Paying the Price

The economics profession is starting to wake up to the terrible price of obsession with distribution-blind “efficiency”:

The AEA [American Economic Association] meetings took place against the backdrop of the publication of Anne Case and Angus Deaton’s remarkable and poignant book Deaths of Despair, which was presented during a special panel. Case and Deaton’s research shows how a particular set of economic ideas privileging the “free market,” along with an obsession with material indicators such as aggregate productivity and GDP, have fueled an epidemic of suicide, drug overdose, and alcoholism among America’s working class. Capitalism is no longer delivering, and economics is, at the very least, complicit.

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