Oct. 16, 2026, 13:30-15:00
Location: Ångström laboratory, room 106157
Registration: Link (please register by October 14)
Speaker: Laura Fürsich, Linköping University
Title: Consolidation in Time and Space: Information-Theoretic Decompositions of Inequality
Abstract: Inequality is conventionally located in the difference between group means, but social structure operates on distributions. A group difference that is small overall can be large within every subgroup, because aggregation averages over the very conditions that produce it. I develop this argument through two studies anchored in Swedish register data. The aggregate gender wage gap is small, and residential segregation on any single attribute is modest by international comparison. Both facts are artifacts of marginalization. I show that inequality in an ostensibly egalitarian society is relocated into conditional and joint distributions that mean-based indices and one-dimensional segregation measures cannot address. The first study decomposes the entropy of income by chain rule in an ordered sequence of life-course contexts. Gender’s conditional mutual information traces an inverted U. It rises as antecedents are conditioned on, unmasking within-class gaps suppressed at the aggregate, then falls as downstream life course events — occupational segregation above all — absorb the signal. Male and female incomes do not differ equally across the population that contexts, rather the disadvantage is assembled by the sequence of contexts themselves. The second study applies the same apparatus across space, decomposing the joint mutual information between neighborhood and background × income into marginal and interaction components for Swedish cities and, for comparison, US metropolitan areas. The interaction term isolates the sorting attributable to the co-occurrence of the two attributes. In both countries, its contribution is concentrated in two corners of the joint distribution: the poorest minority households and the richest majority households. Segregation is thus located in the combination of attributes. In both cases the inequality is concentrated at the extremes of the distribution and absent from its centre. Sequential conditioning and joint conditioning are the same operation applied to different orderings of the same social structure.
Bio: Laura Fürsich is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Analytical Sociology, Linköping University, where she also completed her PhD, and was previously a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago. She studies how social networks, residential space, and institutional structure combine to produce durable inequality, with a focus on the consolidation of ethnicity, class, education, and geography. Her work draws on population-scale network data from the Swedish and Dutch registers, using information theory, network analysis, and agent-based modeling.