Angus Deaton Quotes

Political and legal institutions play a central role in setting the environment that can nurture prosperity and economic growth.

- Angus Deaton

Foreign aid, especially when there is a lot of it, affects how institutions function and how they change.

- Angus Deaton

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.

- Angus Deaton

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.

- Angus Deaton

It's hard to think that Mark Zuckerberg is actually impoverishing anyone by getting rich with Facebook. But driverless cars are another matter entirely.

- Angus Deaton

The school in the Yorkshire mining village in which my father grew up in the 1920s and 1930s allowed only a few children to go to high school, and my father was not one of them. He spent much of his time as a young man repairing this deprivation, mostly at night school.

- Angus Deaton

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.

- Angus Deaton

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.

- Angus Deaton

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.

- Angus Deaton

Success breeds inequality, and you don't want to choke off success.

- Angus Deaton

I'm very keen that we have this debate about the good parts of inequality and the bad parts of inequality. It's not a one-sided thing.

- Angus Deaton

The call to rein in globalization reflects a belief that it has eliminated jobs in the West, sending them East and South. But the biggest threat to traditional jobs is not Chinese or Mexican; it is a robot.

- Angus Deaton

I think there are a lot of policies that have been unfriendly to workers' wages.

- Angus Deaton

International cooperation is vital to keeping our globe safe, commerce flowing, and our planet habitable.

- Angus Deaton

Putting, say, an 85 per cent income tax rate is unlikely to bring in much revenue.

- Angus Deaton

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.

- Angus Deaton

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.

- Angus Deaton

Despite broad public support, raising the minimum wage is always difficult owing to the disproportionate influence that wealthy firms and donors have in Congress.

- Angus Deaton

China and India are the success stories; rapid growth in large countries is an engine that can make a colossal dent in world poverty.

- Angus Deaton

Growth does not bring any 'automatic' improvement in the health component of wellbeing.

- Angus Deaton

The key is to somehow find a way of tackling rent-seeking, crony capitalism, and corruption - legal and illegal - and build fairer, more equal society without compromising innovation or entrepreneurship.

- Angus Deaton

High quality, open, transparent, and uncensored data are needed to support democracy.

- Angus Deaton

The World Bank adjusts its poverty estimates for differences in prices across countries, but it ignores differences in needs.

- Angus Deaton

Like many in academia and in the development industry, I am among globalization's greatest beneficiaries - those who are able to sell our services in markets that are larger and richer than our parents could have dreamed of.

- Angus Deaton

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.

- Angus Deaton

Without properly functioning civil courts, there is no guarantee that innovative entrepreneurs can claim the rewards of their ideas.

- Angus Deaton

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.

- Angus Deaton

In Scotland, I was brought up to think of policemen as allies and to ask one for help when I needed it.

- Angus Deaton

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.

- Angus Deaton

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.

- Angus Deaton

I was born in Edinburgh, in Scotland, a few days after the end of the Second World War. Both my parents had left school at a very young age, unwillingly in my father's case. Yet both had deep effects on my education, my father influencing me toward measurement and mathematics, and my mother toward writing and history.

- Angus Deaton

When I was a boy living in Edinburgh in Scotland, especially in December, when the hours of daylight were few, and it was cold, and often wet, I used to dream of escaping to a tropical magic kingdom.

- Angus Deaton

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.

- Angus Deaton

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.

- Angus Deaton

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.

- Angus Deaton

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.

- Angus Deaton

Trade, migration, and modern communications have given us networks of friends and associates in other countries. We owe them much, but the social contract with our fellow citizens at home brings unique rights and responsibilities that must sometimes take precedence, especially when they are as destitute as the world's poorest people.

- Angus Deaton

European countries give much larger shares of aid for poverty relief than the U.S.

- Angus Deaton

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.

- Angus Deaton

Businesses have moved from doing business to doing lobbying, and I think that's a very bad thing.

- Angus Deaton

I've written about how mortality is a wonderful indicator of societal progress.

- Angus Deaton

Economic growth is very important, but it is not the only thing, and it must be accompanied by sharing with those who are left behind, through effective social services and provision.

- Angus Deaton

International development aid is based on the Robin Hood principle: take from the rich and give to the poor.

- Angus Deaton

I feel passionately about measurement - about how difficult it is, about how much theory and conceptualization is involved in measurement, and indeed, how much politics is involved.

- Angus Deaton

What is not OK is for rent-seekers to get rich.

