In this interview with LSE Review of Books Managing Editor Anna D’Alton, Danny Dorling discusses his new book, The Next Crisis: What We Think About the Future which examines survey data on what worries the public most, finding that the answers can differ significantly from what’s in the headlines. From how the cost of living crisis is tied to inequality, how employment is often associated with immigration to distract from other issues and why concern about the climate crisis has waned, Dorling unpacks the causes and perception of crises and considers how we might deal with emerging problems.

The Next Crisis: What We Think About the Future. Danny Dorling. Verso. 2025.

Your book examines monthly Ipsos survey data on what people in different countries are most worried about. Why do you think it’s worth understanding and interrogating what issues people are concerned about?

I think people’s opinions really matter. At the start of the book I look at what experts at Davos claim as the biggest risks and crises in their annual Global Risks Report, and they’re not any better than the general public at coming up with risks that that actually materialise. Through the monthly What Worries the World surveys conducted by Ipsos, people are asked questions about what they care and worry most about. We should at least look at what they say. And what they say makes sense to me.

How did you arrive at the methodology and structure of the book?

I tried to work out a way of ranking and ordering the many crises people are concerned about. I decided to look at survey data on people’s worries, because a crisis in many ways is whatever it is that you fear. When there were still very large numbers of people worried about going to Hell, that was the crisis, and if you’re trying to understand human behaviour in Europe and other parts of the world a few 100 years ago, understanding that matters.

You group together different concerns in the chapters, for example, in chapter two on what you call the top crisis, you’re looking at a combination of concerns: poverty, inequality, and the cost of living.

That’s the most arbitrary part of the book in a way. In the Ipsos surveys, which form the main body of data for the book, people are asked about 18 questions, which was too many to grapple with individually in my book, and many of them are not issues that many people concern themselves about. I wanted to include the climate crisis – it’s only 8th in the Ipsos survey by 2024 – and I wanted to narrow the main chapters down to six, plus an introduction and conclusion.

Because the cost-of-living crisis is relatively recent, and because it’s so linked to inequality and poverty, I put those together. Immigration is usually a relatively low crisis in most countries in the world, but it can suddenly come up as an issue. It’s so linked to unemployment: why people leave places without opportunities to look for work, and fears people have about immigrants taking their jobs and opportunities away from them.

Stoking fear about immigration is also very useful for diverting attention away from who is actually taking all the money. Take somewhere like Hungary. Orban uses fear of migrants coming, particularly from the east, to keep his power, to keep people afraid.

On this topic, one of the things you mention in the book is that despite claims by politicians and some media about immigrants taking jobs, and the public’s concern around this, it doesn’t bear out in reality.

It doesn’t bear out at all. It’s quite incredible that it’s still put forward as a suggestion. But there’s a playbook about how you how you scare people an influx of people that are about to come across your borders, or that or that they’re all around you and you can’t quite see them. And having a go at these other people has frequently been used by politicians, particularly on the right, but now often across the board, as a way of claiming they’re doing something about your problems. The reality is that when people turn up in a place, it creates employment booms for the people who are already there, and for other people. The worst thing that happens to places is when nobody arrives.

Stoking fear about immigration is also very useful for diverting attention away from who is actually taking all the money. Take somewhere like Hungary. Orban uses fear of migrants coming, particularly from the east, to keep his power, to keep people afraid. Trump does the same thing. Stable societies do it least, or sometimes not at all. Finland, for instance, celebrates the arrival of immigrants, but it’s got a fertility rate of 1.3 – low, like in most European countries. It’s “game over” without immigration for low fertility countries economically.

Let’s talk about the Finns, because in chapter five you discuss the happiest countries, and Finland has topped this poll for the last eight years. Why are Finns so happy? You mention low inequality as a factor.

Yeah, that’s definitely there as one of the key factors behind societal happiness. I wrote a piece in The Conversation in 2023 showing the correlation internationally between low inequality and happiness, which applies in Finland, but is found across the board.

The wording of the question could have something to do with it too: the international question is “how happy are you on a scale from 0 to 10, all things considered,” and culturally, Finns are very good at considering. The more you actually so consider all things, and how bad they could be, you’re more likely to rank yourself higher in terms of happiness. That may be why Finland, initially at least, ended up edging over some of the other countries at the very top, places like Norway and Denmark which are equally equal. It could also be that now they’d like to stay in the habit of ranking above their neighbours.

Finland was once one of the poorest places in Europe with very high emigration rates. It has achieved its contemporary prosperity without exploiting others much, without an empire of any kind, without oil, which partly explains why Finns can be quite self-satisfied or patriotic about these achievements. Finland has also avoided the Russians invading, and that’s an ever-present and very realistic fear – so all things considered, why not be happy there?

