Seven Children: Inequality and Britain’s Next Generation

by Danny Dorling

If we found seven typical 5-year-olds to represent today’s UK, who would they be? What would their stories reveal?

Seven Children is about injustice and hope. Danny Dorling’s highly original book 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 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 endure.

Immersive, surprising and thought-provoking, Seven Children gets to the heart of post-pandemic Britain’s most pressing 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 the extremes? Why are most British parents on below-average income? Who are today’s real middle class? And how can we reverse the trends leaving all children worse off than their parents?

Genres: Politics, Nonfiction

322 pages, Kindle Edition

Published September 26, 2024

About the author

Danny Dorling is a British social geographer researching inequality and human geography. He is the Halford Mackinder Professor of Geography of the School of Geography and the Environment of the University of Oxford.

Danny Dorling has lived all his life in England. To try to counter his myopic world view, in 2006, Danny started working with a group of researchers on a project to remap the world (www.worldmapper.org).
He has published with many colleagues more than a dozen books on issues related to social inequalities in Britain and several hundred journal papers. Much of this work is available open access and will be added to this website soon.

His work concerns issues of housing, health, employment, education and poverty. Danny was employed as a play-worker in children’s summer play-schemes. He learnt the ethos of pre-school education where the underlying rationale was that playing is learning for living. He tries not to forget this. He is an Academician of the Academy of the Learned Societies in the Social Sciences, Honorary President of the Society of Cartographers and a patron of Roadpeace, the national charity for road crash victims.

Reviews

[Francesca Pashby · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well that was depressing. Unsurprisingly.

Extremely detail laden with a lot of stats about the economic status of Britain's families mainly since Thatcherism, but also referring back to post WWII.

Stark truth is that ALL families seem to be suffering to a degree, even the ones who are ostensibly amongst the better off (ie. in the top 40%). These 7 children were amalgamated creations of "types" of data made human, but as of 2024, 4 of the 7 live below the "average"household income, the 5th child is "average" (and barely has their head above water), and the 6th and 7th children don't seem to be luxuriating much above that!

Britain lags behind every country in Europe (bar Bulgaria) in terms of child poverty. A disgusting statistic which no political party seems to have the will (Conservatives) or ability (Labour, thus far) to deal with. I am not a sociologist, nor a statistician, but I know it should be the right of every child to have a warm coat, a bicycle, friends to tea once a fortnight, and their birthday celebrated (all criteria within the survey that much of this data comes from).

What is the world we have made, where some people have SO much, and others the absolute bare minimum?

[Geoff Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Seven Children is a very interesting and informative book, based on data and statistical analysis. Although written by a leading UK academic, the book is aimed at ordinary lay people, and is pretty accessible. The book’s accessibility is strengthened by the use of the seven imaginary children, each representing the average child of seven sectors of children, based on families’ disposable income.

To come to the main takeaways of the book:

1. Inequality and poverty have increased massively for children in the UK in the half century since the 1960s.

“In the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, the UK was becoming more equal.” (paperback edition, page 68) “The stretching apart happened between the mid-1970s and late 1990s, and today the gaps between richest and poorest are so wide it is staggering. Within the best-off 1 per cent today, a typical family with children will have a disposable income 100 times higher than the typical family with children in the bottom seventh of households… Meanwhile, in households with three or more children in Britain, a staggering 44 per cent are now living in poverty.” (paperback edition, page 8) “Before the last thirty years… back in the 1960s and 1970s, we were much more equal… The economic shape of British society has become stuck… on 39 [the Gini coefficient graph, the ‘unfairness score’]” (paperback edition, page 39). “You have to back to 1962 to find a time when the Gini coefficient… was only 25”. (paperback edition, page 40) “People in Britain were all, on average, and especially by income, more like other people then also living in Britain.” (paperback edition, page 41) “In the UK in the 1960s and 1970s, privately renting tenants had far more rights than they have today, and people were able to establish a home and start a family at much younger ages than they can today.” (paperback edition, page 86-87) “For decades we have tolerated inequalities that have grown so wide that many children will now have become adults with almost no memories of any family holiday at all, nor of living in a secure home from which they cannot be evicted with just a couple of months’ notice; instead, in an increasing number of cases, they will have memories of going hungry as a child in the UK in 2024.” (paperback edition, page 100) “Do people in the UK still become better off as they age, on average? The answer is no. Or at least no, not any longer, not since the 1990s…” (paperback edition, page 112) “Wouldn’t you say something has gone badly wrong in Britain, if a family like Freddy’s doesn’t feel comfortably off, even though their income places them squarely in the ‘affluent but not rich’ category?” (paperback edition, page 138) “For a few people to be successfully greedy, many other people, an increasing number of others, have to be poor.” (paperback edition, page 144) “in the UK by 2020, ‘wealth varied most by age, with median total wealth among respondents aged in their early 60s almost nine times as high as those aged in their early 30s.” (paperback edition, page 162)

2. The majority of British children live in families that struggle to make ends meet, on less than the average disposable income. After inflation, in real terms, the disposable income for Anna’s family, the poorest of the seven categories of children, is little more than for a child in the same bracket a century ago.

