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

Categories:

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

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Awards & Accolades

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New York Times Bestseller

THE GREATEST SENTENCE EVER WRITTEN

by Walter Isaacson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 18, 2025

A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.

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Awards & Accolades

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49

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New York Times Bestseller

Words that made a nation.

Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.

A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.

Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025

ISBN: 9781982181314

Page Count: 80

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025

Categories:

CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | HISTORY | UNITED STATES

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

by Howard Zinn ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1979

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For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.