Host: Nick Petrić Howe
Welcome back to the Nature Podcast. This week: an inequality special.
[Jingle]
Host: Nick Petrić Howe
Nature has a special focus on inequality, the studies describing it and how science can help tackle it, this week, and we’re following suit here on the podcast. In this show, we’ll be finding out how inequality is growing, how scientists can help and the role randomised controlled trials can play. One of the key people behind this special is Kerri Smith, features editor here at Nature, and likely a familiar voice for long-time listeners. She’s co-hosting the Nature Podcast with me this week. Kerri, hi.
Host: Kerri Smith
Hi, great to be back.
Host: Nick Petrić Howe
So, Kerri, it’s wonderful to have you here, and the first thing I wanted to ask you about this special issue is why now? Why is Nature pulling out all the stops to talk about inequality this week?
Host: Kerri Smith
Well, as you probably know, it’s a perennial issue – it’s been around for centuries – so there’s kind of never a bad time, and the research that goes into quantifying and trying to reduce it is something that we always have an eye on. But really, the answer to why now is because the pandemic has thrown new light on this and has also not only exposed it but worsened it some ways. COVID has battered incomes the world over, but there is inequality in how people can recover from that, and it’s affected a lot of people’s health, but some groups worse are affected worse than others.
Host: Nick Petrić Howe
Now, inequality is quite a broad thing, so I guess a good place to start is by asking what is Nature’s sort of focus here?
Host: Kerri Smith
Well, so, first of all, I guess I should just give a quick definition. So, inequality at its core is any unfair situation in which some people have more or less of a thing, in terms of money, in terms of health or education or opportunity. And the way that Nature thought that we could kind of contribute to this is, as a science publication we’re obviously focused on how the research community considers and studies inequality. There isn’t really a field of inequality studies. People study it where they find it, so that could be in economics, in public health, in medicine and even in climate. Honestly, there are just so many different vantage points. One of the focuses for the special is on how scientists study inequality in all these different fields that touch upon it and how, if we learned to measure certain types of inequality better, we might know a little more of the nature of the beast and be able to address it more effectively. Another thing we've looked at is what science tells us about how to reduce inequality. So, these are trials that are going on, decades of trials, in fact, trying to figure out what it is that can lift people out of poverty. And I mean, crucially now, the questions are, can you scale those efforts up? And then I suppose the other thing is just there's a lot of effort – there always has been – from the World Bank and other large organisations, painting a picture of what inequality is like over the years and decades, and we have a graphic spread that focuses on what COVID has done to inequalities, so how it's plunged what looks like tens of millions more people into poverty, for instance, than who would have been there without the pandemic, and how race, ethnicity or deprivation can affect who gets the virus and who dies from it.
Host: Nick Petrić Howe
And so, you've given us a little bit of a flavour there, but what else do we now understand about COVID, the pandemic and inequality?
Host: Kerri Smith
It seems clear now that the pandemic has exposed certain inequalities and worsened others. So, COVID affected incomes across the board, but the highest earners in the world, the top 20%, have managed to basically recoup the losses they made, whereas people in the bottom 20% have just not at all recovered financially. They're not earning what they ought to be if the pandemic sort of hadn't happened. And there is more graphics on income and other inequalities in the spread. Another looks at health disparities. So, in the US, data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed that among Indigenous groups and other ethnic minorities in the States, death rates from COVID were much higher per 100,000 people than they were for the white population. And in the UK, an analysis of deprivation – so this is a kind of measure of living conditions, education levels, that sort of thing – that suggested that death rates from COVID were twice as high for people in the most deprived circumstances than they were for people who live in the most affluent areas.
Host: Nick Petrić Howe
And so, how are researchers dealing with this sort of increase in inequality that has happened because of the pandemic? How are they responding?
Host: Kerri Smith
Well, I think there was probably an upwards trend in how interested researchers were in inequality even before the pandemic because there have been some suggestions that it's worsening. So, there was a report put out by the UN in 2020 showing that inequality had increased in most developed countries, some middle-income countries. Although I should say that the measure of between country inequality, so inequality among countries, has actually been falling for some time prior to the pandemic, which saw a little uptick. But overall, the picture is gradually getting worse. The share of income going to the richest 1% has increased in a bunch of countries in the last few decades. And of course, that doesn't capture the effects of the pandemic. Newer forces, I suppose, like climate change and technology, have just made researchers, I think, more interested in looking at this, so they're heading into the field and increasing numbers. That's one point that our careers feature makes in the special issue. And in new fields too, so not just thinking about the obvious thing, maybe poverty, but how climate change might affect inequality and the lack or otherwise of natural resources, for example.
