Life expectancy in the United States has recently fallen for three years in a row—a reversal not seen since 1918 or in any other wealthy nation in modern times. In the past two decades, deaths of despair from suicide, drug overdose, and alcoholism have risen dramatically, and now claim hundreds of thousands of American lives each year—and they’re still rising. Anne Case and Angus Deaton, known for first sounding the alarm about deaths of despair, explain the overwhelming surge in these deaths and shed light on the social and economic forces that are making life harder for the working class. They demonstrate why, for those who used to prosper in America, capitalism is no longer delivering.
Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism paints a troubling portrait of the American dream in decline. For the white working class, today’s America has become a land of broken families and few prospects. As the college educated become healthier and wealthier, adults without a degree are literally dying from pain and despair. In this critically important book, Case and Deaton tie the crisis to the weakening position of labor, the growing power of corporations, and, above all, to a rapacious health-care sector that redistributes working-class wages into the pockets of the wealthy. Capitalism, which over two centuries lifted countless people out of poverty, is now destroying the lives of blue-collar America.
This book charts a way forward, providing solutions that can rein in capitalism’s excesses and make it work for everyone.
Sir Angus Deaton is Senior Scholar and Professor Emeritus at Princeton University and Presidential Scholar at the University of Southern California. He is the author of The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality (2013) and, with Anne Case, Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism (2020). His interests span domestic and international issues and include health, happiness, development, poverty, inequality, and how to best collect and interpret evidence for policy. Deaton is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, a Fellow of the British Academy, and an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He is a past President of the American Economic Association. His BA, MA, and PhD are from Cambridge University, and he holds several honorary doctorates from universities in Europe and the US. In 2015, he received the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel ‘for his analysis of consumption, poverty, and welfare’. He was born in Edinburgh, Scotland. He was made a Knight Bachelor in the Queen’s Birthday Honors List in 2016.
Society as a whole would benefit from the power of the free market: for decades, the West blindly believed in this economic fairy tale. It turns out we couldn’t be further from the truth. Social and economic inequality is greater than ever and the number of people living in poverty in the Western world is growing exponentially. Sir Angus Deaton was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics for his research on poverty, and in his Nexus Lecture he will address the problems in our current capitalist model and what needs to be done to distribute wealth more fairly and to fight poverty while having a thriving economy.
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