Highlighting inequality

The walls have been freshly painted and the moving boxes unpacked: Following extensive renovations, the Munich International Stone Center for Inequality Research (ISI) is embarking on its next chapter in new premises. Located on Ohmstraße, the center not only intends to research inequality in the future. It’s also creating an event space, set aside for engaging workshops, discussions, readings, exhibitions, and other formats that are relatively uncommon in academia.

Ever since it was founded a year and a half ago, ISI has pursued the goal of reaching a broad public audience and communicating scientific research in an accessible way. According to sociologist Professor Fabian Pfeffer, Director of ISI, communicating science is especially important when it comes to wealth inequality because “wealth inequality affects democracy, social mobility, and economic stability. When wealth is highly concentrated, power is concentrated as well.”

“Inequality is a big issue here too”

Pfeffer earned his doctorate in the United States and spent many years researching aspects of social and intergenerational inequality in the country. Many forms of inequality are even more visible in the United States, he explains. “But inequality and its harmful effects are also a big issue in Germany.”

The center, which is still relatively new, is part of an international network that is funded by the U.S. philanthropists Cathleen and James M. Stone. Its research focuses on wealth, unequal starts in life, and power structures in society.

Numbers you can relate to

To get as many people as possible interested in research on inequality, ISI places a particular emphasis on making its publications clear and easy to read. “Fewer technical terms, more visual translation,” says ISI Communications Director Michèle Loetzner. “Numbers need to be relatable.”

This focus on accessibility has not gone unnoticed. The center’s inaugural report, which it published last year, received a remarkable number of awards. Not only did it win the FOX Award for efficiency and visual quality, but it also received the International Creative Media Award in the Custom Media category and the European Publishing Award for Content Marketing Print 2026.

Unusually entertaining

The jury’s statement for the FOX Award highlighted the report’s “unusually entertaining journalistic approach”. “We commend the boldness, the content, and not least the efforts of a small in-house editorial team that also managed to produce the report on an extremely tight budget,” the jury wrote.

The awards represent a big endorsement of ISI’s ambitious work and an affirmation of its communication strategy. According to Pfeffer, the European Newspaper Award, which originates from the world of newspaper and magazine design, demonstrates in particular “that scientific content can also be compelling when it comes to design, storytelling, and journalism.”

Munipoly – unequal opportunities in Munich

The 34-page report does indeed present the issue of inequality in an informative and creative way, using accessible (English) language. It features a quiz, interviews, real-life stories, and a satirical version of Monopoly called “Munipoly”. Its spaces include names like “Born in Bogenhausen”, “Parents’ Apartment”, “Gentrification Express Glockenbach”, and “Schwabing Ownership Boundary”. You can get stuck because you ended up in the wrong place, or in a less affluent neighborhood. So the game illustrates that, just like in real life, people’s opportunities in Munich are also unevenly spread right from the very start.

Concentrated wealth, concentrated power

According to Pfeffer, the effects of wealth inequality are keenly felt by many people. Yet the topic often remains abstract and is “frequently discussed in a distorted or oversimplified way.”

Political debates, for example, often focus, if they focus on anything at all, on potential minor savings in welfare benefits. On the other hand, people’s big fortunes and how they are distributed receive far less attention. “If we reflect on the fact that around €400 billion is inherited every year, or that the bottom 50% of the population owns only about three percent of total wealth, this changes the perspective,” says Pfeffer. “Not every inequality is automatically unjust. But when inequality leads to life opportunities being systematically spread unequally, then this becomes a problem in my view.”

A utopian vision? Not necessarily.

ISI’s research also explores potential solutions to problems that may initially seem utopian but have already been trialed internationally. Offering free public transport, investing more in publicly owned housing, or requiring large asset funds to contribute more to financing public services may sound unrealistic or provocative here in Germany, but measures like these are already commonplace in other countries. ISI Communications Director Michèle Loetzner says this is a good enough reason “to expand the range of ideas and shift the perception of what is possible in society. If something works successfully somewhere else, why shouldn’t it work here as well?”

Part of ISI’s innovative communication strategy involves developing social media channels with a different style and tone for different audiences. “For us, this isn’t inconsistent with scientific accuracy,” Loetzner explains. “It’s part of good science communication: we need people to be able to understand us wherever they encounter us.”