Host: Nick Petrić Howe
So, there are more people coming into this field. Is there any concern that with an influx of people it could have some sort of unintended consequences to the research?
Host: Kerri Smith
Well, I think whenever a topic becomes salient, we've seen before, waves of research that aren't done as well as they could be, so perhaps this is by people who are captured by the topic and very well-meaning but not necessarily as well equipped as people who've been in the field for a while. This happened with clinical trials for COVID, some of which were just too small, too underpowered to be able to really demonstrate benefit – a bit of a waste of time. Adding inequality to your research questions might seem really trendy. It's great that it's getting all of this extra attention, but some of the researchers, again, quoted in our careers feature say that there are dangers of mischaracterising, for example, what's really causing inequalities, and that could cloud the picture. So, it's great that people are jumping in, but they need to be careful what they're doing.
Host: Nick Petrić Howe
And I guess you talked a little bit about people trying to measure stuff and trying to understand the issue. Is there an issue with just not enough data? Do we just not understand this problem well enough?
Host: Kerri Smith
I think, as science-friendly people here at Nature and scientists in our audience, we're probably always going to say there's not enough data. There's never enough data and we want more data. If you don't have the data, it could be as if the inequality doesn't exist. If you can collect data on age and ethnicity and gender, well, that's all very well. You can measure those things. But if you don't collect, for example, disability information, then what can you really say about disability? So, some organisations and some scholars are calling for more comprehensive data collection, and I'm sure that's a theme that at Nature we could endorse.
Host: Nick Petrić Howe
And another part of the coverage in this week's special issue is about poverty. And that's something that reporter Jeff Tollefson has been writing about.
Host: Kerri Smith
Yeah, so he has looked at decades of work, and the most recent sort of trends within that, on using randomised controlled trials, so trials where you split people into groups, you give an intervention to one group, you don't give it to the other, and you see if there's a difference at the other end. And he's focused on a group of trials that have to do with giving people money, basically, to see if they spend that in a way that helps lift them out of poverty.
Host: Nick Petrić Howe
And that's something that we've delved into in a little bit more depth this week, as reporter Benjamin Thompson actually spoke to Jeff about his feature. And Jeff started by outlining the scale of this issue.
Interviewee: Jeff Tollefson
Well, globally, there are hundreds of millions of people living in extreme poverty, and the governments of the world have committed to eliminate extreme poverty by 2030, so that sets up your fundamental challenge.
Interviewer: Benjamin Thompson
And so, governments and aid organisations are looking to develop and deliver measures to reduce poverty, and much of the work that you've been writing about involves randomised controlled trials. Now, often when we hear that phrase, we think of testing drugs or testing vaccines and what have you, but when it comes to anti-poverty programmes, many of these RCTs began in the 1990s.
Interviewee: Jeff Tollefson
That's correct. There’s been research into poverty policies going back long before that, and there are different ways that you can look at this: education, health, opportunity. But beginning around the mid-1990s, there was a subtle shift toward the use of randomised controlled trials to try and test policies and interventions. And now the entire field of research has been mainstreamed, straight up to the World Bank itself.
Interviewer: Benjamin Thompson
And where are these trials being done now then, and what are they sort of looking at in particular?
Interviewee: Jeff Tollefson
These trials are being done everywhere, targeting kind of almost everything – the full suite of issues. But in our recent story, we focused on a particular subset of these programmes that's really focused on giving people money and other resources to try and lift them out of poverty. So, the basic idea here is that, in the words of one of the economists I talked to, if you give people money, it turns out it makes them less poor. That might sound like an obvious statement, but it took us decades to get to that realisation. So, that's what a lot of the biggest trials today are focused on.
Interviewer: Benjamin Thompson
I mean you say it's an obvious statement, but it was a very controversial statement for a long time, and there was a lot of pushback even into running trials like this.
Interviewee: Jeff Tollefson
Yeah, there were always fears that if you gave poor people money, they would use it on cigarettes or alcohol. You see the same concerns raised in industrialised countries. If you let people stay on the social safety net too long, does it make them lazy? Does giving people money encourage them to work less or enable them to work less? The answer from all of the research that's been done is basically, no. People want to work, people want to earn more, people want to have a higher standard of living, and oftentimes, it's the lack of money that is preventing them from doing those things. And a lot of governments have taken these lessons to heart. Today, cash transfer programmes, whether they have conditions attached to them or are completely unconditional, these types of programmes have been rolled out across the global south. They're extremely common and, in many ways, they’ve become a core tool in the arsenal that governments use to try and alleviate poverty.
