Joseph Stiglitz- Inequality is now killing middle America
This week, Angus Deaton will receive the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics “for his analysis of consumption, poverty, and welfare.” Deservedly so. Indeed, soon after the award was announced in October, Deaton published some startling work with Ann Case in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences – research that is at least as newsworthy as the Nobel ceremony.
Analysing a vast amount of data about health and deaths among Americans, Case and Deaton showed declining life expectancy and health for middle-aged white Americans, especially those with a high school education or less. Among the causes were suicide, drugs, and alcoholism.
America prides itself on being one of the world’s most prosperous countries, and can boast that in every recent year except one (2009) per capita GDP has increased. And a sign of prosperity is supposed to be good health and longevity. But, while the US spends more money per capita on medical care than almost any other country (and more as a percentage of GDP), it is far from topping the world in life expectancy. France, for example, spends less than 12% of its GDP on medical care, compared to 17% in the US. Yet Americans can expect to live three full years less than the French.
For years, many Americans explained away this gap. The US is a more heterogeneous society, they argued, and the gap supposedly reflected the huge difference in average life expectancy between African Americans and white Americans.
more
http://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/dec/08/inequality-is-now-killing-middle-america-joseph-stiglitz
= new reply since forum marked as read
is always right about everything. But that was the PLAN all alongl this is a FEATURE, not a BUG. From the point of view of society's rulers, no happier result could be coming about. All they want is their fair share and that means every last dime. Letting people die off from lack of health care (and food, which will be next) is much cheaper than building extermination/concentration camps, thus allowing more money to remain in the pockets of the wealth. Self-liquidating sheeple are the oligarchs' wildest dreams come true. And it provides a source of convenient victim-blaming propaganda to use on the remaining sheeple, to boot. A win-win for the oligarchy! Yay capitalism!
