Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism

“It’s a really important book. It pulls together the work that they’ve been doing for a number of years now, looking at the fact that, for the first time, life expectancy in the US is falling, and that decrease is falling very unequally. They have identified this phenomenon of white high-school dropouts who are falling victim to deaths of despair—suicides, opioids and other overdoses, and alcoholism. By bringing together all of this evidence, they have put a spotlight on the phenomenon.” Read more...

The Best Economics Books of 2020

Diane Coyle, Economist

“Angus Deaton won the Nobel Prize in economics and Anne Case is a very respected empirical economist. They’re looking at something that’s at the very core of Trumpism, the plight of white working-class Americans in the early 21st century. They’ve done a lot of digging into the data for rising suicide rates and deaths from drugs overdoes and alcohol abuse —the ‘deaths of despair’ of the title—and how and why those have gone up. It’s essentially a book about some of the human economic pain that lay behind Trump’s success. They lay the blame very strongly on the US healthcare system, particularly the way in which opioid prescription has turned into an epidemic of addiction.” Read more...

The Best Business Books of 2020: the Financial Times & McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award

Andrew Hill, Journalist