Angus Deaton

We examine mortality differences between Americans adults with and without a four-year college degree over the period 1992 to 2021. Mortality patterns, in aggregate and across groups, can provide evidence on how well society is functioning, information that goes beyond aggregate measures of material wellbeing. From 1992 to 2010, both educational groups saw falling mortality, but with greater improvements for the more educated; from 2010 to 2019, mortality continued to fall for those with a BA while rising for those without; during the COVID pandemic, mortality rose for both groups, but markedly more rapidly for the less educated. In consequence, the mortality gap between the two groups expanded in all three periods, leading to an 8.5-year difference in adult life expectancy by the end of 2021. There have been dramatic changes in patterns of mortality since 1992, but gaps rose consistently in each of thirteen broad classifications of cause of death. We document rising gaps in other wellbeing-relevant measures, background factors to the rising gap in mortality, including morbidity, social isolation, marriage, family income, and wealth.

Names: Deaton, Angus, author. Title: Economics in America: an immigrant economist explores the land of inequality/Angus Deaton. Description: Princeton: Princeton University Press,[2023]| Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023011502 (print)| LCCN 2023011503 (ebook)| ISBN 9780691247625 (hardback)| ISBN 9780691247854 (ebook)

In March 2020, the International Comparison Project published its latest results, for the calendar year 2017. This round presents common‐unit or purchasing‐power‐parity data for 176 countries on Gross Domestic Product and its components. We review a number of important issues, what is new, what is not new, and what the new data can and cannot do. Of great importance is the lack of news, that the results are broadly in line with earlier results from 2011. We consider the relationship between national accounts measures and health, particularly in light of the COVID‐19 epidemic which may reduce global inequality, even as it increases inequality within countries. We emphasize things that GDP cannot do, some familiar—like its silence on distribution—and some less familiar—including its increasing detachment from national material well‐being in a globalized world where international transfers of capital and …

To ensure the accuracy of self-reported data, it is important to reduce potential sources of bias such as the unwanted influence of prior questions on subsequent questions, the so-called item context effect. This article attempts to replicate the finding that evaluative subjective well-being was affected by a preceding item, a question about the political atmosphere in the country; it also examines manipulations that could mitigate the impact of the context-inducing item on well-being. Study 1 used a sample of 4,500 participants recruited from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk; it examined the effect of three manipulations based on adding buffer questions or adding text to reorient participants’ attention. A context effect was found, and one manipulation mitigated the context effect. Study 2 used a nationally representative sample (n = 906); it only replicated the context effect. These results reaffirm the importance of carefully …

Time-use data show that females spend much more time on unpaid household duties compared to men. The situation worsened during the COVID-19 pandemic due to higher job loss among women and more time spent with children due to school closures. This gender injustice has devastating health consequences for women, and, somewhat surprisingly, to future generations of Ukrainians of both genders. Ukraine should start regularly collecting time-use data right after the victory to guide social policies if we are serious about achieving gender and health equity in the European family of free and prosperous nations.

On May 13, 2021, CCG hosted a dialogue between Huiyao Wang, CCG President; David Blair, CCG Vice President and Senior Economist; Anne Case, Alexander Stewart 1886 Professor of Economics and Public Affairs, Emeritus at Princeton University; and Angus Deaton, Senior Scholar, Princeton School of Public and International Affairs.

Deaths of despair, morbidity, and emotional distress continue to rise in the United States, largely borne by those without a college degree—the majority of American adults—for many of whom the economy and society are no longer delivering. Concurrently, all-cause mortality in the United States is diverging by education in a way not seen in other rich countries. We review the rising prevalence of pain, despair, and suicide among those without a bachelor's degree. Pain and despair created a baseline demand for opioids, but the escalation of addiction came from pharma and its political enablers. We examine the politics of despair, or how less-educated people have abandoned and been abandoned by the Democratic Party. Whereas healthier states once voted Republican in presidential elections, now the less-healthy states do. We review deaths during COVID-19, finding that mortality in 2020 maintained or …