[In France] there is consistently high concern about equality which you can date back to the revolution. There is a sense that France should be a fairly equal country, and if it isn’t, something’s going wrong.

France, on the other hand, is not so high on the happiness list – 27th in 2024, despite being much more equal than most other countries in Europe. What accounts for this?

There are often particular historical reasons why a country is slightly happier or less happy than you’d expect. South Africa is happier than it ought to be, but it’s down to the aftermath of getting rid of apartheid, the celebration of that achievement.

There’s a stereotype of the French being a bit less sanguine than their counterparts in other nearby European countries, a bit less likely to say that things are wonderful. I think one of the reasons why France is the most equal of large countries is because there is consistently high concern about equality which you can date back to the revolution. There is a sense that France should be a fairly equal country, and if it isn’t, something’s going wrong. Whereas the in the UK, some of us – and especially many of those that rule us – feel we ought to be unequal, and that’s what we are. You can see something similar in Spain and Italy, where inequality is seen as more normal, whereas Germany is much more like France.

You also mention India and the US, where inequality doesn’t feature very high as a concern, you say, because people are used to inequality.

Inequality is definitely engrained in the US. If you ask a standard survey question like, “should children have warm winter coats?” you’ll much more often than elsewhere get the answer, “only if their parents can afford it”. People have been conditioned not to think about others as being like them.

India is also very unequal, and it traditionally had the caste system, which the British exploited for their own advantage, this idea of certain people in society being more deserving of power and wealth than others. Narendra Modi, despite a slight decline in his popularity recently, is still extremely popular and India has the highest government approval rating worldwide. It’s a propaganda win, and this is despite the fact that life expectancy in India dropped by four years during the pandemic three of which are not due to COVID. By March of 2021 there had been 228,000 extra child and maternal deaths due to COVID-disrupted healthcare were reported across South Asia. The only other country that rivals India for how badly handled the pandemic is Russia, which also a four-year drop in life expectancy since the pandemic. The invasion of Ukraine was perfect timing to stop people in Russia looking at what was happening in Russia.

All the work [climate adaptation] would require becomes much harder if you’re allowing a few people to amass the vast amount of money, which they often do through things that create emissions

On the climate crisis, you’ve mentioned it doesn’t rank as highly in the Ipsos surveys as the more bread-and-butter issues. But you do say in the book that adapting to the climate crisis will require reducing income inequality. Why do you make that claim?

Global interest in the climate crisis is definitely dropping. It’s a case of crying wolf so much, “12 years to save the Earth”, that kind of thing. After you’ve had enough of that, and you’ve got a memory of it, it begins to lose its urgency.

There is a big problem in that the climate crisis is perceived as the biggest worry of the well-meaning very rich, partly because they don’t have other things to worry about and they want to be useful. But they don’t necessarily not want to be rich, so worrying about climate is something they can do. We’ve absolutely got to get carbon down, but we’re certainly going to have to adapt because it seems certain that global average temperatures will rise by 1.5, much more likely by two degrees.

The realisation that inequality, poverty and cost of living are our biggest issue is not something we knew 20 years ago. People are beginning to get it.

In theory, if you’re incredibly well-coordinated, you can give up some coastal cities, move populations northward. But we’re not very good at being coordinated as a species. Furthermore, all the work it would require becomes much harder if you’re allowing a few people to amass the vast amount of money, which they often do through things that create emissions, like high-tech products which involve huge amounts of energy to run so many computer servers. It’s also this group of wealth elite who pollute most through what they consume. Until you curtail at the top, it’s very hard to ask other people to change what they’re doing. Recent climate books like Tony Juniper’s Just Earth: How a Fairer World Will Save the Planet cite inequality as the key to addressing the climate crisis.

How optimistic or pessimistic are you that there will be significant inequality reduction in the next decade?

I’m quite optimistic, partly because in most countries in, say, Europe, it’s already happening. Even in the UK since 2018, it’s begun, income inequality has been falling there for seven years. We’ve brought down the inequalities before, around the world, which means we can do it again. The realisation that inequality, poverty and cost of living are our biggest issue is not something we knew 20 years ago. People are beginning to get it. They are now worrying about how much the rich have and the gaps between people, that is what we’re beginning to see right across the world in surveys. Something has got through. The question is, how can you go from the population beginning to realise that what’s making their lives bad to action that will change that reality.

Note: This interview gives the views of the author and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Image: fran_kie on Shutterstock.

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