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How to Fix Democracy with Sir Angus Deaton

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Since its origins, democracy has been a work in progress. Today, many question its resilience. The Bertelsmann Foundation and Humanity in Action have teamed up with Andrew Keen, author of How to Fix the Future, to launch How to Fix Democracy: a video and podcast series exploring practical responses to the threats facing democracies around the world. Host Andrew Keen interviews prominent thinkers, writers, politicians, technologists, and business leaders who enlighten and challenge us as we seek the answers to How to Fix Democracy.

Host Andrew Keen joins Sir Angus Deaton, the Dwight D. Eisenhower Professor of International Affairs, Emeritus, Professor of Economics and International Affairs, Emeritus, and Senior Scholar at Princeton University, for the third episode of Season 2.

In this episode, host Andrew Keen sits down with distinguished economist, Sir Angus Deaton, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2015 for his analysis of consumption, poverty, and welfare, discusses why capitalism is no longer delivering happiness and quality of life for working class people in the United States. Instead, it has created growing inequality in the U.S. healthcare system as many Americans are deprived of health insurance and can no longer afford care, especially when they are unemployed. Deaton’s latest book, “Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism”, written with his fellow Princeton economist and wife Anne Case, looks at precisely this issue: how a changing global economy can have dire public health consequences. Fixing healthcare inequality, Deaton argues in this interview, must be a top priority for the future of capitalism and democracy in the land of the American Dream.