the problem ---------- same problem as John Howard ---------- 40 years too late
The 78-year-old professor says he's recently been changing his mind about views he's long held and it's a "discomfiting process."
In early 2020, Professor Deaton published Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism, with co-author Anne Case, which topped a number of best-seller lists.
It explained how the lives of America's blue-collar workers have been destroyed during the past few decades.
It catalogued how "deaths of despair" from suicide, drug overdose, and alcoholic liver disease have risen dramatically in the US since the mid-1990s, to the point where they're claiming "hundreds of thousands of lives" every year.
It linked the crisis to the weakening power of workers, the growth in corporate power, and the "rapacious health-care sector" that is redistributing working-class wages into the pockets of the wealthy.
"We live in a mirror image of a Robin Hood society, one in which resources are indeed being redistributed, not downward, from rich to poor, as Robin Hood was reputed to do, but upward, from poor to rich," Case and Deaton argued.
He wonders if the economics profession needs to start thinking about pre-distribution — the mechanisms that determine the distribution of income in the market itself, before taxes and transfers — and less about redistribution.
"We need rules and policies that prevent the distress in the first place, all of which takes economists into uncomfortable territory: promoting unions, placed-based policies, immigration control, job preservation, industrial policy, and the like," he argues.