“Is it really possible that a majority of parents in Britain are the undeserving poor, since four of our seven children are living below the average household’s means? Is it plausible that fecklessness explains why children like Anna and Brandon are living in near destitution, and children like Candice are now so hugely deprived too?” (paperback edition, page 72) “The majority of people – not half, but the majority – have jobs that pay below the arithmetic mean… because just a few are getting a wage so much higher, pulling the average up.” (paperback edition, page 74) “A third of British children are living in homes where their parents cannot save even £10 a month.” (paperback edition, page 78) “Our middle child of seven in the UK is not at the country’s median household income level; that is the next child up. David is living in a family with an income below what most UK households have to live on. This is because households without children, which include retirees and families whose kids have home, tend to be a little bit, or occasionally a lot, better off… not half, but most, of the UK’s children are from families on a below-average income.” (paperback edition, page 92-93)

3. Children are worse off in the UK than almost all European countries. There are countries in Europe that have inequality levels much lower than the UK.

“The UK is now home to the largest concentration of children living below or on the poverty line across the entire continent of Europe – far more poor children than in the poorest parts of Eastern Europe.” (paperback edition, page 4) “Britain has transformed itself in just one decade, in the 1980s, going from one of the most equitable countries in Europe to one of the most inequitable.” (paperback edition, page 42) “There are 4 million children in the UK living… in the poorest fifth of households.” (paperback edition, page 51) “The majority of children in the UK are growing up in poor and modest homes – and have been doing so for decades.” (paperback edition, page 53) “The UK… is becoming one of the poorer and most divided states in all of Europe.” (paperback edition, page 77) “No other European country has privatised its universities as fully as the UK… This enormous cost… has helped to increase social divisions among universities in England…” (paperback edition, page 126) “the UK’s educational balance is unusual. Chile is the only affluent country in the world where more is spent on private education than in Britain… No other European country spends anything like as much as we spend on just a few children at private schools, to the ever-greater detriment of the spending on the rest.” (paperback edition, page 128-129) “By 2019, the inequality gap among different areas in the UK had become so large that it couldn’t be plotted on European graphs without inventing a special scale to avoid the UK being literally off the chart, because its geographical inequalities were three times bigger than those of the next most unequal country.” (paperback edition, page 175)

4. High UK inequality has had and is having significant material consequences, including on children’s height, the risk of infant death, and access to the basic needs of life including security of accommodation, heating and nutritious food.

“in the UK, though not in comparable Western countries, the height of 5-year-old boys has been falling since 2010… the children of the UK are increasingly becoming stunted.” (paperback edition, page 49) “At any one time, a third of a million of British children are homeless in some way.” (paperback edition, page 178) “An editorial in The Lancet tried to sum up the situation: ’The socioeconomic determinants of health in the UK are deteriorating… That one in three children is living in poverty in the world’s fifth largest economy is nothing short of a disgrace.” (paperback edition, page 181)

5. The two largest political parties have both contributed to the shocking rise in inequality in the UK, though the Conservative Party has contributed more.

“generally, the better-off vote Conservative (or much more rarely Green or LibDem), the less well-off mostly Labour, and the least well-off are most likely not to vote at all.” (paperback edition, page 163-164) “Huge inequalities are being maintained in the UK only because Britain’s leading politicians are becoming more and more extreme… What the British people have… seen since the mid-2010s has been a rapid shift… a move far to the right.” (paperback edition, page 164) “It is hard to find a European Conservative who recognises the British Tory party today as being a Conservative party.” (paperback edition, page 165) “Fearmongering over immigration has been a key pillar of the Conservative party’s shift to extremism.” (paperback edition, page 166) “People can even be made scared of themselves, and their own shadows. Immigrants can easily be made to fear new immigrants.” (paperback edition, page 167) “Today, a fictional white working class – a ‘sociologically spectral’ group that does not exist – has been invoked by those with a vested interest in telling them that it was immigrants who took their homes and jobs. The latest Households Below Average Income statistics release in March 2024 revealed that Monday’s and Tuesday’s children were an enormous seven times more likely to be of Bangladeshi origin… seven times more for Black, African, Caribbean and Black British children; five times more for Pakistani children and all other not listed ethnic minorities… It was only children of Indian or Chinese ethnic origin who were as likely as White children to be Sunday’s children in Britain.” (paperback edition, page 175) “People say the Conservatives look after the old, as their voter base, but we also know that the UK has the worst rate of pensioner poverty in Western Europe.” (paperback edition, page 182)