Interviewer: Benjamin Thompson
And in your feature, you write about how researchers are trying to improve upon these approaches of just providing funds and the evolution of these trials to include more things.
Interviewee: Jeff Tollefson
So, the field has moved on. I mean, this started even perhaps a decade ago. I mean, if you think about an unconditional cash grant programme as like a baseline, we know that that does some good. The real question is, can we design programmes that do better than that? If not, then there's no sense in designing programmes. You just give some people some money and call it good. So, what scientists have been doing is looking at programmes that give people, in addition to some cash aid, things like an asset, could be a cow, or some chickens, and some business training, and perhaps some personal coaching, focused on life skills designed to promote self-empowerment and self-confidence. And even in the case of one of the most recent trials that we're talking about in Niger, community programming, where villages in Niger were shown a video about a couple that kind of struggles to make do and to create a new business and is successful with the help of friends and family and community. And then there's a discussion with the recipients of this programme and the broader community. So, this is kind of a suite of interventions that's designed to not just help people at the subsistence level, but help them build businesses or build ways to boost their income and improve their lives over the long haul. That's the goal.
Interviewer: Benjamin Thompson
And what sort of results have been seen from these trials then, Jeff?
Interviewee: Jeff Tollefson
In general, they tend to show that people are better off financially, better off psychologically, tend to be happier, less stressed. That was the case in the latest programme in Niger. And the thing is that they set it up in such a way as to test the effects of the different components of these interventions. So, some people, in addition to the business training, received a cash grant. Other people, in addition to the business training, received some kind of psychosocial intervention. And another group received all of the above. And what they found is the group that receives everything performs the best, but the group that received the psychosocial interventions alone also did pretty well. And if you look at it from a purely cost-benefit perspective, that one is probably the most efficient intervention.
Interviewer: Benjamin Thompson
And one of the folks you speak to in your feature does make the point that it's not all about the money. And this isn't new as well. This has been seen before in other studies.
Interviewee: Jeff Tollefson
Yeah, that's correct. One of the examples that we give in this story is this classic experiment from Jamaica in the late 1980s. Again, this is one of these experiments that predates the modern wave. And it tells you things about how these types of interventions can have lasting effects. In this case, it was an early childhood intervention. It focused on nutrition for malnourished children under the age of two. And it also focused on interventions for mothers, basically parental training, and 2 decades on, the children that received the intervention were earning 25% more and 3 decades on, that disparity increased to 37%. So, that's an experiment that has had huge impacts on the research community across the world, and governments have tried replicating it and scaling it up ever since.
Interviewer: Benjamin Thompson
And scaling can be an issue, right? Moving from a small pilot in one location to a large intervention somewhere else can be tough. Countries are different, cultures are different, and working out exactly what it was that made the difference can be difficult too.
Interviewee: Jeff Tollefson
Absolutely, so even in this programme, there have been a couple of well-documented attempts to scale this up to 700 people in Colombia and 70,000 in Peru, and they saw less effect. When I talked to the lead on that original experiment, she was perfectly honest and said scaling up is a nightmare. The experiment in Niger that we talked about, it's part of a larger set of trials that goes across the Sahara, four countries. And this already is one kind of question: how do we scale up some of these early results? The trick is to figure out what is the special sauce, and can you replicate that special sauce in a different culture with different people? In some of these cases, you're talking about dedicated scientists and postdocs at the pilot scale. When you move up to a government programme that operates across the country, you're talking about perhaps functionaries within a health system who may already be overworked in all sorts of ways. So, how do you translate it from science, basically, to public policy?
Interviewer: Benjamin Thompson
And of course, the current issue of Nature is very much looking at issues surrounding inequality and inequity. And as these anti-poverty trials are ramped up from pilot studies to larger efforts around the world, researchers are really maybe holding up a mirror to themselves, and making sure that the right people are reached as well. What have researchers said to you about that?