A 4-y college degree is increasingly the key to good jobs and, ultimately, to good lives in an ever-more meritocratic and unequal society. The bachelor’s degree (BA) is increasingly dividing Americans; the one-third with a BA or more live longer and more prosperous lives, while the two-thirds without face rising mortality and declining prospects. We construct a time series, from 1990 to 2018, of a summary of each year’s mortality rates and expected years lived from 25 to 75 at the fixed mortality rates of that year. Our measure excludes those over 75 who have done relatively well over the last three decades and focuses on the years when deaths rose rapidly through drug overdoses, suicides, and alcoholic liver disease and when the decline in mortality from cardiovascular disease slowed and reversed. The BA/no-BA gap in our measure widened steadily from 1990 to 2018. Beyond 2010, as those with a BA continued …

L’espérance de vie aux États-Unis a récemment baissé: du jamais-vu en Occident depuis 1918. Durant les deux dernières décennies, les morts par suicide ou dues à la consommation de drogue ou l’alcoolisme n’ont cessé d’augmenter. Anne Case et Angus Deaton ont été les premiers a tiré la sonnette d’alarme face à ce phénomène qui affecte la classe ouvrière blanche. Ils expliquent comment le système économique et sociale ruine les espoirs de ces Américains, autrefois portés par l’«American Dream» qui leur promettait réussite et prospérité. Ce livre dresse le portrait d’une Amérique désormais exclusivement préoccupée de l’enrichissement toujours plus grand des riches, qui abandonne à leur sort les non-diplômés, condamnés à mourir de souffrance et de désespoir. La fin d’un rêve à laquelle ont conduit les excès du capitalisme. Des pistes aussi pour enrayer cette spirale mortifère. Publication originale: Princeton University Press, 2020 Traduit de l’anglais par Laurent Bury.

There is a widespread belief that the COVID-19 pandemic has increased global income inequality, reducing per capita incomes by more in poor countries than in rich. This supposition is reasonable but false. Rich countries have experienced more deaths per head than have poor countries; their better health systems, higher incomes, more capable governments and better preparedness notwithstanding. The US did worse than some rich countries, but better than several others. Countries with more deaths saw larger declines in income. There was thus not only no trade-off between lives and income; fewer deaths meant more income. As a result, per capita incomes fell by more in higher-income countries. Country by country, international income inequality decreased. When countries are weighted by population, international income inequality increased, more in line with the original intuition. This was largely because Indian incomes fell, and because the disequalizing effect of declining Indian incomes was not offset by rising incomes in China, which is no longer a globally poor country. That these findings are a result of the pandemic is supported by comparing global inequality using IMF forecasts in October 2019 and October 2020.

It is now established that mortality and excess mortality from COVID-19 differed across racial and ethnic groups in 2020. Less is known about educational differences in mortality during the pandemic. We examine mortality rates by BA status within sex, age, and race/ethnic groups comparing 2020 with 2019. Mortality rates have increasingly differed by BA status in the US in recent years and there are good reasons to expect the gap to have widened further during the pandemic. Using publicly available provisional data from the National Center for Health Statistics we find that mortality rates increased in 2020 over 2019 for those with and without a BA, irrespective of age, sex, or race/ethnicity. Although mortality rates increased by more for those without a BA, the ratio of mortality rates for those with and without a BA changed surprisingly little from 2019 to 2020. The BA was protective against mortality prior to the pandemic, and it was equally protective during the pandemic. Among 60 groups (sex by race/ethnicity by age) that are available in the data, the ratio of mortality rates of those without a BA to those with a BA fell for more than half of the groups. Our results suggest that differences in the risk of infection were less important in structuring mortality by education than differences in the risk of death conditional on infection.

