by Angus Deaton: ‘The war on poverty has become a war on the poor’ When Angus Deaton arrived in the US four decades ago, he imagined he had something to say about economic inequality and how to tackle it that Americans might want to hear. Instead, the great economic minds of the time told him to shut up … As Deaton describes in his unsparing new book, Economics in America: An Immigrant Economist Explores the Land of Inequality, he soon realized he had run headlong into the libertarian monetarists of the Chicago School of Economics, and they were driving US policy … Deaton was surprised to discover that American economists were largely uninterested in how their policies contributed to inequality and hardship. Deaton ticks off the list of Nobel prizes for
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Angus Deaton: ‘The war on poverty has become a war on the poor’
When Angus Deaton arrived in the US four decades ago, he imagined he had something to say about economic inequality and how to tackle it that Americans might want to hear. Instead, the great economic minds of the time told him to shut up …
As Deaton describes in his unsparing new book, Economics in America: An Immigrant Economist Explores the Land of Inequality, he soon realized he had run headlong into the libertarian monetarists of the Chicago School of Economics, and they were driving US policy …
Deaton was surprised to discover that American economists were largely uninterested in how their policies contributed to inequality and hardship.
Deaton ticks off the list of Nobel prizes for economics won by the Chicago school’s highly regarded minds, including Milton Friedman and George Stigler. He does not doubt what he calls their intellectual contributions.
“Yet it is hard to imagine a body of work more antithetical to worrying about inequality,” he writes.
“A friend of mine, a conservative economist and deeply religious man, is fond of saying that ‘fair’ is a four-letter word that should be expunged from economics.”