** 16th book of 2021: Dismal Science **
With advocates like these, capitalism doesn’t need critics. My advice? Skip this book. Great Escape is a free flowing riff on the last 100 years of growth (or lack thereof). As Deaton argues, * The evolution of income can be looked at from three different perspectives: growth, poverty, and inequality. Growth is about the average and how it changes, poverty about the bottom, and inequality about how widely incomes are spread across families or people. *
- For growth, Deaton provides a rough history of how the ‘great escape’ happened, by focusing mainly on life expectancy and GDP charts. The capitalist cheerleading narrative is not convincing, and better delivered in other books on long-sweep economics such as Factfulness or Enlightenment Now, with authors that are able to look beyond raw statistics.
- For poverty, Deaton makes the bold claim that aid is in fact pernicious for the countries that receive it. While there is wisdom to parts of this argument, the brush is applied so broadly as to be laughable. He fails to make a distinction between large and small scale aid, and uses country-level statistics as the basis for very specific and unsupported claims. He could have left it with his own statement: * the statistical analysis is so murky no answer can be found * but instead treats correlative country-level graphs like mystic oracle bones, and is ready to draw a narrative story with nothing more than a finger to the wind.
- For Inequality, there’s not much meat. At best this book is footnotes to Piketty, with even Rise and Fall of American Growth or The Great Leveler providing better, if pessimistic insights.