Economics in America
An Immigrant Economist Explores the Land of Inequality
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
From the Nobel Prize–winning economist and New York Times bestselling coauthor of Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism, candid reflections on the economist’s craft
When economist Angus Deaton immigrated to the United States from Britain in the early 1980s, he was awed by America’s strengths and shocked by the extraordinary gaps he witnessed between people. Economics in America explains in clear terms how the field of economics addresses the most pressing issues of our time—from poverty, retirement, and the minimum wage to the ravages of the nation’s uniquely disastrous health care system—and narrates Deaton’s account of his experiences as a naturalized US citizen and academic economist.
Deaton is witty and pulls no punches. In this incisive, candid, and funny book, he describes the everyday lives of working economists, recounting the triumphs as well as the disasters, and tells the inside story of the Nobel Prize in economics and the journey that led him to Stockholm to receive one. He discusses the ongoing tensions between economics and politics—and the extent to which economics has any content beyond the political prejudices of economists—and reflects on whether economists bear at least some responsibility for the growing despair and rising populism in America.
Blending rare personal insights with illuminating perspectives on the social challenges that confront us today, Deaton offers a disarmingly frank critique of his own profession while shining a light on his adopted country’s policy accomplishments and failures.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Nobel Prize–winning British economist Deaton (The Great Escape) lambastes American economic injustice in these feisty missives. In "Adventures in American Healthcare," he decries the country's medical system as expensive, wasteful, cruelly exclusionary of people without insurance, and difficult to understand (he found it almost impossible to determine how much his hip replacement would cost because of opaque hospital pricing and byzantine insurance rules). Elsewhere, Deaton criticizes the Chicago school of market-oriented economists for obsessing over efficiency while neglecting inequality and discusses research disproving conservative economists' contention that minimum wage increases raise unemployment. However, he often departs from liberal orthodoxy, arguing, for example, that foreign aid to poor nations is a waste of money that weakens their governments and that cigarette taxes are a form of paternalism that hurts people who have a right to enjoy a smoke. Deaton's prose is lucid and tartly down-to-earth (the U.S. government works "to help rich predators make ordinary people poorer," he writes), and he makes a convincing case that "economics should be about understanding the reasons for and doing away with the sordidness and joylessness that come with poverty and deprivation." The result is a refreshing take on America's economic discontents.
