Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism, reviewed

Review of Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism by  Anne Case and Nobel Prize winner Angus Deaton, shortlisted for the 2020 Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award

Buy the Book: Princeton University Press

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 more than 150,000 American lives each year. 

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(link is external)” 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.

Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism, reviewed

After decades and decades of growth in life expectancy, even including the 1940s and the period of the first World War and the Spanish Flu, the United States has now seen three consecutive years of a fall in life expectancy. Even more strikingly, the cost of US health care has risen even as these life expectancy rates have fallen. The US also lags behind all other leading Western nations in terms of life expectancy and the amount spent per capita. To put it plainly almost everywhere else people are living for longer on less money spent on them.

Add into this a rising death rate due to drugs, opiates, suicide, and other non natural causes of deaths, and it is not unfair to conclude that even before the current horror show that is their management of covid-19, the US has some serious problems to remedy.

I just want everyone in this country to have the same healthcare I receive as a member of Congress.

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) October 5, 2020

This book effectively dives into the issues faced, including the rise of Sheriff of Nottingham redistribution of wealth, ie upwards, enabling the rich to get richer, rather than equitably sharing it out. It is truly shocking at times how dire the situation is over there, except that it is also pretty clear what a mess the country is in by the current division and upheaval currently playing out in the current electoral cycle. Hopefully a book as well researched and incisive as this can help to point the US in the right direction, at the same time, due to all the entrenched interests it is also a massive challenge too.

This is a tragic, but important book, and hopefully it helps to nudge the needle towards where badly needed social reforms need to go. Though it may take a change of government from the one that is so set on removing Obama care rather than expanding it to cover as much of the population as possible. Until those type of changes take place it is hard to see the negative trends outlined by these authors ceasing.

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