she hadn’t bid for, on the estate she had written off. On that estate, Charlie tells us she found something entirely different from what her professional training had prepared her to see in the generosity and spirit of the community.
“I began to discover that community assets aren’t confined to a place database, and likely don’t have a website, but it is these often invisible assets that hold community together. That discovery changed how I see everything. People. Policy. Places.”
What makes this piece worth reading alongside the policy analysis elsewhere in our work is the honesty of its challenge. As a professional, Charlie was trained to look for problems, but as a neighbour, she learned to see possibilities. It’s a clear-eyed reflection on the failure of policy to see the reality of places.
Our final piece of the month reported back from an intensive one-day workshop at the University of Bristol, the BÆM Meeting on Fairness in the Economy, which brought together eleven experts from Zurich, Bergen, St Gallen, Oslo, Amsterdam, LSE, Princeton, Berlin and Cambridge to present the latest research on how people think about fairness and inequality. The findings are rich, and some of them cut across the grain of familiar assumptions.
On the question of why redistribution varies so dramatically between countries, Morten Støstad’s analysis of 92,000 people across 40 nations suggests that the most redistributive societies, including the Nordic countries, are not necessarily the most altruistic. They are the ones most convinced that unchecked inequality is bad for social cohesion, trust and growth. On the question of how inequality is perceived, Joël van der Weele’s research finds that the choice of metric shapes public attitudes significantly: people who hear about the top 10% income share think inequality is higher, less fair and more in need of correction than those who hear about the Gini coefficient.
Paolo Brunori’s European survey data shows that people’s perceived inequality of opportunity has been rising over time, and that support for redistribution is likely falling not because people have stopped caring, but because they have lost confidence that government can do anything effective about it. Simona Sartor’s experiments demonstrate a phenomenon that she calls “aristocratic meritocracy”: people who believe hard work should be rewarded tend to extend that principle to inherited wealth too, on the grounds that it represents the hard work of previous generations. And Ranveig Falch’s study of 14,000 Americans and Scandinavians finds that almost nobody thinks pure self-interest is morally acceptable, but most people think some degree of self-prioritisation is fine, and that stripping away the justifications (the invisible-hand argument, or reciprocity) causes approval to drop sharply.
Taken together, the eleven presentations offer valuable and important lessons for those of us working on wealth and inequality, particularly on public perceptions.
The workshop was organised by Paul Hufe at the University of Bristol, with funding from an UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship (ref MR/X033333/1), as part of a series of Bristol Applied Economics Meetings.
If you’d like to discuss any of this month’s work, collaborate on future projects, or share your reflections, we’d love to hear from you - just reply to this email.