Trending Globally: Exploring “the land of inequality” with economist Sir Angus Deaton
On this episode, political economist and Watson professor Mark Blyth talks with Nobel Prize-winning economist Sir Angus Deaton about his new book, “Economics in America: An Immigrant Economist Explores the Land of Inequality.”
You may not know Angus Deaton by name, but you probably know a phrase he helped to make famous: “deaths of despair.” In 2015, Deaton and his wife and research partner Anne Case published a paper that revealed something startling: an increase in mortality rates among white middle-aged men and women in the 2000s and 2010s in the United States.
Deaton and Case attributed this to a confluence of factors, including economic stagnation, social isolation and the opioid crisis. In explaining this topic, they did something economists usually avoid doing: They told a sweeping but still complex and nuanced story about American society and economy in the 21st century.
In this conversation, Mark and Angus Deaton discuss Deaton’s new book, as well as its relationship to his work on deaths of despair. They also explore why the field of economics ignored the issue of inequality for so long, and why in the last decade that’s started to change.
You guys should speak with yannis varoufakis. He's always happy to do interviews and he's been talking about this for over a decade since grexit
“Licensing the plunder”, Brilliant!
I read the article paradoxes and puzzles great! Love the stuff about his father. On another note Dave Chappell was right
Too short ….
a bit miffed by the historical analysis presented here.. namely the idea that the libertarian view came from skewed perceptions, a period of relative equality and an american ideological belief in meritocracy. It reminded me of this other talk on the history of class in america (kzhead.info/sun/psOAoZape6l8o3k/bejne.html). Ideologues exist ofc, but to argue that the prominence achieved by the libertarian narrative was not due to its benefit to an already existing elite is, simplistic.