Angus Deaton, the Dwight D. Eisenhower Professor of Economics and global Affairs at the Wilson School and the economics department at the University, was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced Monday.
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Deaton contributed in many other important ways to the empirical revolution in econ. He pioneered the use of household surveys as a way of working around the limitations of government data-collection agencies.
Deaton said that while the world is becoming a better place and many humans enjoy a higher standard of living than they did several hundred years ago, inequality has become a serious threat with enormous ramifications for politics and climate change.
In his 2013 book, “The Great Escape”, Deaton examined the historical patterns between the health and wealth of nations.
USA economist Tyler Cowen said Mr Deaton was “a brilliant, excellent selection”. “People’s lives are not as fulfilled as they were”. The prevalence of pain is increasing among middle-aged Americans, and is accompanied by a substantial increase in suicides and deaths from drug and alcohol poisoning. And today, it also won the 69-year-old Princeton University professor the Nobel Prize for Economics.
Deaton, 69, was awarded the prize by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences “for his analysis of consumption, poverty, and welfare”. Most people on planet Earth are much better off than their ancestors.
James Poterba, president of the National Bureau of Economic Research, which is responsible for dating the beginnings and endings of USA recessions, said in an e-mail.
In the 1980s, Deaton’s work focused on the relationship between income and consumption at the aggregate and individual level, and since the 1990s, he has focused on developing economies. Deaton claimed the award for his analysis of consumption, poverty, and welfare.
For example, India’s constitution calls free health care a right, “but it’s not being delivered” in numerous country’s understaffed hospitals, he noted.
There is much to be said for equality of opportunity, and for not penalizing people for the success that comes from their own hard work. “There are many unfamiliar things in a new country”, he wrote, “and one of the most immediate, for me, when I first came to America, was the lack of interest in inequality, among either academics or the general public”. His areas of research include “poverty in the world and in India”, “health status and economics”, and “household surveys”.
“What we see is the result of hundreds of years of unequal development… that left a whole part of the world behind”, he said.
Prosperity has a lot to do with “luck”, Deaton concluded. His dad later encouraged his teenager to read, while others in the family were pushing him to leave his studies for a job in Britain’s doomed coal mines. “I’ve always wanted to be like him”, Deaton told Binyamin Appelbaum, of the Times.
Bloomberg News contributed to this article.
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Prof. Deaton looks at economic development from the starting point of consumption rather than income, wrote Tyler Cowen, economics professor at George Mason University and blogger. Substituting the simplistic notion of a representative consumer with the combined effect of different classes of consumers whose incomes move in opposite directions, Deaton improved theory and also made it impossible to ignore different implications of policy for different sections of society.
