America’s Deaths of Despair

 

Anne Case and Angus Deaton (2020), Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism, Princeton University Press, New Jersey, pp. 312

This is perhaps the most important book to come out last year that argues trenchantly about what inequality can do to a society. Princeton economists and real-life spouses Anne Case and Angus Deaton (who also happens to have won the Nobel Prize in Economics) examine the reasons for the recently observed deaths of despair among white Americans. In doing so, they open the black box of what globalization, deindustrialization, and persistent unemployment and low-quality employment have pushed an erstwhile working-class group into poverty and precarity in a span of a few decades. Divided into four parts, the authors dissect the problem, bring evidence-based arguments and look for possible institutional solutions. As the title suggest, they are optimistic enough to believe that there is a future for capitalism despite its epic tragedies!

The authors begin with the question, why the ‘deaths of despair’? The poignantly named phenomenon refers to the recently observed deaths among the erstwhile white working-class Americans resulting from suicide, alcohol and drug abuse. These deaths of despair have risen to hundreds of thousands in recent years making a disturbing mark in large-scale demographic data, indicating systemic malaise and reversing the great public health strides in life expectancy since 1918. In exploring these deaths, the authors unearth the dismantling of society that systemic failures of institutions and politics resulted in after the golden decades immediately succeeding World War II. The book also critiques how the American public health system particularly failed its people and often actively colluded in their descent into despair and demise.

The story of the American white working-class despair is set amidst the indifference of the rest of the world as it shifted gear to a new ideology and left entire communities bereft of well-paying jobs, a place in society, and meaning in their lives. The best thing about this book is how data has been used to make claims and arguments. The writers bring disaggregated panel data from public health and economics to compare white middle-class Americans with other demographic groups such as Hispanics and African Americans to demonstrate how they slipped and fell as the discourse around progress and prosperity changed rapidly since the 1970s.

Beyond the immediate issue of the white-working class crisis, this book gives space to the race question in the United States, the equation between white privilege of the working class and minority politics, the divide on the immigration issue and partly explains the resurgence of populist politics. Unlike some data-driven scholarly works, this book is written with a heart. The pain is palpable and the poignancy is evident even as evidence is marshalled to show what went wrong with a surgical precision. Read the work with care and debate vigorously the arguments it provokes.

Hard Choices

 

What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets (2013), Michael J Sandel, Penguin  UK, pp 256

Renowned political philosopher, public intellectual, professor of Politics at Harvard University and the author of the best-selling book ‘Justice’, Michael Sandel asks some of the most important questions facing the market driven world in which we live in today in his book ‘What money can’t buy’. Sandel points out with provocative illustrations and examples, both from the developed and developing countries, the way in which market norms like sales and profit have crowded out the non-market norms and values that humans have cherished in their social lives for centuries. In a world where everything is up for purchase and consumption, where do values come in and how much ethics is practically viable? More importantly, what is the tipping point beyond which markets should not be allowed to invade society? 

Sandel sets the tone of the debate with patiently collected examples and illustrations from various fields and cultures. From paying for wombs in surrogacy to paying someone to stand in the queue, the cases range from the commonplace to the unacceptable where market values have been literally taken too far. Ideas like ‘stranger originated insurance’ where big corporations make a windfall by taking insurance on its employees to asking late arriving parents at an Israeli day care to pay up a fine, lucidly bring out the point where a fine turns into a fee and what is morally reprehensible becomes the norm. Thus, Sandel puts forth the idea that economics as a discipline has fostered a culture of monetary incentives and has simultaneously taken away stronger non-monetary incentives for inducing morally upright behaviour. This subtle corruption that has crept into our social psyche has far reaching consequences for the evolution of social behaviour and our collective conscience in determining cultural norms.

The author is not against market per se. Money is an effective way of allocating goods and services and in today’s world gripped by the economist’s way of thinking, even an acceptable way to do so. That Governments think of branding their country new, Sandel says, is a sign of times. Commercialisation, commodification and privatisation have emerged as the three powerful sources of coercion and corruption. Ultimately, the way in which a product is sold affects the moral value of the product itself. In a world aspiring to be more democratic and equal, we owe others a minimum level of equal chances and dignity that an absolute focus on wealth potential is likely to destroy. It is in our interest to resist this pernicious tendency and prevent ourselves from transforming from a market economy to a market society.

(This review was published in the July issue of The CSR Analyst, Mumbai)