ISI Wealth Conference 2025

How do you measure wealth? Why does it stay in the same hands so often? And what does that mean for democracies that depend on participation and trust? For three days, everything at LMU Munich revolved around wealth, its concentration and its consequences. The ISI Wealth Conference 2025 was attended by around 150 researchers from more than 20 countries, from Amsterdam to Zurich, from the London School of Economics to Harvard. The program included around 70 contributions.

Céline Bessière from Université Paris Dauphine kicked off. Her keynote The Gender of Capital was one of those moments in which a hall becomes noticeably quiet. She spoke about power, money and gender, about inheritances and companies, and about the invisible work that holds wealth together. After her presentation, it was clear where these days would lead. It was about structures that have a profound effect and the question of how such structures can be changed as soon as they become visible.

In the further course, the presentation by Lane Kenworthy from the University of California in San Diego attracted a lot of attention. He called for widespread assumptions about the social effects of wealth inequality to be empirically tested. His analyses made it clear that public debate often runs ahead while the data is still coming behind, and that evidence-based answers are more important than ever.

Our one and a half minute recap video takes you through these conference days. It shows full panel rooms, concentrated discussions, and the small moments in between when thoughts take shape. The host was Fabian Pfeffer, Professor of Sociology at LMU and Director of the Munich International Stone Center for Inequality Research. With calm and alert attention, he pulled strings together, brought people into conversation and made visible what ISI wanted to be: a place where new ideas arise.

In the end, the impression remained of a discipline that was just reorganizing itself. The ISI Wealth Conference 2025 showed that wealth research is no longer a silent calculation in grey seminar rooms, but a conversation about what holds society together or divides society. For three days, it was noticeable that something was growing here. An international community that not only wants to count wealth, but also wants to understand it.

The fact that the first ISI conference was such a success surprised even optimists. The exchange was close, the discussions lively, the atmosphere was open. If economists from Harvard, sociologists from Paris and data experts from Munich are already sitting around the same table, what will not happen until 2027?

The recap video provides a first glimpse. Recordings of the two keynotes will follow soon, including Céline Bessière's full presentation. There is every reason to believe that ISI is becoming more than just a research center. A place with attitude. For science that connects and asks the big questions: Who does the world belong to and why does it still belong to so few?