America got rich and got sad. A top economist says 2020 broke something that hasn’t healed

Intro:

Sam Peltzman is, by his own description, “a fossil from the last millennium.” The Ralph and Dorothy Keller Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business — one of the most cited economists of the past half century — he works without research assistants, answers to no grant committee, and studies only what interests him. He may have just found the most important thing he’s ever studied.