For the second year in a row, The Stone Centre on Wealth and Income Inequality hosted a distinguished lecture on inequality. In October 2025, Sir Richard Blundell of University College London presented the findings of a years-long international research project — The Deaton Review on Inequality — challenging the metrics, assumptions, and policy responses that have dominated economic thinking in the inequality space for decades.
“Richard is in the small handful of the very top economists in the world. If you look it up, he’s in the top 20 in the world for citations. More importantly, he’s had a big impact in various ways.” Acting Director of the Stone Centre Dr. David Green said, introducing him to the room full of faculty, students, and researchers.
“We use the econometric tools that he’s developed. He’s had seminal impacts in a wide range of areas, including consumption [and the] impact of taxes on labor supply. The list is long. Because of that, Richard has won pretty much every major distinction our profession has to give out.”
“He’s also an institution builder [and] basically turned UCL into one of the leading economics departments in the world and was key in turning the [Institute for Fiscal Studies] into something that’s sort of the envy of all economists who analyze policy elsewhere in the world.”
Knighted in the 2014 New Years Honour’s list for services to economics and social science, the David Ricardo Professor of Political Economy at UCL and co-director of the IFS Centre for Microeconomic Analysis of Public Policy has long maintained close ties to UBC. His visit marked both a homecoming as he spent the early years of his academic career here, and a major rollout of research that has consumed the past six years.
“We’re always very happy when he comes back,” Green said.
“Richard’s third hat is doing public policy, writing reports, and taking part in the discussions. It’s truly impressive what he does across a range of areas. I don’tactually believe Richard sleeps.”
“It’s great to visit here and to give this lecture,” Blundell said in his opening remarks. “There’s already been some collaborations with [UCL’s] Stone Centre and more historically and currently with the IFS. We’re working together. I do hope those collaborations continue.”
The Deaton Review brings together economists, sociologists, philosophers, epidemiologists, and policy experts from around the world to examine inequality across multiple dimensions.
“Which inequalities matter most? How are they related and how do they come together? What’s the appropriate mix of policy?” Blundell said, explaining the motivations behind the review. The study produced 96 peer-reviewed research papers, detailed case studies across 17 countries (including Canada, led by Green), and a comprehensive monograph is being prepared for publication this spring.
Blundell began the lecture by framing why the review was necessary in the first place and how it challenges conventional approaches.
“You can’t study inequality just through an economics lens,” he said.
While overall concerns about inequality have grown, Blundell showed that measurement-wise, household income inequality has, in fact, remained stable over the past 30 years. He cited France as a country where there is no evidence of any increase in income inequality, despite growing public concern about the issue. This sharp contrast prompted the study to explore other forms of inequality that concern people, such as work opportunities and career progression.
“This partly came from my own concerns that income wasn’t enough to think about inequality…Inequality is not just about income or the Gini…No more Ginis. If anybody mentions Ginis, they’re out of the room.” Blundell joked. He explained the importance of looking at inequalities between geographical regions and groups, including gender, ethnicity, and race. “Regional inequalities are really key. Economists are a little bit late in the game with this.”
Blundell walked through the scope of the project, touching on wage progression over working lifetimes, the collapse of opportunity in certain regions, the persistence of gender pay gaps despite educational gains, and the mismatch between policy tools like minimum wages and tax credits, and what worries people about inequality. He presented charts mapping educational inequality across regions, wage profiles by education level, and the consequences of firm productivity clustering in certain cities.
What distinguishes The Deaton Review from previous economics-only policy reviews is its breadth. Alongside leading economists like Blundell and Nobel Laureate Angus Deaton, the project includes sociologists studying family and ethnicity, public health experts exploring how inequality correlates with health outcomes and the increasing role of finance and technology driving top incomes.
For the community of UBC researchers and students in the room, the lecture served a dual purpose: offering a rare public appearance by one of the world’s leading economic minds and the arrival of a major research project that will likely shape inequality policy discussions in Canada and beyond over the coming years.
As governments worldwide continue to debate how to respond to public discontent rooted partly in economic inequality, Blundell’s message—that the problem is more complex and multidimensional than current policy responses acknowledge—arrives at a consequential moment.