Author: Angus Deaton

When economist Angus Deaton immigrated to the US from Britain in the early 1980s, he was awed by America’s strengths and shocked by the extraordinary gaps he witnessed between people. 

“Economics in America” explains how the field of economics addresses the most pressing issues of our time — from poverty, retirement, and the minimum wage to the ravages of the nation’s uniquely disastrous healthcare system — and narrates Deaton’s account of his experiences as a naturalized US citizen and academic economist.

In this 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 reflects on whether economists bear at least some responsibility for the growing despair and rising populism in America.