(with Sam Friedman )

When we think of the British elite, familiar caricatures come to mind. But is the new elite painfully woke or an old boy’s chumocracy, plucking its members from Oxford and Cambridge by way of Eton? Aaron Reeves and Sam Friedman combed through a trove of data in search of an answer, looking at the profiles, interests, and career trajectories of over 125,000 members of the British elite from the late 1890s to today to figure out who runs Britain, how they think, and what they want. At the heart of this data-rich sociological study is the historical database of Who’s Who. They also mined genealogical records, probate data, census figures, and 70 years of Desert Island Discs to distinguish between two types of elites: a “positional elite” and a “wealth elite”, the fortunate .01 percent. What they found at the end of this ambitious seven-year project is that there is less movement at the top than we think. Yes, there has been progress on including women and Black and Asian Brits, but those born into the top 1% are just as likely to get into the elite today as they were 125 years ago. What has changed is how elites present themselves. The new elite is desperate to appear ordinary. Why should we care? Because the elites we get affect the politics we get. While scholars have long proposed a link between social composition and the exercise of power, the empirical evidence has been thin—until now.

(with Scott Greer, Julia Lynch, Clare Bambra, Jon Cylus, Jane Gingrich, and Michelle Falkenbach )

Societies are ageing, in Europe and elsewhere. This is an effectively unprecedented development in human history and one that many think could pose a real threat to welfare states’ political bases and sustainability. In some countries this has been taken as evidence that the welfare state will become unsustainable given the expected increased cost of health and long term care coupled with the comparatively small number of working adults, while in others that the welfare state has been turned to serve the interests of the elderly at the expense of the young wrongly assu ming that elderly adults become dependent on society after reaching a certain age. The purpose of this book is to present new evidence on how and why political systems respond to the challenges of ageing and health. Research indicates that the extent that population ageing creates difficulties for economies, public finances, and health systems is complex and, importantly, conditional on a host of modifiable factors. Furthermore, a focus on divides between generations distracts us from other, important, inequalities within generations. Not only does science have a part to play in busting many ageing-related ‘myths’, but there is also a key role for policy intervention.