Interviewee: Jeff Tollefson
Well, there are concerns that whether we're either targeting the right populations in all cases or collecting the data that we need to say meaningful things about how these trials actually improve poverty rates or address inequality. For example, we've got anti-poverty trials that are being run all over the world, right. But most of them, although they're in poor countries, they don't tend to be in the poorest countries, right, because it's hard to set up trials in places where there's conflict, for instance, or where there's governmental instability. So, that's kind of one question that's out there. Another is, even once you do your trial, are you collecting enough data to be able to answer questions about whether that trial is affecting people equitably within the group that you're targeting? So, I have one example in the story of a trial of a cash grant programme that was tied to educational attendance, school attendance, among children, where, within that group, it was the less poor students who benefited the most, and the poorest students benefited less, although they did benefit. So, even within a certain group, you can have a situation where you get almost an expansion of inequality. And then, of course, there are always concerns about data collection. I talked to one economist who kind of lamented and said he himself is guilty, but lamented that economists who are working on this issue often don't report the data that you would need to determine the poverty level of the people involved in some of these interventions. So, you might have an agricultural technology intervention, where you try it out and you see, ‘Oh, yes, this programme works, the people adopted the technology.’ But did it reduce poverty? We don't know because the data wasn't collected. So, these concerns are out there and people are thinking about them more and more.
Interviewer: Benjamin Thompson
Jeff, I don’t think it’s a stretch to say then that these issues aren't going to be solved overnight, despite these trials being put in place and these pilot schemes. What are researchers saying to about the near- and medium-term efforts to alleviate poverty and inequality issues around the world?
Interviewee: Jeff Tollefson
So, I mean, there's another thing to keep in mind. A lot of these programmes are targeted at some basic issues. Economic poverty is just one component. We've talked a little bit about education and health. But really, if you want to promote global development, sustainable development at an international level and in any kind of equitable manner, you have to address a whole range of issues. And so, Arianna Legovini, who heads the impact evaluation work at the World Bank, she talked to me about this and said her goal is to basically take these same tools that were developed for poverty alleviation and social protection, and start trying to apply them to some of the other big-ticket items that are out there. Infrastructure, climate interventions, governance – these are all areas where the international community makes very large investments, larger than in the poverty arena, in fact, and in theory, you want all of those interventions to be aimed in the right direction and to be working together. So, there's a big agenda out there to understand the efficacy of all of the investments that we're making in the global development arena.
Host: Nick Petrić Howe
That was Nature’s, Jeff Tollefson there. We'll put a link to his feature in the show notes. And so, Kerri, Jeff spoke there about RCTs, randomised controlled trials, to do with poverty, but this is something that can be used a bit more broadly.
Host: Kerri Smith
Yeah, and so, of course, RCTs are a very well used tool. They probably first became a tool in medicine as opposed to in social science, and here there are a couple of ways researchers need to be thinking about inequality. Firstly, are you excluding particular people from your drug trial, for instance, and therefore, will you find it hard to apply that treatment to everybody? So, we saw this happen with drugs and vaccines for COVID which weren't routinely tested in pregnant women, and subsequently guidance on whether they were safe for that group was very muddy for a while. And then, of course, the second thing, I suppose, to worry about once the trial is complete is, is your drug or vaccine going to be distributed equitably? We know there's been a lot of problems distributing these sorts of treatments and preventative measures worldwide for COVID and, of course, that does nothing to improve the situation.
Host: Nick Petrić Howe
And so, you mentioned there about some people maybe not being included in some randomised controlled trials. Is there anything being done to sort of address this?
Host: Kerri Smith
Yeah, of course, it's really important to ensure that disadvantaged, underserved populations are not excluded from your trials, so that your intervention could benefit everybody, and that your drug or your treatment, or whatever it is, isn't just tested on a group of wealthy-ish, white males, for the sake of caricature. One programme trying to do this in the arena of clinical trials is called Trial Forge. It’s run out of the University of Aberdeen and a team that are centred there. And it's developing a new framework for clinical trials that basically aims to boost participation in groups that might be underrepresented and just help researchers to think about ways they might be more equitable. And then I suppose the second thing that you could do to address this is more data. I think we mentioned this. There's an increasing awareness that researchers need better data on their populations to make sure that they can analyse afterwards any effects that are specific to particular subgroups. If the data is not there, you can't do that. You don't need to do that yourself as a researcher, but at least if it's there, then other researchers can come along, crunch the data, conduct what's often called a systematic review and draw lessons from the work about who was impacted, who benefited most, who failed to benefit, from any particular trial.
Host: Nick Petrić Howe
And so, Kerri, whilst we're shining a light on inequality this week, there is still other science going on in the world, and we have a story about that coming up now. Reporter Ali Jennings has been finding out how time of day could affect how breast cancer spreads.
