Dividing Americans: How Education, More Than Race, is Driving Life Expectancy Disparities in Adulthood

New research by Princeton Professor Anne Case and Nobel Laureate Sir Angus Deaton identifies a devastating trend dividing Americans: men and women with a Bachelor’s degree are living longer and prospering more compared to adults without one. For those without a college degree, adult life expectancy has declined for most of a decade in the U.S. Furthermore, over the last 30 years, racial divides narrowed while educational divides grew. This study builds on their seminal work on deaths of despair published in 2015.
On March 16, join Schaeffer Center Director Dana Goldman in conversation with study authors Anne Case, Alexander Stewart 1886 Professor of Economics and Public Affairs – Emeritus at Princeton University, and Sir Angus Deaton, USC Presidential Professor of Economics, Schaeffer Center Distinguished Fellow and Senior Scholar at Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs.

Event Date
Tuesday, March 16, 2021
1:00 PM - 2:00 PM Pacific
Location

Dana Goldman, PhD (Moderator)
Director, USC Schaeffer Center
Interim Dean, USC Price School

Dana Goldman is the Interim Dean at the USC Sol Price School of Public Policy, as well as the Leonard D. Schaeffer Chair and Distinguished Professor of Pharmacy, Public Policy, and Economics at the University of Southern California. Goldman began serving in his new capacity as interim dean on July 1, 2020.   One of his first initiatives is to establish the Price School Social Justice Advisory Board representing faculty, staff, and students. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine and the National Academy of Social Insurance –two of his field’s highest honors.  He is the author of more than300articles and book chapters, and his research has been published in leading medical, economic, health policy, and statistics journals. He has raised over $100 million in funding from external sources—including more than $50 million from the National Institutes of Health. Goldman pioneered the “Netflix model” to improve access to prescription drugs and the value of reduced copayments for the chronically ill.   He served as a formal health policy advisor to the Congressional Budget Office, Covered California, National Institutes of Health, and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Institute.   He serves on the editorial boards of Health Affairs and the American Journal of Managed Care and is founding editor of the forum for Health Economics and Policy.   His work has been featured in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, The Economist, NBC Nightly News and other media. He is the former director of ISPOR and ASHEconand a co-founder of Precision Health Economics, a health care consultancy. Goldman received his B.A. summa cum Laude from Cornell University and a Ph.D. in Economics from Stanford University.

Anne Case, PhD
Alexander Stewart 1886 Professor of Economics and Public Affairs, Emeritus, Princeton University

Anne Case is the Alexander Stewart 1886 Professor of Economics and Public Affairs Emeritus at Princeton University, where she continues to teach in the School of Public and International Affairs. She has written extensively on health over the life course. Case is a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, a fellow of the Econometric Society, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society.  Her book with Angus Deaton, Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism, was a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller, and was shortlisted for the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year. Case received her Ph.D. from Princeton University.

Sir Angus Deaton, PhD
Distinguished Fellow, USC Schaeffer Center
Presidential Professor of Economics, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences
Senior Scholar, Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University

Professor Sir Angus Deaton is a Presidential Professor of Economics at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences and a Distinguished Fellow at the USC Schaeffer Center. He is also a Senior Scholar and the Dwight D. Eisenhower Professor of Economics and International Affairs Emeritus at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and the Economics Department at Princeton University. His main current research areas are in poverty, inequality, health, wellbeing, economic development, and randomized controlled trials.

He holds both American and British citizenship. In Britain, he taught at Cambridge University and the University of Bristol. He is a corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, a Fellow of the Econometric Society and, in 1978, was the first recipient of the Society's Frisch Medal. He was President of the American Economic Association in 2009. In 2012, he was awarded the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award. In April 2014, he was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society. He was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences on April 28, 2015. He was the recipient of the 2015 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. In 2016, he was made a Knight Bachelor for his services to economics and international affairs.

His current research focuses on the determinants of health in rich and poor countries, as well as on the measurement of poverty and inequality in the US, India and around the world. He also maintains a long-standing interest in the analysis of household surveys. He is also interested in what randomized controlled trials can and cannot do.