- Angus Deaton

Many people have mixed views about unions, but unions used to give people some measure of control at work. They gave them a social life and political representation in Washington, which doesn't really exist anymore.

- Angus Deaton

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.

- Angus Deaton

I doubt that Donald Trump would be happier... if he was a different person. But Trump is always telling people how great his life is and about all the great things that he's done, and that's also all about his income. And that's also what we found. If you ask people how their lives are going, as a whole, it seems they tend to point to income.

- Angus Deaton

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.

- Angus Deaton

I don't think that globalisation is anywhere near the threat that robots are.

- Angus Deaton

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.

- Angus Deaton

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.

- Angus Deaton

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.

- Angus Deaton

I have the great good fortune that one of my collaborators in work, Anne Case, is also my collaborator in life.

- Angus Deaton

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.

- Angus Deaton

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.

- Angus Deaton

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.

- Angus Deaton

A lot of people, including me, are worried that inequality will lead to bad things.

- Angus Deaton

Although globalization and technological change have disrupted traditional work arrangements, both processes have the potential to benefit everyone. The fact that they have not suggests that the wealthy have captured the benefits for themselves.

- Angus Deaton

Policies aimed at reversing globalization will lead only to a decrease in real income as goods become more expensive.

- Angus Deaton

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.

- Angus Deaton

There is much that remains mysterious about why some countries grow rapidly and some grow slowly.

- Angus Deaton

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.

- Angus Deaton

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.

- Angus Deaton

You accumulate emotional wisdom as you get older. You know, when you're 25, you go on blind dates with people that, when you're 50, you know to stay away from.

- Angus Deaton

I, who do not believe in socialized health-care, would advocate a single-payment system... because it will get this monster that we've created out of the economy and allow the rest of capitalism to flourish without the awful things that healthcare is doing to us.

- Angus Deaton

The people who hate immigrants are people who have never met them!

- Angus Deaton

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.

- Angus Deaton

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.

- Angus Deaton

Globalization obviously has the potential to be good. That doesn't mean it's good for everybody. There's a very large number of people in India and China who benefited directly from globalization, but it doesn't mean everybody in America benefits from globalization.

- Angus Deaton

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.

- Angus Deaton

Aid can only reach the victims of war by paying off the warlords and, sometimes, extending the war.

- Angus Deaton

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.

- Angus Deaton

We are trying to say that low income and low job opportunities, after a long period of time, tears at the social fabric.

- Angus Deaton

I believe, as do most people, that we have an obligation to assist the truly destitute.

- Angus Deaton

A lot of people in America and Europe feel that their governments are not representing them very much.

- Angus Deaton

I think lower wages have made men much less marriageable than they were before. It's not just like your job goes to hell. Your marriage goes to hell. You don't know your children anymore. Your children have a higher chance of being screwed up.

- Angus Deaton

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!

- Angus Deaton

The Nobel thing is like dying and going to heaven for a while. It's like being transported to a fairyland.

- Angus Deaton

I think putting numbers together into a coherent framework always seemed to me to be what really matters.

- Angus Deaton

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.

- Angus Deaton

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.

- Angus Deaton

Inequality is partly a marker of success.

- Angus Deaton

Without effective states working with active and involved citizens, there is little chance for the growth that is needed to abolish global poverty.

- Angus Deaton

It's a murky world out there, and it's hard to figure things out sometimes.

- Angus Deaton

I don't think Brexit is going to help people in Britain.

- Angus Deaton

I think inequality has gone past the point where it's helping us all get rich, and it's really becoming a serious threat.

- Angus Deaton

The world is hugely unequal.

- Angus Deaton

After a day's fishing, I'll know the solution to something or have good ideas that were not accessible before.

- Angus Deaton

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.

- Angus Deaton

I don't think income solely determines health. I think lots of other things determine health.

- Angus Deaton

You can certainly draw a picture of 2016 which makes it look like the 1930s, which, of course, is what everyone is doing.

- Angus Deaton

I'm not a left-wing nut pushing for single-payer!

- Angus Deaton

Inequality is an enormously complicated thing that is both good and bad.

- Angus Deaton

In the high-income English-speaking world, the elderly get treated very well indeed.

- Angus Deaton

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.

- Angus Deaton

People who have children, by and large, want children. People who don't want children are people who, by and large, don't want to have children. And why would you expect one set to be happier than another?

- Angus Deaton

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.

- Angus Deaton

I both love inequality and am terrified of it.

- Angus Deaton

I do worry about a world in which the rich get to write the rules.

- Angus Deaton