Interviewer: Ali Jennings
Cancer tumours are of groups of cells that multiply uncontrollably in the body. In certain cancers, a kind of cell called a circulating tumour cell can dislodge from a tumour and then travel around the body through the blood, possibly forming a new tumour in another place. This is called metastasis. Metastasis is generally associated with worse clinical outcomes for cancer patients. But although it is such an important aspect of cancer, it is still poorly understood why the circulating tumour cells that can lead to metastasis enter the bloodstream in the first place.
Interviewee: Nicola Aceto
It was thought to happen continuously as a tumour grows. These tumour cells are able to leave the tumour more or less at any point in time and enter the circulation.
Interviewer: Ali Jennings
This is Nicola Aceto, a researcher from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. Nicola and his team wanted to better understand why circulating tumour cells left tumour sites in the first place, so they started by studying mice with breast cancer tumours. But when they tested the numbers of circulating tumour cells in their blood, they stumbled on something surprising.
Interviewee: Nicola Aceto
So, the lead author of the manuscript, she drew blood from these models just naturally at different times of the day, and then she couldn't put the numbers together. She realised that the very same model had very different numbers of circulating tumour cells, depending on whether you would take blood at different times of the day.
Interviewer: Ali Jennings
What Nicola and his team had observed was that the tumour cells’ release depended on the mouse’s circadian rhythm.
Interviewee: Nicola Aceto
We knew nothing about the circadian rhythm. We are cancer people. We never even thought about it until we saw these strange, strange numbers.
Interviewer: Ali Jennings
The circadian rhythm is an internal clock that changes aspects of a creature’s physiology, depending on where it is in its wake-rest cycle. Nicola and his team found that mice had up to 88 times the number of circulating tumour cells during their rest phase compared to their awake phase.
Interviewee: Nicola Aceto
The first thought was really like, ‘Oh my god, nobody ever noticed that.’ Just by switching lights in the room on and off at different times, we could change the number of circulating tumour cells in animal models. And so, pretty much the first step that we did was to look at patient samples. And then at that point, the excitement became very, very real because it was clearly the case also in patients.
Interviewer: Ali Jennings
Nicola’s team took blood from breast cancer patients at 4am – during rest phase – and 10am – when they were awake. Just over 78% of all the circulating tumour cells they found came from rest phase. But that wasn’t all. When Nicola and his team returned to the mouse model to better characterise what they were seeing, they made another crucial observation about the circulating tumour cells produced during rest phase.
Interviewee: Nicola Aceto
Not only they are much more in number, but they are also a lot more proliferating and a lot more capable to form metastasises compared to cells that are taken during the active phase.
Interviewer: Ali Jennings
And the rest-phase release of these aggressive tumour cells was being regulated by specific hormones. Glucocorticoids, testosterone and insulin are all released differentially throughout the wake-rest cycle. When Nicola’s team interfered with these hormonal pathways, it decreased the amount of circulating tumour cells released into the bloodstream. Hearing that got me excited – could blocking these hormones at night be a way to slow metastasis for cancer patients?
Interviewee: Nicola Aceto
It’s not that simple because the blockers that we found are blocking very well in a highly controlled experimental setting. To think about giving these blockers continuously to patients, because it's not just blocking one time, it's blocking as long as they have a tumour, that's a completely different story and that, of course, is not that simple.
Interviewer: Ali Jennings
But there could be other avenues of treatment to explore.
Interviewee: Nicola Aceto
One option could be to really time treatments of patients in a way that maximum concentration of drugs is achieved during the night as opposed to being achieved during the day because that's when things happen.
Interviewee: Sunitha Nagrath
Really this paper has opened a new chapter in blood-based biomarker studies.
Interviewer: Ali Jennings
This is Sunitha Nagrath, a researcher in chemical engineering and biomedical engineering from the University of Michigan, who was not involved in this work.
Interviewee: Sunitha Nagrath
I studied circulating tumour cells for no more than 15 years. And we look at the biology of the cells, we have elegant technologies to capture the cells, but we never thought the CTCs could be released in a very differential manner by looking when you are looking for them.
Interviewer: Ali Jennings
Sunitha thinks that this work will have profound effects on the way people study blood-borne markers for cancer. Now, researchers will need to take circadian cycles into account. And she also thinks it will change how clinicians monitor the health of cancer patients.
Interviewee: Sunitha Nagrath
If you want to monitor the patients with a robust biomarker, we need to be very aware of when to draw the blood because it can drastically affect the way we are measuring the cell concentration in the blood and how we are monitoring.
