Nobel Laureate Deaton at the EoF School 2024:
“Rethinking Capitalism: Dreams, Nightmares, and Threats”

Join us on July 8 for a live streaming event on EoF International YouTube Channel.

At the fourth edition of the advanced training course promoted by the Economy of Francesco (EoF), the anticipated speech by the 2015 Nobel Prize winner in Economics, Sir Angus Deaton, on the future of capitalism, is scheduled for 6:00 PM (CET) on Monday, July 8, and will be live-streamed on the EoF International YouTube Channel, open to all interested parties.

This special event is part of the 2024 edition of the EoF School, a course dedicated to research themes within EoF, which this year is delving into the topic “Capitals and Capabilities in the On-Life Era”.

“Reality is constantly evolving,” explain the organizers of the School. “The meaning of concepts such as inequality, discrimination, poverty, capital, sustainability, and others is not the same as it was twenty years ago. As Pope Francis has often stated, reality is always greater than ideas.” The fourth edition of the EoF School is thus focusing on this change, exploring a theme that, in the previous year, was central to the reflections of the EoF community of young economists, entrepreneurs, and changemakers: the “different forms of capital” (spiritual, narrative, social, economic, environmental) and, complementarily, the notion of “capabilities”. “Both revolve around the concept of poverty,” the organizers continue, emphasizing: “Poverty is not only (or primarily) a matter of flows (income, wages) but of capital (material and immaterial).

Today, for example, many lament a scarcity of ‘spiritual capital.’ The supply of money and consumption (for some) increases, and simultaneously, the demand for sense and meaning grows. Many do not survive the crises inside and outside workplaces because the spiritual capital accumulated over centuries of religious, philosophical, and literary narratives is disappearing in an increasingly individualistic and atomized society.”

In the book “Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism”, Angus Deaton and Anne Case analyzed this phenomenon in the United States. With the methodological rigor and intellectual honesty that come from a long career as an empirical economist, Deaton uses data to show an epidemic, as invisible as it is impactful, not linked to viruses or bacteria. He refers to deaths related to despair, that is, self-inflicted deaths linked to extremely harsh living conditions. In a society where inequalities are growing, poverty becomes synonymous with misery, and the gap between the few deserving and the many culpable is accentuated by institutions such as the educational system, the epidemic of deaths of despair finds fertile ground to grow. What can we do? In their book, Case and Deaton propose various solutions: raising wages, reducing economic inequalities, reforming the healthcare system, and so on. While sharing the importance of all these proposals, EoF also emphasizes the need to recover narrative and spiritual capital. Therefore, the meeting and dialogue with Deaton will be of utmost importance for envisioning the future of capitalism or the future beyond capitalism.