In The Great Escape, published in 2013, one of us told a positive story about human progress over the last two hundred and fifty years. The story there was one of previously unimaginable material progress, a decline in poverty and deprivation, and extensions in the length of human life. The generation and application of useful knowledge made this progress possible. A star of the show was capitalism, which freed millions from dire poverty, supported by the positive forces of globalization. Democracy spread around the planet, allowing more and more people to participate in shaping their communities and societies. This book is much less upbeat. It documents despair and death, it critiques aspects of capitalism, and it questions how globalization and technical change are working in America today. Yet we remain optimistic. We believe in capitalism, and we continue to believe that globalization and technical change …

American mortality rates have diverged in recent years between those with and without a four-year college degree, and there are many reasons to expect the education-mortality gradient to have steepened during the pandemic. Those without a BA are more likely to work in frontline occupations, to rely on public transportation, and to live in crowded quarters, all of which are associated with an increase in infection risk, a risk that was zero prior to the pandemic. We use publicly available data from the National Center for Health Statistics on deaths by age, sex, education and race/ethnicity to assess the protective effect of a BA in 2020 compared to 2019. While the BA was strongly protective during 2020, the ratio of mortality rates between those with and without a degree was little changed relative to pre-pandemic years. Among 60 groups (gender by race/ethnicity by age) that are available in the data, the relative risk reduction associated with a BA fell for more than half the groups between 2019 and 2020, and increased by more than 5 percentage points for only five groups. Our main finding is not that the BA was protective against death in 2020, which has long been the case, but that the protective effect was little different than in 2019 and earlier years, in spite of the change in the pattern of risk by occupation and income. The virus maintained the mortality-education gradient that existed pre-pandemic, at least through the end of 2020. Our results suggest that changes in the risk of infection were less important in structuring mortality than changes in the risk of death conditional on infection.

En plus des centaines de milliers de décès qu’elle a provoqués directement, la Covid-19 aggrave les déséquilibres économiques qui minent la vie et la subsistance des Américains les plus défavorisés. La pandémie finira bien par être maîtrisée. Mais qui peut prédire la fin de l’épidémie de désespoir? e capitalisme américain ne bénéficie qu’à une minorité d’Américains. Les élites éduquées vivent une existence longue et prospère. Les Américains les moins instruits–deux tiers de la population–meurent plus jeunes; ils peinent toute leur vie sur le plan physique, économique et social. L’augmentation récente de la mortalité ne concerne, presque exclusivement, que ceux qui n’ont pas fait d’études supérieures. Ce niveau de qualification divise également les individus en matière d’emploi, de rémunération, de morbidité et d’estime sociale–autant de clés d’une vie heureuse.La pandémie opère de la même manière …

Since the mid-1990s, the United States has been suffering from an epidemic of “deaths of despair”—a term we coined in 2015 to describe fatalities caused by drug overdose, alcoholic liver disease, or suicide. The inexorable increase in these deaths, together with a slowdown and reversal in the long-standing reduction in deaths from heart disease, led to an astonishing development: life expectancy at birth for Americans declined for three consecutive years, from 2015 through 2017, something that had not happened since the influenza pandemic at the end of World War I. In the twentieth century, the United States led the way in reducing mortality rates and raising life expectancy. Many important health improvements—such as the decline in mortality from heart disease as a result of reductions in smoking and the increased use of antihypertensives and the decrease in infant mortality rates because of the development …

There is an expectation that, on average, pain will increase with age, through accumulated injury, physical wear and tear, and an increasing burden of disease. Consistent with that expectation, pain rises with age into old age in other wealthy countries. However, in America today, the elderly report less pain than those in midlife. This is the mystery of American pain. Using multiple datasets and definitions of pain, we show today’s midlife Americans have had more pain throughout adulthood than did today’s elderly. Disaggregating the cross-section of ages by year of birth and completion of a bachelor’s degree, we find, for those with less education, that each successive birth cohort has a higher prevalence of pain at each age—a result not found for those with a bachelor’s degree. Thus, the gap in pain between the more and less educated has widened in each successive birth cohort. The increase seen across birth …

The not so good news comes from the list of the world’s richest countries, as measured by per capita GDP: Luxembourg, Qatar, Singapore, Ireland, Bermuda, Cayman Islands, Switzerland, UAE, Norway, Brunei, the US and Hong Kong. Whatever this list tells us, it is hardly an exact list of countries where people enjoy the world’s highest material living standards.Ireland is a good example. Attracted by low corporation tax rates, several large multinationals relocated their intellectual property assets to Ireland, so that income generated from that property now contributes to Irish GDP. In 2015, such transfers caused Irish GDP to grow by 26 per cent in one year.

