Serious questions need to be asked about why Nigel Farage’s Brexit party is riding high in the polls and why so many people seem to want to buy his snake oil ahead of the elections to the European parliament. Yet no one in government is posing them. It seems obvious that countries where voters feel excluded both politically and economically will be susceptible to conspiracy thinking. As a country we ought to be grateful that Sir Angus Deaton, Nobel laureate in economics, has stepped forward to warn that the UK risks replicating the United States’ extreme inequality – and reaping the political whirlwind.
In a speech on Tuesday night in London, the Princeton economist rightly said that US capitalism is not delivering for most citizens. Even while per capita GDP has risen, real wages for US men without a four-year college degree have been falling for half a century. Less educated Americans are dying by their own hands, from suicide, from alcoholic liver disease, and from drug overdoses. Life expectancy in the US has fallen for three years in a row, the first time such a reversal has happened for a century. » | Editorial | Tuesday, May 14, 2019
