A few weeks back I was a guest on Goldsmith’s Political Economy Research Centre’s Lockdown Podcast with Sahil Jai Dutta. Over the half hour conversation, Sahil and I discussed a wide range of topics: the relationship between corporate governance and inequality, my research with Joseph Baines on how the class struggle predicts stock market performance, our Common Wealth report on shareholder value ideology in large UK firms, and my Socio-Economic ‘State of the Art’ piece on what can be done to tackle rising inequality.

At the end of the podcast, Sahil asked me for a reading recommendation, and I chose a book that I’d recently read by three experimental psychologists: The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Life in Death. I plan to write another blog post related to the subject of the book in the near future, so I’ll just briefly summarize it here. As the sub-title suggests, the book examines the role of death in our lives, focusing specifically on how our subconscious anxieties about death shape our behaviour, often in disturbing ways.

The theoretical insights in the book are inspired by the work of the late cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker, who drew on ideas from philosophy, anthropology, political economy and psychoanalysis to illustrate how we construct self esteem and culture as a way of alleviating death anxiety. The Worm at the Core discusses a bunch of experiments that have conducted to confirm Becker’s claims. As I mentioned to Sahil, this is a great example of how to do non-disciplinary, philosophically profound and empirically innovative social science.