The Annual Review of Resource Economics presents Professor Sir Angus Deaton in conversation with economist Dr. Gordon Rausser. Dr. Deaton is Senior Scholar and the Dwight D. Eisenhower Professor of Economics and International Affairs Emeritus at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and Department of Economics at Princeton University and Presidential Professor of Economics at University of Southern California. An applied economist, Deaton has made seminal contributions to the econometrics and estimation of demand systems, analysis of consumer behavior, understanding of commodity prices, the economics of health, nutrition and poverty, and most recently, deaths of despair and the future of capitalism, focusing on the United States. His work to improve welfare estimation in developing countries contributed to upgrading data collection efforts at the World Bank and other …

The International Comparison Program (ICP) has become not only the largest international statistical program in the world, but also the most complex. In the years leading up to 2005, six rounds of the ICP were conducted, each with more countries and each with improved methodology. This volume is a comprehensive review of the statistical theory and methods underlying the estimation of purchasing power parities (PPPs) and real expenditures, the choices made for the 2005 ICP round, and the lessons learned that led to improvements in the 2011 ICP. Disclosing the theory, concepts, and methods underlying estimates enhances the transparency of the 2011 ICP process. This book describes the challenges faced by the 2005 round of the ICP, the new theories and methods developed to address those problems, and the lessons learned that can be applied to future rounds of the ICP. The book refers to six …

Randomized controlled trials have been used in economics for 50 years, and intensively in economic development for more than 20. There has been a great deal of useful work, but RCTs have no unique advantages or disadvantages over other empirical methods in economics. They do not simplify inference, nor can an RCT establish causality. Many of the difficulties were recognized and explored in economics 30 years ago, but are sometimes forgotten. I review some of the most relevant issues here. The most troubling questions concern ethics, especially when very poor people are experimented on. Finding out what works, even if such a thing is possible, is in itself a deeply inadequate basis for policy

This conversation between Nobel Laureates Amartya Sen and Angus Deaton, moderated by Annual Review of Economics Editorial Committee Member Tim Besley, focuses on bringing ethical issues into economics, and the implications that this has for the practice and teaching of economics. A video of this interview is available online at https://www.annualreviews.org/r/EconMoralCompass.

Por primera vez desde la primera guerra mundial, en Estados Unidos la esperanza de vida ha disminuido durante tres años consecutivos. Es algo que no ha pasado recientemente en ningún otro país rico. En las dos últimas décadas, las muertes por desesperación debidas a sobredosis de droga, suicidios o enfermedades relacionadas con el alcohol han aumentado de manera drástica entre los trabajadores blancos y, en la actualidad, cada año son la causa de cientos de miles de fallecimientos en Estados Unidos.¿ Por qué ha sucedido esto en el país más rico y poderoso del mundo?¿ Qué fuerzas económicas y sociales han hecho que la clase trabajadora blanca ya no pueda acceder a los empleos buenos y prosperar, y recurra a los opioides para calmar el dolor y la desesperación?¿ Por qué cada vez más no contar con un título universitario supone estar condenado a una vida insatisfecha? En este libro demoledor, Angus Deaton, ganador del Premio Nobel, y Anne Case retratan el declive del sueño americano para muchos trabajadores blancos que ven cómo sus familias se rompen y sus esperanzas se frustran. Mientras las élites universitarias y profesionales prosperan y alcanzan unas cotas de riqueza sin precedentes, una parte importante de la población es testigo de cómo el capitalismo le deja de lado y su vida es cada vez más corta.