Nobel prize winner Angus Deaton has a lot to say about his chosen profession of economics and its deep failure to address the crisis of poverty and inequality, and it's all good stuff. In a lively NPR interview about his new book, Deaton explains that when he first came to the US during the Reagan era, he was shocked at the extent to which his colleagues did not care about inequality and rejected any government role in the economy.
One result of economists failing to take inequality seriously, Deaton argues, is the unfortunate trend of declining US life expectancy, primarily due to sharp increases in deaths from drug abuse and suicide. As Deaton and fellow economist Anne Case found, the increase in these so-called "deaths of despair" is directly tied to a lack of good jobs… which in turn follows from the kinds of neoliberal economic policies our country has pursued for the last few decades. Instead, Deaton calls on his fellow economists to think harder and advance policies that promote higher incomes for workers and provide support for communities, and asks us all to "abandon our sole fixation on money as a measure of human wellbeing."
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