DEATHS OF DESPAIR AND THE FUTURE OF CAPITALISM - ANNE CASE & ANGUS DEATON

I’ve been following this “deaths of despair” trend for a few years now, I do think it speaks to something both chilling and deeply true about modern life, but this is the first full book I’ve read on the subject. Normally, I read about the subject in academic papers and magazine articles so I was excited to take a deep dive. Sadly, this could have been a long magazine piece and have been just as good, it’s flabby at 200+ pages. You probably know the basic stuff, Americans are undergoing multiple intersecting epidemics. Deaths from alcohol, drugs (specifically opioids) and suicide are very much on the raise, espeically for YT men. This book, and the dialogue around this phenomena as a whole, is, in my opinion, undercounting these despair deaths, since there are many, many people dying in suicidal accidents or eating themselves to death or otherwise dying in a way that is the result of profound despair but isn’t counted towards the total. I can overlook this, I don’t think there’s a way to get the “real” number. This book does a good job of highlighting how this is a YT man thing, how these deaths and this level of despair is par for the course for the rest of America since time immemorial. And here it’s split again, with most of these deaths of despair concentrated within the cohort of YT men w/o a college degree. There’s some interesting facts and history folded into this book. I didn’t know the first Indian to be knighted was Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy, who supplied most of the Opium England was selling in the Opium wars. I did not realize that the Civil War was the real big bang for widespread morphine use (IV drugs, morphine in particular were new at the time) and that ~100k soldiers came back from that war as addicts. I did not know that China used to be the major exception to the “men kill themselves more often than women'' but now they are on the same page as everyone else. I did not know about the suicide belt in the US stretching up the Mountain West, from AZ to AK. I think Case&Denton and I agree about the problem and the scope but, boy, does being a professional economist give you fucking brainworms when it comes to solutions. There’s basic stuff, like quoting skull-measurer Charles Murray without giving the context of his longstanding charlatanism, or talking about human relationships in purely economic terms and thus ending up with PUA bullshit, like when they talk about woman waiting to have sex being endangered by the more promiscuous who “undercut the bargaining power of those who would prefer to wait.” Is this really how they think people live their lives and think about themselves? It’s like a parody of an econ professor. Likewise, C&D have to do insane logical reaches and backbends to explain how Capitalism is the solution to all the immiserating Capitalism caused. This is why we get a long chapter about US healthcare and how awful it is and how it’s literally killing people and then long, confusing explanations of various voucher programs or regulatory tweaks that they think would make things better, slightly, over a long period of time. Maybe we just shouldn’t have a capitalist healthcare market? Maybe some very, very rich people need to be less rich? But C&D go out of their way to insist that this isn’t the case, we don’t need real change, we need minor tweaks, supervised by elite economists, of course. Wish is why we get sentences like, “Upward redistribution is not an inherent feature of Capitalism - it does not have to work that way” which might align with some “theory” they have but simply is not true historically. Likewise, they can’t really understand things like dignity or the use of the word “labor” or “work”. “Many Americans believe that work is essential if one is to fully participate in life, and if a UBI reduces people’s willingness to work and takes pressure off them to find gainful employment, it will diminish their life chances.” This sentence betrays this misunderstanding. The first use of “work” in that quote refers to meaningful labor or something like a life’s work. The second use refers to “work” the way most people use it, which is to say a gig or a job you have to work to make money to not starve. For some lucky people, like economics professors, these are the same things. Most of us don’t get that. And their inability or unwillingness to understand how these things are different, how so many people in this country and the world view their relationship with their work (i.e. it's something that they have to do or they’ll die), shows the widespread blindness of economics as a professional endeavor. It’s a math problem to them, it’s real life to us. Even here where the topic revolves around the fact that our economy, which is world-historically large, is so odious and terrible that people are killing themselves in unprecedented numbers, they can’t help but prescribe a bunch of minor tweaks then rant about how anything resembling socialism is a utopian pipedream for children. Total insanity, but a good example of how someone can write a whole book on a topic, can dedicate an entire professional career to studying a topic, and still totally misperceive it because of personal ideology. Again, good on the causes and effects, bad on solutions. 1979 slow suicides.