Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism by Anne Case and Angus Deaton has been shortlisted for the prestigious Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year. A New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller, Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism is a groundbreaking account of American capitalism’s fatal flaws. 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. As the college educated become healthier and wealthier, adults without a degree are literally dying from pain and despair. Drawing on years of data analysis, economists 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.
Deaths of Despair and the Future of Captialism is one of six books shortlisted for the 2020 Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year. The winner will be announced in London on December 1.
Listen to an excerpt from the audiobook
Watch an interview with Anne Case and Angus Deaton on PBS NewsHour
About the Authors
Anne Case is the Alexander Stewart 1886 Professor of Economics and Public Affairs Emeritus at Princeton University.
Angus Deaton, winner of the 2015 Nobel Prize in economics, is the Dwight D. Eisenhower Professor of Economics and International Affairs Emeritus at Princeton University and Presidential Professor of Economics at the University of Southern California. His books include The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality (Princeton).