Their work suggests this dramatic rise is not mirrored in other developed countries or in other groups. As the administration crafts new policies to try to help the Americans who voted for Trump, the research seems more relevant than ever.

I caught up with Deaton on Monday at the annual conference of the National Association for Business Economics, where he was giving the keynote address, about this struggling population, as well as other aspects of his work. Deaton won the Nobel Prize for his study of how consumers, particularly the poor, make decisions about using their money, and he is also well known for his opposition to foreign aid to developing countries, which he says can corrupt their governments and slow their growth.

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This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

One defining characteristic of the past few years has been a backlash to globalization. I believe you’ve generally argued that globalization is a positive thing and that most people around the world are doing better than they ever have. How much of the recent rise in populism would you attribute to economic factors?

Economics are certainly a very important part of it. Globalization obviously has the potential to be good. That doesn’t mean it’s good for everybody. There’s a very large number of people in India and China who benefited directly from globalization, but it doesn’t mean everybody in America benefits from globalization. There has been a long-run cumulative process in which the labor market has been getting worse and worse for people, who you might call the white working class, partly through globalization and trade, but partly through automation and technological progress. They’re not in a position to benefit from those trends.

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The other thing sociologists talk about is a huge decline in marriage for the white working class. When they do get married, the divorce rates are much higher than for people who have a college degree. It’s not like they don’t live with people, so there’s a huge increase in cohabitation, and people have children in those cohabiting unions. In Europe, cohabitation seems to be sort of okay, sort of like marriage. In the U.S., the data seems to show that cohabitation is very fragile. People get together, then they fall out, so you have lots of kids who have multiple fathers by the time they’re teenagers. I think lower wages have made men much less marriageable than they were before. It’s not just like your job goes to hell. Your marriage goes to hell. You don’t know your children anymore. Your children have a higher chance of being screwed up.

So there has been a disintegration in those people’s world, and they’ve been excluded from politics. That is one of the things we saw last year. I don’t think either the Democrats or the Republicans do much for them. The American working class, which reached its heyday in the early 1970s, seems to be vanishing. There are no unions anymore, at least not in the private sector. Those unions used to be a political voice for the working class.

What is the link between these trends and the loss of unions and manufacturing jobs? The Trump administration has talked about the need to revive manufacturing in the U.S. – what do you think about that economic argument?

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I have some sympathy with the idea, but I doubt very much it’s feasible. It’s important that manufacturing has not declined. Manufacturing output in the United States continues to rise, it’s manufacturing jobs that have gone away, and manufacturing jobs have gone away in Germany, too. It’s not a peculiar thing to the U.S. You could put a giant fortress around your country, and turn it into Albania or North Korea, in which we make our own stuff, but I don’t think that’s going to bring prosperity.

The administration has not announced many details of their budget, but one thing they clarified is that they have decided to sharply cut foreign aid. Do you support that plan? What do you think the effects of that might be, given your research into development assistance?

It’s complicated. For one thing, the foreign aid budget is tiny. So if you cut the whole foreign aid budget, it wouldn’t begin to do the things he needs. I think it’s purely a piece of red meat thrown to his supporters, more than it’s a rational economic calculation. There’s just not a lot of money there to do very much.

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The other thing about U.S. foreign aid is it’s mostly geopolitical. If you look at the top recipients, they’re Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel. We’re not really talking about poverty relief here. There are things like PEPFAR, the president’s emergency plan for AIDS relief, that George W. Bush started, that might have a marginal effect on health programs in Africa, and it clearly would send a signal to other places. European countries give much larger shares of aid for poverty relief than the U.S.

It’s true, I’m very skeptical as to whether large amounts of foreign aid to poor countries is productive, but I don’t think that’s what we’re really talking about.

Your work has helped economists understand people living in poverty by studying consumption. What does that tell you about trends in living standards in the U.S.?

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That’s not really been a focus of my work. But one of the things I’ll mention today is the World Bank classifies people as being in global destitution if they have a per capita consumption of less than $1.90 per person per day. I think there are rather a lot of people at that level in the U.S., which the World Bank measures, but then brushes it aside. They say no one in the U.S. could possibly live on that. But there are probably millions of people in the U.S. who are actually as poor as anyone in Africa or Asia.

You mentioned the lack of policies to help these people. What policies could help them?

This is just a very difficult problem, and it divides people very sharply. If you’re on the right, you think it’s state benefits that are creating this culture of dependency. But you know, there are much, much more generous benefits in Europe. [Princeton University professor] Anne [Case] and I have been spending a lot of time thinking why are all these deaths occurring here, and why are they not occurring in Europe. The pre-tax distribution of income in Germany is almost as unequal as it is here. The big difference is there is a huge set of disability payments and unemployment payments which we don’t have. If I were arguing this from the left, that’s the argument I would take, that a much richer set of income transfers in the U.S. would prevent some of the misery. I’m not sure what my position is on that, but that’s the argument, and it’s consistent with the international data.

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What are your thoughts about inequality in the U.S.?

I’m not persuaded that inequality in and of itself is a bad thing. What I’ll argue today is the thing I think is hurting us is the degree of rent-seeking, that’s of people getting rich not legitimately, but basically by legalized theft in some form or another. A lot of inequality is generated that way. And the way to tackle it is not through taxes and redistribution, but actually through stopping it from happening.

Is that true in the U.S. as well as elsewhere?

It’s much more true here. The lobbying that we all take for granted here is only a few decades old. Businesses have moved from doing business to doing lobbying, and I think that’s a very bad thing.