DEATHS OF DESPAIR AND THE FUTURE OF CAPITALISM

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DEATHS OF DESPAIR AND THE FUTURE OF CAPITALISM

Name: DEATHS OF DESPAIR AND THE FUTURE OF CAPITALISM
Author: Anne Case
ISBN: 978-0-691-19078-5

by Anne Case & Angus Deaton ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020

An alarm every bit as urgent as The Jungle and a book that demands immediate attention.

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Noted Princeton economists Case and Deaton, a winner of the Nobel Prize, examine the effects of income and educational inequality on public health. As Beth Macy’s Dopesick carefully chronicled, there is a disease afoot in the land, born of economic anxiety, manifested in addiction and self-destruction. Building on a Brookings Institution paper of 2017, Case and Deaton give a name to this epidemic. In 1900, they write, the leading causes of death were infectious diseases such as tuberculosis and cholera. Writing before the unexpected onset of COVID-19, the authors mark the current leading causes as heart disease and cancer. However, especially among the poor and those without a four-year college degree, “the risk of dying in midlife from suicide, accidental drug overdose, or alcoholic liver disease” is markedly higher than in better-educated and more affluent cohorts. Thus the “deaths of despair” of the title, self-inflicted and generationally bound—for, as the authors note with grimly precise data, the chance of such a person’s dying at age 45 in 1960 were half again as high as in 1950, and in 1970 more than twice as high as in 1960. “The later you were born,” they conclude, “the higher your risk of dying a death of despair at any given age.” The epidemic of deaths of young people today to gunshot, cirrhosis, fentanyl and opioid overdosing, and such causes is sober testimonial to the authors’ mathematical reasoning. Non–college educated whites born in 1980, the authors write, are four times more likely to commit suicide as their college-educated white cohorts. Interestingly, the epidemic is not affecting other ethnicities in nearly the same numbers. What has affected nearly every group, however, is another manifestation of despair: obesity, which yields pain and often self-medication, especially among “those who are not at the top.” An alarm every bit as urgent as The Jungle and a book that demands immediate attention.

Pub Date: March 17, 2020

ISBN: 978-0-691-19078-5

Page Count: 312

Publisher: Princeton Univ.

Review Posted Online: April 5, 2020

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CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | POLITICS | ECONOMICS | GENERAL BUSINESS

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ABUNDANCE

by Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 18, 2025

Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.

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Helping liberals get out of their own way.

Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.

Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.

Pub Date: March 18, 2025

ISBN: 9781668023488

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Avid Reader Press

Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025

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CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | BUSINESS | U.S. GOVERNMENT

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ONE DAY, EVERYONE WILL HAVE ALWAYS BEEN AGAINST THIS

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ONE DAY, EVERYONE WILL HAVE ALWAYS BEEN AGAINST THIS

by Omar El Akkad ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 25, 2025

A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.

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An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.

“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”

A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.