US-British economist Angus Deaton speaks at a press conference after winning the Nobel Prize for Economics at Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey, on October 12, 2015.
JEWEL SAMAD/AFP via Getty Images
In October 2015, Princeton economist Angus Deaton got an early-morning call from Sweden that most scholars can only dream of. Groggy and bleary-eyed, Deaton learned that he had won the Nobel Prize in economics “for his analysis of consumption, poverty, and welfare.”
For most award winners, the storm of media coverage following the Nobel announcement is unlike anything they’ll ever experience. But, Deaton writes in a new book, the publicity about his award was quickly overshadowed “by an order of magnitude” when he published an academic paper a few weeks after his Nobel win.
The paper, which he co-authored with his wife, Anne Case, another distinguished economist at Princeton, was titled “Rising morbidity and mortality in midlife among white non-Hispanic Americans in the 21st century.” Case and Deaton documented an astonishing fact: unlike virtually every other demographic group in America (and other rich countries), the death rate of white, middle-aged Americans was rising instead of falling. And that this macabre trend was being driven largely by a rise in what they would call “deaths of despair” — from suicides, drug overdoses, and alcohol abuse — especially in the population without a college degree.
Case and Deaton’s findings hit American politics like an atomic bomb. When they both went to the White House as part of the traditional post-Nobel-award meet-and-greet with the president, President Obama immediately brought up the paper. “Deaths of despair” became a constant talking point in…
Read the full article here
Leave a Reply