For their February 13th, 2025 issue, IPK Fellow Caitlin Zaloom penned a piece for The New York Review titled “Too Close for Comfort” Read the excerpt below, then click for the full article.

The need for social health to be measured and included in decision-making has grown all the more clear in the twenty-first century. When Mondale made his proposal, the conditions of life for Americans were improving slowly but steadily, and lifespans were growing longer. But around 2000 there were some signs that progress was stalling, especially among certain groups. Since then, more and more white middle-aged Americans, especially those without a four-year college degree, have been dying from suicide or substance-related causes—more than 150,000 in 2017 alone, as the economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton argue in their 2020 book Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism. They also provide a clear-eyed explanation: the “economy has shifted away from serving ordinary people and toward serving businesses, their managers, and their owners.”

In his new book, Economics in America: An Immigrant Economist Explores the Land of Inequality, Deaton, a Nobel winner and former president of the American Economics Association, criticizes the intellectual underpinnings of this arrangement. He contends that US economists, often inspired by the market veneration of the University of Chicago’s economics department, have rarely focused on the chasms that divide Americans. In this thinking, he writes, the efficiency of policies “is the only thing that counts,” and inequality is “natural.” As he notes, such arguments are frequently made by those economists who have enjoyed significant power in politics, such as Glen Hubbard, a former CEA chair under George W. Bush who believed that health care should function as a consumer market and “give people a way to profit financially” from staying well; if they cannot avoid illness altogether, the sick should be rewarded for choosing inexpensive doctors and cheap tests. In Deaton’s view, Hubbard’s favored policies—and the now-familiar health care savings accounts that Bush signed into law—“penalized” the ill “for their own poor health.”

Read the full article here.

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