LLL Presents Angus Deaton & Matthew Desmond: “Economics in America”

In his new book, the Nobel-prize winning economist explains in clear terms how the field of economics addresses pressing issues from poverty, retirement, and the minimum wage to the ravages of the nation’s uniquely disastrous health care system, and he recounts his own experiences as a naturalized US citizen and academic economist. We are thrilled to welcome him along with Matthew Desmond, the Pulitzer Prize winning author of Evicted and Poverty, by America, for a presentation and discussion.

When Angus Deaton immigrated to the United States from Britain in the early 1980s, he was awed by America’s strengths and shocked by the extraordinary gaps he witnessed between people. In his incisive, candid, and funny book, he describes the everyday lives of working economists, recounting the triumphs as well as the disasters, and tells the inside story of the Nobel Prize in economics and the journey that led him to Stockholm to receive one. He discusses the ongoing tensions between economics and politics—and the extent to which economics has any content beyond the political prejudices of economists—and reflects on whether economists bear at least some responsibility for the growing despair and rising populism in America.

Angus Deaton, winner of the 2015 Nobel Prize in economics, is Professor of Economics and International Affairs Emeritus and Senior Scholar at Princeton University. He is the author with Anne Case of the New York Times bestselling Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism. Matthew Desmond is professor of sociology at Princeton University. He is the author of four seminal books, including Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, and Poverty, by America, and is the principal investigator of The Eviction Lab at Princeton.

Co-presented by Labyrinth Books and the Princeton Public Library and cosponsored by Princeton University’s Humanities Council, Economics and Sociology Departments, and Eviction Lab, and  SPIA in NJ.