Interviewer: Ali Jennings
But Sunitha is also aware that more work will need to be done to flesh out this initial discovery.
Interviewee: Sunitha Nagrath
The key is always to be able to see similar results in human patients. I would like to see a study where we really monitor them continuously, over a period of 24 hours, and really see that surge is in a cyclical fashion following the circadian cycle.
Interviewer: Ali Jennings
And will they see the same result in other kinds of cancers?
Interviewee: Sunitha Nagrath
This is in a hormone-dependent cancer, which is a breast cancer tumour. It will be interesting to see whether these observations will maybe still hold true if we study it in maybe a lung cancer or non-hormonal cancers.
Interviewer: Ali Jennings
I asked Nicola what his next experiments would be, and it turns out he and Sunitha are thinking along the same lines.
Interviewee: Nicola Aceto
Yeah, the next step is first of all to understand whether this happens only in breast cancer, which is where we've seen it, or maybe in other cancer types. Of course, we dream that this might be a cancer phenomenon, that metastasis really occurs during sleep in many cancer types.
Interviewer: Ali Jennings
With this research, Nicola and his team have observed an entirely new dimension through which to study the behaviour of circulating cancer tumour cells. And it may be that this leads to some profound changes to the way understand and treat cancer.
Host: Nick Petrić Howe
That was Ali Jennings, who spoke to Nicola Aceto from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Switzerland, and to Sunitha Nagrath from the University of Michigan in the US. As always, you can find the full paper in the show notes. So, Kerri, bringing us back round to the main topic of the show this week – inequality – there's also a Comment article in Nature this week about inequality of opportunity. What can you tell me about this?
Host: Kerri Smith
So, this is a Comment piece by an author, an economist called Francisco Ferreira, and he's arguing for better measurement of this particularly harmful type, he says, of inequality – inequality of opportunity. So, he defines that as inequalities based on just things you can't really change, things you can't do anything about – your race, where you grew up, your parents’ education – and these are often things that reproduce down the generations. And what he says in his Comment is it's really hard to get data on this, so we just don't know what proportion of any given inequality is due to this, this kind of pernicious effect of inequality of opportunity. So, it's really just hard to quantify this and we should be better at it.
Host: Nick Petrić Howe
So, how might we close that gap in terms of getting more data about this particular part of inequality?
Host: Kerri Smith
So, his idea is, in order to get the data, he acknowledges this is really difficult stuff. You're asking for people's parents’ education levels and these sorts of things to try and find out if that has an effect on those people as they become adults. So, you need long term surveys and lots of detail on family history, basically, in the person's own circumstances. And there are some datasets that are like this. Mostly, they've been put together in wealthy nations. So, the US has one, Germany has a socio-economic panel, both running for decades, that ask about people's jobs, parenting, and then this is useful information to have when you're looking at how those features might affect the next generation. And then, of course, you have to kind of figure out how to split people into groups that make sense in terms of how they might differ in certain characteristics. Their parents went to university or they didn't, or they're a different race or ethnicity. And his idea is, once you can control for variables like these, you can start to figure out what proportion of inequality overall might be due to an equality of opportunity. And if he estimates inequality of opportunity in this way, he thinks it might account for over two thirds (66% and upwards) of the overall sort of income inequality in the country.
Host: Nick Petrić Howe
So, possibly then a very large part of inequality. So, there's a lot to think about here if inequality is not going away and recent events have made things worse. Do we have any sort of takeaways from this special issue?
Host: Kerri Smith
I guess, for scientists, a takeaway we've talked about already, maybe ad nauseam or maybe it's music to the ears of our listeners, is that we just need data. We need good data. We need up-to-date data on a whole host of inequalities, and we need to make sure that we're collecting the right data to answer the right questions. And that's not going to happen for inequality without the help of scientists across the board. So, interdisciplinarity, horrible word but useful concept, is going to be really key here, as it is in many other or an increasing amount of scientific disciplines. So, that if you're studying inequalities worsened by climate change, for instance, you might work with a climate scientist, with an economist, with an anthropologist. You might join up some skills from very different areas of academia to help you sort of really get a handle on the problem.
Host: Nick Petrić Howe
Well, fascinating and sobering stuff there, Kerri. Thank you so much for talking to me today. And listeners, there'll be links to all the articles in this week's special issue in the show notes. And Kerri, thanks once again.
Host: Kerri Smith
Thanks for having me.