Released last year in the United States, Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism (Died of despair. The future of capitalism, PUF, 2021, 412 pages, 25 euros) summarizes and extends the work that Anne Case and Angus Deaton, economists at Princeton – today emeritus professors of this university – have been publishing for five years on the decline in life expectancy of ‘a very specific category of the American population: “non-Hispanic” whites with little education (less than a master’s degree) from the states of the Midwest and the Southeast of the United States.
Angus Deaton had previously studied the tremendous rise of Western Europe from the end of the 18th century.e century, brilliantly linking economic and demographic data. What he describes here with his co-author and colleague, Anne Case, is the reverse phenomenon, which necessarily questions the future of an economic system capable of generating such a regression after two centuries of progress in material life and life expectancy – because the authors do not hide their fear of seeing the phenomenon spread to other populations, in the United States and elsewhere.
They first describe, with supporting curves, the extent of the phenomenon – and it is catastrophic. We are talking about hundreds of thousands of deaths here. They then analyze the causes. They are the same ones that plunged much of the African American population into poverty, disease and drugs thirty years ago: the lack of stable and well-paid jobs.
After the black working class, the white working class is hit by competition from industries in low-wage countries, the emergence of information technology, the growing “uberization” of service jobs, the ultraliberal crushing of protections. regulatory and union. The income of white workers fell 13% between 1979 and 2017, when U.S. national income per capita rose 85%. This is the “reverse flow” described by the authors: in the United States, the income of the poorest has been redistributed to the richest.
Corruption of political power
The merit of this book is not to limit itself to these cold statistics, but to show how this “poverty effect” fundamentally affects the social, emotional, psychological life of its victims, deprived of the means to protect themselves from the vagaries of life. . Hence the explosion in rates of suicide, death from alcoholism and overdose of drugs and opiates …
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