Excerpts: “Among America’s 350 largest firms, average CEO earnings in 2018 was $17.2 million, 278 times average earnings. In 1965 the ratio was only 20 to 1” (p. 52).
“When meritocracies are unequal, as is the case in the US today, with vast rewards for successfully identified merit–passing exams, promotions, making partner, speculating successfully, or getting elected–the rewards are paid not only for ability and virtue but also for cheating and for abandoning long-held ethical constraints that are seen as impediments to success” (p. 55).
“With globalization, changing technology, rising healthcare costs of employees, and the shift from manufacturing to services, firms shed less educated labor, first blacks and then less educated whites” (p. 69).
“It is impossible to understand drug use without understanding the environments in which users live, and how those environments are treating them and have treated them in the past” (p. 123).
“At a time when the American military was bombing the opium supply in Helmand province in Afghanistan, Johnson & Johnson was legally growing the raw material for the nation’s opioid supply in Tasmania” (p. 125).
“After the crash, when so many ordinary people lost so much, including their jobs and their homes, the bankers continued to be rewarded and went unpunished, and politicians continued to protect them. Capitalism began to look more like a racket for redistributing upward than an engine of general prosperity” (p. 147).
“As Bertrand Russell once noted, among the strongest advocates that the poor should work more are the idle rich, who have never done any” (p. 163).
“The gulf between the less and the more educated has widened, not only in the labor market but also in marriage, in child rearing, in religion, in social activities, and in participation in the community” (p. 167).
“Doctors numbers are held down by limiting the number of places in medical schools, at the behest of doctors’ groups and Congress, and by making it difficult for foreign doctors to practice in the US” (p. 197).
“The American experience needs an American explanation. The difficulties of globalization and automation are real enough, and the decline of the working class in America would not have happened without them, but it is American institutions–such a healthcare–and the way that they shaped America’s response to the challenges that caused the problems, not the challenges themselves” (p. 222-223).
“The exorbitant price of health insurance has caused firms to shed workers; this is not a natural disaster but rather one based on rent-seeking, politically protected profiteering, and weak enforcement of antitrust in the healthcare sector” (p. 229).
“It is not possible for an unregulated market to provide a socially acceptable degree of coverage; as Kenneth Arrow noted long ago, ‘The laissez-faire solution for medicine is intolerable.’ Some amount of compulsion is required, as are subsidies for those who cannot pay. Reforms that deny those facts are doomed” (p. 248).
“The fundamental problem is unfairness, that the great wealth at the top is seen as ill-gotten in a system that gives no chance to many” (p. 261).
Case, Anne and Deaton, Angus (2020). Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism. Princeton University Press, New Jersey.