Deaths of despair and the future of capitalism, by Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton, offers an extensively researched analysis of a divided America where some live long healthy lives while others die in middle age due to systemic flaws in today's capitalism. Case and Deaton argue that 'deaths of despair', caused by suicide, alcoholic liver disease and drug overdoses, are on the rise in white, non-Hispanic, middle-aged Americans without a university degree, and that these deaths will continue to grow unless the way that the US economy and society are structured is rethought. Why is there a focus on white deaths and not black deaths? The answer is that although black mortality rates remain consistently higher than white mortality rates, they 'fell in the first fifteen years of the twenty-first century while those of working class whites were rising' (p. 5).
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