Class, Class, Class

It's what it's all about baby! Read this terrific interview by Justin Fox with Angus Deaton and Anne Case then go buy their book, Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism.

"AD: The U.S. has become a two-class society. We’re conferring sort of elite status on people with a bachelor’s degree and letting the rest go fish, as it were. The funny thing is that only a third of the adult population have BAs. So the two-thirds that’s not doing very well is a majority, and you might have thought that legislative politics and voting would sort this out. That’s one of the puzzles of the age, why the majority has not managed to use the political mechanism to rectify this problem.

JF: This education divide exists in political leanings outside the U.S., but does it show up across the board in other countries as well?

AC: Anywhere you look in the world, people with more education live longer lives and are healthier, for a variety of reasons. But the only other episode we could find where the life expectancy in adulthood is moving in opposite directions for people with and without a BA is in the countries of Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall. So we’re keeping very bad company."

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