6. There is a wealthy class in the UK with eye-watering assets and disposable income with access to life-styles almost unimaginable to the great majority of people in the UK.

“People in the UK live in the place where the very rich (as compared to elsewhere in Europe) exert the greatest influence by funding supposedly impartial think tanks that are, in fact, biased towards their interests.” (paperback edition, page 69) “Whenever she goes out their flat, Candice’s mother… automatically steps out of the way of the people she thinks of as above her, especially men in suits. But it isn’t them; it is most people she defers to. She calls it ‘being polite’. She keeps her eyes downwards. She has done this for so long that she is hardly aware that she does it. But we are all hardly aware of how our glances are a product of the society we live in.” (paperback edition, page 73) “It is a common argument to blame the poor for their own poverty, to blame the victim of events, rather than the actual instigator of those events. The perpetrator is not an individual person, or a group of people. The perpetrator is a system that has emerged where individual greed has been allowed to run riot, where mostly it is now only the rich who determine others’ wages and others’ rents.” (paperback edition, page 85-86) “Through the tax breaks that private schools enjoy due to their charitable status, the government is actually spending more per child on privately educated pupils than on those it is directly educating. In 2011, private school children were funded £3,100 more (per annum) than state school children. By 2021, that gap had more than doubled to an extra £6,500 for every privately educated child in the UK. There had been no austerity for the rich, quite the opposite.” (paperback edition, page 109) “if the UK’s wealthy were not so engaged in tax avoidance, they would be paying more tax than their equivalents in Italy, Austria, Germany or Spain. However, consumption taxes such as VAT mean that it is the poor in the UK who end up paying at the highest rates. Britain’s top earners pay much less than half the marginal rate they paid in the 1970s.” (paperback edition, page 115) “In August 2023, CEOs in the UK got an average pay increase of 16 per cent, bringing their average salaries to nearly £4 million.” (paperback edition, page 146) “Every year, around 9,000 people in the UK receive an income of over £1 million each, which almost none of them have worked for.” (paperback edition, page 183) “Controlling the few is a political as much as a national economic necessity… ‘philanthropy is heavily implicated in justifying extreme inequalities, within and between nations, because it is through the persuasive use of ethically charged language that toleration of the status quo is increased.” (paperback edition, page 183) “the more unequal a society, the more likely its citizens are to explain success in meritocratic terms, and the less important they deem non-meritocratic factors such as a person’s family wealth and connections.” (paperback edition, page 183) “Positive change does happen. Women now being seen as fully human by most people is just one of many examples of enormous change within living memory.” (paperback edition, page 187)

[Jack Green · Rating 4 out of 5]

‘The poor can stop being poor if the rich are willing to become even richer at a slower rate’

There is so much of this book that is deeply profound whilst being so depressing about the state of inequality across Britain.

Points are curated with such impact: welfare used to be a right, not a conditional act of charity by the state; many inequalities are solely presented by the media as realities to live with; when inequality rises, empathy and understanding fall. Some of the statistics presented are barely believable.

It also paints an accurate story as to why the far-right is emerging: due to people’s fear of falling down the academic ladder, not necessarily those who have.

4.5 stars

[Oliver Donnelly · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a really beautiful book: it’s rare that I would take a non-fiction that is predominantly about statistics and talk about the emotive character of it - but the hypothetical people, or situations rather, that Dorling presents us with with feel visceral and relatable in a way that very few books about sociology or economics ever will be - one has to wonder if more books like this were written, whether less books like this would need to be written.

A sad book, with beautiful prose, and a jarring, invigorating sense of need that doesn’t quite feel like hope, but perhaps the hope for hope?

[Isaac Wade · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really good. I thought the semi-fictional conceit would weigh the whole thing down but this was structured in a really good way and made the stats presented much more engaging

[Adewumi Oni-Shogbonyo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Favourite book ever RR