Who cares?
Responsibility in an age of individualism — how the burden of care is really divided between families, markets, communities and the state, and what breaks when each of them fails.
Neil GilbertProfessor of Social Welfare
Contact & Speaking
Book Neil Gilbert
Available for keynotes, lectures, panels and seminars — for universities, agencies, foundations and associations that want a real point of view, not a summary of the morning's headlines.
Half a century of studying how societies care — and what happens when they stop.
Neil Gilbert has spent five decades on a single question that every society eventually has to answer out loud: who is responsible for the people who cannot provide for themselves? His answer has never been ideological. It has been comparative, evidence-driven and quietly provocative — informed by research across Europe and North America, decades of advising governments and international bodies, and a body of writing that reviewers placed alongside the work that defined modern social policy.
What an audience gets is increasingly rare: a scholar who can hold a room between the research and the human stakes, who has watched enough policy cycles to know which obvious solutions have already been tried, and who is more interested in the hard trade-offs than in the applause lines.
Speaking enquiries
Check dates, or ask a question.
Enquiries go directly to Professor Gilbert. The more specific you are about your audience and your goals, the faster you will get a straight answer about fit.
Talks
What he speaks about.
The welfare state, fifty years on
A comparative tour of how wealthy societies built, defended and quietly dismantled the systems that protect their citizens — and what the next fifty years will demand.
The family question
What the evidence actually says about marriage, parenthood and child well-being, told away from the culture-war version of the same debate.
Capitalism and the care deficit
How market society reshapes what we owe one another, and why inequality keeps finding the children first.
Children and the policy gap
Child welfare, child poverty, and the difference between policies that photograph well and policies that work.
Evidence in a loud world
How to read social research honestly, how to spot a study that claims more than it can, and how to use findings without surrendering judgement.
Every engagement is prepared for the room in front of him. Tell him who will be there and what decision they are wrestling with, and the talk gets built around that.
The chair
Distinguished Professor and the Milton and Gertrude Chernin Professor of Social Welfare at the University of California, Berkeley.
The record
Fifteen authored books and twenty edited volumes, reviewed in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, New York Review of Books and The Atlantic.
The range
Two Fulbright fellowships and visiting posts at Oxford, the London School of Economics, Stockholm, Hamburg, Madrid, Prague, Tel Aviv, Haifa and Geneva.
The recognition
Fellow of the American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare; doctor honoris causa of Spain's National University of Distance Education.
Formats
How it can take shape.
- Keynote address
- Academic or public lecture
- Panel or moderated conversation
- Seminar or workshop for staff, fellows and leadership teams
- Webinar, interview or pre-recorded session
Who invites him
Rooms he is at home in.
- Universities and schools of public policy
- Government agencies, legislatures and commissions
- Foundations and nonprofit coalitions
- Professional associations and annual conferences
- Civic, community and faith organizations
Tell him what you want the room to walk away with.
Audience, date, format, and the thing you wish everyone understood — that is all he needs to know whether this is a fit.
berkeley1@msn.com