Angus Deaton

Economist

1945-10-19

Angus Deaton is a British-American economist known for research on consumption, poverty, and welfare. He was born on 1945-10-19 in Edinburgh, Scotland. He received the 2015 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.

Quotes by Angus Deaton

Trade, migration, and modern communications have given us networks of friends and associates in other countries. We owe them much, but the social contract with our fellow citizens at home brings unique rights and responsibilities that must sometimes take precedence, especially when they are as destitute as the world's poorest people.
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We are trying to say that low income and low job opportunities, after a long period of time, tears at the social fabric.
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I argue that experiments have no special ability to produce more credible knowledge than other methods, and that actual experiments are frequently subject to practical problems that undermine any claims to statistical or epistemic superiority.
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A lot of our sources for income-inequality measures come from household surveys in which people report how much they earned in the last year, how much income they have, and so on. Those are not as well funded as they should be. We need to have those numbers.
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Putting, say, an 85 per cent income tax rate is unlikely to bring in much revenue.
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Broadly shared progress can be achieved with policies that are designed specifically to benefit consumers and workers. And such policies need not even include redistributive taxation, which many workers oppose. Rather, they can focus on ways to encourage competition and discourage rent-seeking.
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I don't think that globalisation is anywhere near the threat that robots are.
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When citizens believe that the elite care more about those across the ocean than those across the train tracks, insurance has broken down, we divide into factions, and those who are left behind become angry and disillusioned with a politics that no longer serves them.
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When I was a boy living in Edinburgh in Scotland, especially in December, when the hours of daylight were few, and it was cold, and often wet, I used to dream of escaping to a tropical magic kingdom.
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High quality, open, transparent, and uncensored data are needed to support democracy.
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The world is hugely unequal.
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Inequality is not the same thing as unfairness; and, to my mind, it is the latter that has incited so much political turmoil in the rich world today.
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I think there are a lot of policies that have been unfriendly to workers' wages.
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It is true that globalization has fueled greater income inequality. But much of this increase should be welcomed, not condemned. There is nothing inherently bad about inequality. Whether it is bad depends on how it comes about and what it does.
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Growth does not bring any 'automatic' improvement in the health component of wellbeing.
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The World Bank adjusts its poverty estimates for differences in prices across countries, but it ignores differences in needs.
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The school in the Yorkshire mining village in which my father grew up in the 1920s and 1930s allowed only a few children to go to high school, and my father was not one of them. He spent much of his time as a young man repairing this deprivation, mostly at night school.
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