Virtual Event: Princeton University Public LecturesThrough the Past Darkly - How the Covid Crisis 'Unmasks' Four Decades of Failed U.S. Economic Policy

Join David Autor and Anne Case, coauthor of Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism, for a Zoom webinar: Through the Past Darkly - How the Covid Crisis ‘Unmasks’ Four Decades of Failed U.S. Economic Policy.

David Autor is Ford Professor in the MIT Department of Economics. His scholarship explores the labor-market impacts of technological change and globalization on job polarization, skill demands, earnings levels and inequality, and electoral outcomes.

Autor has received numerous awards for both his scholarship—the National Science Foundation CAREER Award, an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship, the Sherwin Rosen Prize for outstanding contributions in the field of Labor Economics, the Andrew Carnegie Fellowship—and for his teaching, including the MIT MacVicar Faculty Fellowship.

In 2017, Autor was recognized by Bloomberg as one of the 50 people who defined global business. In March of 2019, he was christened “Twerpy MIT Economist, David Autor” by John Oliver, host of Last Week Tonight, during a segment on automation and employment. Autor is currently determining how to merchandise this title.

Anne Case is the Alexander Stewart 1886 Professor of Economics and Public Affairs, Emeritus at Princeton University and Director, Research Program in Development Studies.

Case has written extensively on health over the life course. She is known for her work on “deaths of despair,” deaths related to drugs, alcohol, and suicide.

About the Book

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.