Angus Deaton Quotes
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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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The Nobel thing is like dying and going to heaven for a while. It's like being transported to a fairyland.
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Americans, like many citizens of rich countries, take for granted the legal and regulatory system, the public schools, health care and social security for the elderly, roads, defense and diplomacy, and heavy investments by the state in research, particularly in medicine.
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The educational highlights I remember were not in the classroom. My father spent a lot of time with me when he could. He taught me how to take square roots, a skill I have retained but do not use often, except to check that I still remember.
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International cooperation is vital to keeping our globe safe, commerce flowing, and our planet habitable.
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After a day's fishing, I'll know the solution to something or have good ideas that were not accessible before.
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If someone thinks of something, some new innovation that benefits us all, and the market works properly, they get richly rewarded for that, and that's just terrific, and that creates inequality.
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I have the great good fortune that one of my collaborators in work, Anne Case, is also my collaborator in life.
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The very wealthy have little need for state-provided education or health care... They have even less reason to support health insurance for everyone or to worry about the low quality of public schools that plagues much of the country.
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The globalization that has rescued so many in poor countries has harmed some people in rich countries, as factories and jobs migrated to where labor is cheaper.
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The absence of state capacity - that is, of the services and protections that people in rich countries take for granted - is one of the major causes of poverty and deprivation around the world.
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The first thing we need to understand when we think about globalization is that it has benefited an enormous number of people who are not part of the global elite.
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Parents tend to value their lives more highly than people without kids, but they're different in lots of ways: They're richer. They're better educated. They're healthier.
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Foreign aid, especially when there is a lot of it, affects how institutions function and how they change.
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Aid can only reach the victims of war by paying off the warlords and, sometimes, extending the war.
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I believe, as do most people, that we have an obligation to assist the truly destitute.
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Inequality is not so much a cause of economic, political, and social processes as a consequence. Some of these processes are good, some are bad, and some are very bad indeed.
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There's this narrative that is entrenched in some of the professions that there's this mysterious thing called 'socioeconomic status' that is immutably correlated with health. And it isn't.
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The people who hate immigrants are people who have never met them!
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I've written about how mortality is a wonderful indicator of societal progress.
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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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You can find episodes like the flu epidemic or war times when mortality rates go up, but sustained increases in mortality for any major group in any society are really quite rare. It's an indication that something is very wrong.
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Those of us who were lucky enough to be born in the right countries have a moral obligation to reduce poverty and ill health in the world.
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It's a murky world out there, and it's hard to figure things out sometimes.