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 his rethinking, which he detailed in a recent article for the International Monetary Fund, he said there wasn’t just one moment that led to his evolving views — it’s been a process, and one that he’s not alone in. He thinks there’s a broader reevaluation going on.
“I don’t think I’ve stopped being an economist, nor have I stopped thinking a lot of the things I thought about before,” he said. “It’s just that around the edges, there are sort of assumptions that probably weren’t true — and that sometimes we have to take a broader view of things.”
He’s fond of the phrase “sandbagged by reality,” which can perhaps explain why he says historians tend to be critical of economists: The most efficient answer to a problem doesn’t always promote optimal well-being for the humans involved.
“When your views don’t seem to help very much with reality, then maybe it’s time to think through what might be wrong with those views,” he said.
It all comes down to the importance economists have placed on efficiency in recent decades, as Deaton writes in his IMF piece. That’s a shift away from norms established by the likes of Adam Smith, which take into consideration ethics and the ultimate well-being of the humans involved. Deaton attributes it to a decline in focus on “welfare economics,” which considers how money translates into well-being.
Instead, Deaton said, economists are relying on outdated ideas around welfare economics or, even worse, not learning it at all. Simultaneously, Deaton says, the US is seeing societal qualms like rising suicide and alcoholism rates and the opioid crisis.
“I think the country is in sort of a bad way, in spite of all this hoopla that’s going on about how well we’re doing economically. And so I’m an economist now sort of thinking, ‘well, how should I change my practice of economics a little bit?'” Deaton said. “And there were some things that I knew all along. I mean, one was just that well-being is a lot more than just money.”
In Deaton’s IMF piece, he writes that he “long regarded unions as a nuisance that interfered with economic (and often personal) efficiency and welcomed their slow demise.”
That’s not the case anymore.
He told me that, growing up in Britain, he saw public sector unions causing disruption in the 1970s, such as during the winter of discontent when a garbage collector strike left trash piled up on the streets and bodies went unburied — and not garnering much sympathy for their cause. In his view, the consensus at the time had become that unions’ work wasn’t really needed; they’d already created the necessary worker protections.
However, as Deaton saw private union power decline in the US over the last few decades — especially with the rise of union-weakening laws — in relation to lobbying power held by the corporate and wealthy world, working people were left without a lever. He also sees a mismatch between government representatives and the workers they’re meant to speak for — Deaton points to how, while most Americans don’t have a bachelor’s degree, that’s not reflected in the halls of Congress.
“There’s not much room for power in economics,” Deaton said. “We don’t talk about it very much, but historians talk about it all the time. And I think we ought to be thinking about it more. And I think one of the problems with being a working-class person in America today is just not having very much political power.”
Unions were also an important social force in the past, Deaton points out. As the share of workers in a union has declined, the loss of camaraderie has contributed to the current loneliness crisis in the US, especially for men.
Deaton also noted unions’ ability to secure wage increases for not just the workers in unionized roles but for others in the same type of job.
He points to the recent United Auto Workers’ strike. Economists might say the logical move in the face of demands for higher worker wages would be for manufacturers to make cars in China where it’s cheaper. But that’s not what happened.
“It turns out that the manufacturers actually had quite a bit of profit margin, which this strike forced them to share with the workers. That’s an old idea in economics, too, but not one that’s much currently practiced — that there’s actually a gap which is available for either profits or wages. And there’s a sort of class struggle over who gets that,” Deaton said.
Free trade has earned Deaton’s skepticism, especially for what it means when it comes to the workers at home.
As he writes for the IMF: “I am much more skeptical of the benefits of free trade to American workers and am even skeptical of the claim, which I and others have made in the past, that globalization was responsible for the vast reduction in global poverty over the past 30 years.”
Deaton told me he’d been very influenced by economist Dani Rodrik, who wrote “Has Globalization Gone Too Far?” a book about how globalization might exacerbate inequities and social fissures.
For example, Deaton points to what’s called the “China shock,” when China first emerged as a global trade and industrialization hub in the 1980s. The argument there was that, on average, that new flow of low-cost products was good for America — even though many lost their domestic manufacturing jobs.
“The point is the people who lost their jobs lose money to the China shock, but the rest of us get cheap goods at Walmart and Target or whatever, and the theorem says the value of what we gain is more than the value of what they lose. The trouble is it’s different people,” Deaton said.
Cheaper TVs, for example, may not make up for a household breadwinner losing their livelihood. Meanwhile, company executives may benefit from both higher profits and cheaper goods.
He said Rodrik made the important point that economists are right: Those who stand something to gain in trade gain more than the losers lose. But that gain comes at the expense of redistribution, which may not be what one hopes for.
“Now the standard recipe, which the trade people in the textbooks say is, ‘OK, you can tax the gainers and give it back to losers,’ to which I say, ‘Oh, yes, when did you last do that?'” Deaton said. “And the gainers don’t want to give it up because they think, ‘Oh, we’ve done really well here. Why is the government trying to take it away from us?'”
Deaton makes a blunt point on immigration in his IMF piece: “I used to subscribe to the near consensus among economists that immigration to the US was a good thing, with great benefits to the migrants and little or no cost to domestic low-skilled workers. I no longer think so.”
He told me that he’s not referring to the current US border crisis — which is “sort of a mess” — but instead to the longer-term impacts on inequality.
“The increase in inequality has something to do with immigration,” he said.
In his IMF piece, Deaton writes that “inequality was high when America was open, was much lower when the borders were closed, and rose again post Hart-Celler (the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965) as the fraction of foreign-born people rose back to its levels in the Gilded Age.”
While employers “love it” for the cheap labor, historically, working people and unions have opposed it, according to Deaton. And, more broadly, Deaton says that the Great Migration — when a wave of Black Americans moved from southern states to northern ones in search of jobs — hypothetically might not have happened were there an open immigration policy at the time. As Deaton notes, factory workers in Chicago and elsewhere would’ve been happy to hire cheap European immigrants if it were an option — but that wasn’t possible anymore, leading instead to Black Americans getting hired.
“That really changed the world in a way, and that may not have happened had we had a much more permissive immigration policy,” Deaton said.
One modern argument for immigration also irks Deaton. Many employers have blamed the lack of immigration for their staffing shortages, saying that they can’t staff up enough without an influx of new labor. Deaton said “you shouldn’t listen to people saying that unless they say something about wages. “
“They say ‘no Americans want to do this, and so we need immigrants,'” he said, adding: “What they mean is no Americans will do it at the wages that we’ll pay immigrants.”
All told, while Deaton’s shifting views might reflect the disconnect Americans have been feeling over the past few years between rosy economic numbers and their well-being, there is a bright spot: He thinks what the Biden administration’s been up to is pretty good, even as “a lot of economists are up in arms and saying, this is a disaster.”
And while Deaton said it’s been a little scary to reevaluate his views publicly, he’s been pretty insulated from the response. He doesn’t use social media, for one.
“I just keep myself sane, and so I don’t really care,” he said. “If by the time you have a Nobel Prize, you’re frightened of what people say about you, then maybe there’s something wrong.”
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