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Thank you. through givewell.org slash rationally speaking. Welcome to Rationally Speaking, the podcast where we explore the borderlands between reason and

nonsense. I'm your host, Julia Galef, and my guest today is Angus Dieton. He is a professor of

economics at Princeton, who won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2015. You may have seen his name in the media most recently

because he and his colleague and wife and Case at Princeton wrote a very widely discussed paper

on the alarming rise in the U.S. of deaths of despair, which is their term for deaths from

drug abuse, alcohol abuse, and suicide. That paper came

out a few years ago, but just this year, they published a book on the topic titled Deaths of

Despair and the Future of Capitalism. So that is the first thing that I wanted to speak to Angus about.

Why are deaths of despair increasing? And how do we know? Then the second half of the

episode is about a topic that's especially close to my heart, effective altruism, which is the movement

based on using logic and evidence to figure out how to do the most good. And a few years ago,

Angus wrote an essay that was pretty critical of effective altruism,

and so, of course, I couldn't resist the opportunity to talk to him about it.

So those are the two halves of this episode.

And then at the end, I spend a few minutes talking about my reaction to the arguments that Angus made.

So let's jump in.

Here is Angus Deaton on Deaths of Despair.

As we enter the conversation, he's giving the background context that for most of the 20th

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