Free Republic

Angus Deaton is doing some rethinking. Specifically, the 78-year-old Nobel Memorial Prize-winning economist is re-examining his views on major topics like unions, immigration, and global trade. It's a big statement from someone who's spent over 50 years studying inequality, welfare, poverty, and "deaths of despair," and it comes as he sees economics in disarray. His most recent book, "Economics in America: An Immigrant Economist Explores the Land of Inequality," came out in 2023 — it catalogs, among other topics, the role of economists in the US and tackles some of the problems he's identified. When I asked Deaton what prompted...

The U.S. death rate has been falling for decades, but researchers have detected one group in which the rates have been steadily ticking up - middle-aged white people. Suicides and deaths from drug overdose and alcohol abuse are being blamed. Deaths rates for other races have continued to fall, as they have for whites 65 and older. But death rates for whites 35 to 44 have been level recently, they’re beginning to turn up for whites 55 to 64, and - most strikingly - death rates for whites ages 45 to 54 have risen by half a percent per year...

Good troops story, even if it is from the New York Slimes. Life at the front: GIs savor the good life By Kirk Semple The New York Times SATURDAY, AUGUST 13, 2005 CAMP LIBERTY, Iraq First Lieutenant Taysha Deaton of the Louisiana National Guard went to war anticipating a gritty yearlong deployment of sand, heat and duress, but ended up spending nights in a king-size bed beneath imported sheets and a down comforter. She bought the bed from a departing soldier to replace the twin-size metal frame that came with her air-conditioned trailer on this base in western Baghdad. She...