Invitation to the 2025 LIS Summer Lecture on “Social contagion, inequality and mobility”
LIS is happy to invite you to its 2025 Summer Lecture on “Social contagion, inequality and mobility” by Prof. Marc Fleurbaey, The Paris School of Economics.
The lecture will take place on Monday, June 30, 2025, from 17:30 to 18:30 [Luxembourg Local Time] at the Blackbox, Ground Floor, Maison des Sciences Humaines (MSH), 11, Porte des Sciences, L-4366 Esch-Belval, Luxembourg. This is in-person event with no virtual attendance option.
Abstract
People are transformed, and social hierarchy is shaped, by social interactions. A contagion model, inspired by a classical model of pandemic propagation, is proposed to describe this phenomenon. Two main contributions are made in this paper. First, a taxonomy of social interactions is proposed, based on the transition probabilities depicting social interactions. In particular, a simple characterization of competition and cooperation emerges, alongside a few other archetypal interactions. Second, the relation between the type of interaction and various properties of the social dynamics (stability and uniqueness) and steady state (inequality, mobility, welfare) is studied. Pandemic-like waves and unstable steady states
can occur. More interestingly, the various types of interactions stand in complex relations regarding their outcomes in terms of inequality, mobility, welfare. Additionally, the intensity of social contacts has a non-monotonic influence on the social hierarchy at the steady state.
Bio
Marc Fleurbaey is CNRS Senior Researcher, Chaired Professor at Paris School of Economics, and Associate Professor at ENS-Ulm where he is a co-director of the Center on the Environment and Society (CERES). Up to 2020 he was Robert E. Kuenne Professor at Princeton University and up to 2018 he also held a research chair at Collège d’Etudes Mondiales (FMSH, Paris). Author of Beyond GDP (with Didier Blanchet, OUP 2013), A Theory of Fairness and Social Welfare (with François Maniquet, CUP 2011), and Fairness, Responsibility and Welfare (OUP, 2008), and more than 200 academic articles and chapters, he is a former editor of Social Choice and Welfare and Economics and Philosophy and is currently an associate editor of Free & Equal. He is one of the initiators of the International Panel on Social Progress, and lead author of its Manifesto for Social Progress (CUP 2018). He was a coordinating lead author for the IPCC 5th Assessment Report, a member of the United Nations Committee for Development Policy from 2016 to 2021, and he has co-chaired task forces of the T20. He received the CNRS Silver Medal in 2024 and is a Fellow of the Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory.
Registration
Registration for attending the Summer Lecture is mandatory, you can register through this link.
Registration Deadline: 23rd of June 2025.
The lecture will be followed by a Cocktail Dinner from 18:30 to 19:30.