Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism
Written by Anne Case and Angus Deaton
Narrated by Kate Harper
4.5/5
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About this audiobook
New York Times Bestseller
Wall Street Journal Bestseller
From economist Anne Case and Nobel Prize winner Angus Deaton, a groundbreaking account of how the flaws in capitalism are fatal for America's working class
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.
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Reviews for Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism
30 ratings2 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Curious perspective to propose the perfection of capitalism in the US
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5This book was clearly written before the covid pandemic, as the authors attest to at the beginning, but from a perspective that seems overly optimistic towards capitalism in the 21st century.
There are two problems I have with their theoretical Foundation. The first is their personification of capitalism as an angel of progress. By essentializing the goodness of capitalism, they immediately shoot themselves in the foot with ambivalent arguments throughout the book about the reasons and causes for the decline in quality of life among white Americans. For example, they appear to have no problem with wealth disparities while simultaneously arguing that the massive accumulation of 1 percenters is capitalism gone wrong. Well, what is the culprit, then? According to the authors, it certainly would not be the system that precipitated inequality in the first place, but it would be the system that allows "upward redistribution" that creates oligarchs. In case you haven't guessed it yet, those two systems are actually the same thing.
This odd, Janus-faced approach towards modern economics is somewhat understandable, given that they are Princeton scholars dedicated to creating comfortable lullabies for the very people who benefit from capitalism the most.
But what really irks me is the second problem with their theoretical Foundation: the correlation between education and deaths of despair. Granted, it is very interesting to see how less education may lead to a higher rate of suicide, overdose, and addictions, but the authors never really go much further than essentializing the "goodness" of tertiary education, how it must be redistributed or universalized to better avoid the deaths of despair, and how it, above any other factors, is the best indicator for quelling the epidemic of deaths.
Having worked and studied in American tertiary education now for more than a decade and during the time that the authors examine the increase of deaths, this view is both saccharine naivety and unashamed shilling for the institutions that continue to produce wealth inequality and the impoverishment of American life. The US has always touted its university ecosystem as a "more inclusive" form of imperialism. These authors appear to do the same, although to their credit they hint at some of these critiques though they never say it outright--perhaps a move on the part of editors and department heads fearing that their balls will get chopped off in the next fiscal budget review by Princeton Admins.
I didn't give this book a one star review because, like so many empiricists, the authors did their fucking homework and did it dang well. What their arguments lack in theoretical ferocity, they make up for in part with solid research. But it is this almost complete lack of self-awareness and ambivalence in calling out the symptoms of capitalist accumulation that makes this book infuriating at times: The notions of certain labors like food service or retail as "less demanding" is such a load of bollocks; the insinuation that healthcare is the only major misstep in American capitalism is insulting (although I will give it to them that they actually nutted up and gave a decent argument in that final section of the book on healthcare's out-of-control domination of market costs); and the incredibly tone-deaf elements regarding race and labor relations that run throughout the book turned me off to otherwise cogent and meaningful research.
Had this book been written now rather than in 2019, my guess is that some of the arguments would have gone a bit more coherently, but I fear that the authors' ambivalence over capitalism's virtues would have still won out.2 people found this helpful