Angus Deaton Quotes
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I've written about how mortality is a wonderful indicator of societal progress.
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Inequality is an enormously complicated thing that is both good and bad.
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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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Despite broad public support, raising the minimum wage is always difficult owing to the disproportionate influence that wealthy firms and donors have in Congress.
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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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Foreign aid, especially when there is a lot of it, affects how institutions function and how they change.
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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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Businesses have moved from doing business to doing lobbying, and I think that's a very bad thing.
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I'm in favor of inequality if it comes about from people making great innovations that make us all better off. And I think those people deserve to be rich. But the people who get rich by lobbying the Congress to give them special protections that come out of the hides of the workers seems to be a bad idea.
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In the high-income English-speaking world, the elderly get treated very well indeed.
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It's hard to know what's going to be replaced by technology tomorrow. It feels like we're all at risk. I feel only safe as an emeritus professor!
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A good theoretical account must explain all of the evidence that we see. If it doesn't work everywhere, we have no idea what we are talking about, and all is chaos.
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I'm not a left-wing nut pushing for single-payer!
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Globalisation, for me, seems to be not first-order harm, and I find it very hard not to think about the billion people who have been dragged out of poverty as a result.
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I don't think income solely determines health. I think lots of other things determine health.
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If you think about those bailouts that happened in 2008, that was a situation in which the government gave, at our expense, enormous sums of money to some of the richest people who have ever existed on Earth.
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I both love inequality and am terrified of it.
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I don't think equality is intrinsically valuable, meaning in and of itself. I'm not against inequality... if Bill Gates gets another hundred million dollars, it's no skin off my nose.
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As recognized since ancient times, the coexistence of very rich and very poor leads to two possibilities, neither a happy one. The rich can rule alone, disenfranchising or even enslaving the poor, or the poor can rise up and confiscate the wealth of the rich.
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Globalization and technical change are the guarantee of our future prosperity. And reversing on that will not only make things worse, but it will make things worse for a very large number of people around the world who have benefitted - people in China and India who have been dragged out of the most awful poverty.
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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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Success breeds inequality, and you don't want to choke off success.
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I think there are a lot of policies that have been unfriendly to workers' wages.
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In Scotland, I was brought up to think of policemen as allies and to ask one for help when I needed it.