Angus Deaton Quotes
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There is much that remains mysterious about why some countries grow rapidly and some grow slowly.
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The world is hugely unequal.
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I grew up pretty poor - not poor compared with people in India or Africa who are really poor, but poor enough so that the worry about money really cast a pall over your life a lot of the time.
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My work shows how important it is that independent researchers should have access to data so that government statistics can be checked and so that the democratic debate within India can be informed by the different interpretations of different scholars.
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I don't think Brexit is going to help people in Britain.
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I really don't think we've become a plutocracy, but I worry about the enormous influence that money has in a democracy such as ours.
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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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The World Bank adjusts its poverty estimates for differences in prices across countries, but it ignores differences in needs.
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Putting, say, an 85 per cent income tax rate is unlikely to bring in much revenue.
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If poverty and underdevelopment are primarily consequences of poor institutions, then by weakening those institutions or stunting their development, large aid flows do exactly the opposite of what they are intended to do.
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European countries give much larger shares of aid for poverty relief than the U.S.
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Without properly functioning civil courts, there is no guarantee that innovative entrepreneurs can claim the rewards of their ideas.
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The best moments are when, together with... you bring information, you bring data to bear in a way that helps illuminate something that you just don't really understand. Even if it doesn't completely clarify it, it just, you know, helps bring it together.
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Europeans tend to feel more positively about their governments than do Americans, for whom the failures and unpopularity of their federal, state, and local politicians are a commonplace. Yet Americans' various governments collect taxes and, in return, provide services without which they could not easily live their lives.
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Without effective states working with active and involved citizens, there is little chance for the growth that is needed to abolish global poverty.
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My work on happiness is the only thing I've ever done where I've heard people in the supermarket talking about it, for instance.
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Growth does not bring any 'automatic' improvement in the health component of wellbeing.
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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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The history of Montana has been of the government giving land grants to people that could not possibly turn it into decent farms. And that's destroying their lives. So they don't see the government as something that's out there to help them.
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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 putting numbers together into a coherent framework always seemed to me to be what really matters.
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I didn't care for school much - it was very strict, corporal punishment in the form of the 'tawse' was common and unpredictable, and I was often afraid - but I believe that I did well enough; indeed, my mother always regretted that I had not stayed long enough to become the 'dux,' as the best pupil was called.
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People on left have to better understand what are the benefits of inequality, and people on right have to understand better what the dangers are... It has to become properly hardwired into the American democratic debate in a way that it hasn't really been.
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I've always - and not always happily - considered myself an outsider. Certainly at Fettes. And then the Scots are always outsiders in England. They are always putting you in your place in one way or another, and there is this pretty rigid class hierarchy.