Deaton’s wife, fellow Princeton economics professor Anne Case, answered the phone call from the Nobel committee at their Princeton house.
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But whether economics is a science, or worthy of the Nobel name, is a matter of ongoing contention.
“And then I had a pretty good idea what it was and then they said a few very nice things about me, which was very nice”, he said to laughter.
“Those simple ways of looking at the world are often the basis of policy and if the statements are wrong then the policy may be wrong also”, Currie said. At number 4 on the same list is a name we are all familiar with – Amartya Sen.
“You have to remember that we’re not out of the woods yet”, he said.
The very wealthy have little need for state-provided education or health care; they have every reason to support cuts in Medicare and to fight any increase in taxes.
“What we’re seeing now is the result of hundreds of years of unequal development in the rich world, which has left a lot of the world behind”, he said.
The decision to award the prize to an economist whose work has influenced public policy on aid and poverty was widely praised. On the substance, his work calls for significant rethinking of policy priorities, with much greater attention to the social sector in particular.
“I’ve always thought that I was unlikely to win this prize because I’ve never really had a field”, Deaton said. “This has significant implications since the Indian government is constantly trying to insulate economic policy from public debate”, Drèze added.
Youtube, SRFAngus Deaton.Princeton economist Angus Deaton just won the Nobel Prize for his research into poverty and development. (Deaton holds dual British and USA citizenship.) In the US, he has helped cement the usefulness of household survey data – information gathered from talking to thousands of individual consumers about their spending and general welfare – as a means of understanding the population’s overall welfare.
In 1978, Professor Deaton was the first recipient of the Frisch Medal of the Econometric Society, and was Editor of Econometrica from 1984-1988. His more recent focus on household surveys has helped change development economics from a theoretical field based on aggregate data to an empirical field based on detailed information on the individual, the Academy said.
Here are a few of the important works by Deaton’s on India which has provoked discussions on the most accurate way to measure poverty in India.
“He’s an economist’s economist”, said Dani Rodrik, a Harvard colleague.
While Professor Deaton expected extreme poverty to continue decreasing, he did not want to be “blindly optimistic” because “tremendous health problems among adults and children in India” still existed.
Goran K. Hansson, Permanent Secretary for the Royal Swedish Academy… “For many, many people in the world, things are very bad indeed”.
The economics prize does include the Nobel name – it’s officially “The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel” – so it’s often referred to as a “Nobel Prize” and carries the full weight of that distinction, to the dismay of a few scientists.
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The Nobel committees have now announced all six of the annual 8 million Swedish kronor (about $975,000) awards. Last year, French economist Jean Tirole won the prize. for his analysis of big companies, market power and regulation.
