Join us to hear UK commentator and economic thinker Grace Blakeley talk about her latest book, Vulture Capitalism.

In the book, Grace Blakeley takes on the world’s most powerful corporations by showing how the causes of our modern crises are the result of the economic system we have built – “a toxic melding of public and private power”. It’s not a broken system; it’s working exactly as planned. It can’t be fixed. It must be replaced.

From Amazon’s attack on employee wages through its domination of regional economies, to how Boeing flies in the face of free markets despite its 737 Max disasters, and from the likes of Henry Ford to Margaret Thatcher, Blakeley considers the past and present of our current crises to pinpoint exactly how it all went wrong.

Meet our speakers and chair

Grace Blakeley (@graceblakeley) is an author, journalist, and political commentator. She attended University of Oxford where she graduated with a first-class honours degree in philosophy, economics, and politics. She has written for the Guardian, Tribune and the New Statesman among others, and appears regularly on television and radio, including on ITV Good Morning Britain, TalkTV and Jeremy Vine on Channel Five.

Michael Vaughan is Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the International Inequalities Institute, LSE. His research interests include digital political participation, far-right politics and the communicative dimension of mobilisation around economic inequality.

David Madden (@davidjmadden) is Associate Professor in Sociology at LSE and Co-Director of the Cities Programme. He works on urban studies, political sociology, and social theory. His research interests include housing, public space, urban restructuring, and critical urban theory. He has conducted qualitative, ethnographic and archival research in New York City and London. He is co-author of In Defense of Housing: the politics of crisis.

More about this event

Join us on campus or watch the event online at LSE Live. LSE Live is the new home for our live streams, allowing you to tune in and join the global debate at LSE, wherever you are in the world. A video will be made available shortly after the event on LSE's YouTube channel.

The International Inequalities Institute (@LSEInequalities) at LSE brings together experts from many LSE departments and centres to lead critical and cutting-edge research to understand why inequalities are escalating in numerous arenas across the world, and to develop critical tools to address these challenges.

The Department of Sociology (@LSEsociology) seeks to produce sociology that is public-facing, fully engaged with London as a global city, and with major contemporary debates in the intersection between economy, politics and society – with issues such as financialisation, inequality, migration, urban ecology, and climate change.

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