Academic cocnerned with poor wins Nobel prize

“I’m so delighted, not just for myself, but that this sort of work is being recognised”, Deaton said on Monday, phoning into a press event.

Speaking over the telephone to reporters at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences following the announcement of his award, the Princeton professor noted “tremendous health problems among adults and children in India, where there has been a lot of progress”. Deaton’s refined understanding of how different consumers form their demand for goods and services based on their current needs, incomes and expectations of the future improved the theory of demand, dropping excessively restrictive and unrealistic conditions about consumer behaviour while retaining rationality as a valid attribute.

Their system, and subsequent improvements by other researchers, “has had an vast impact in academia as well as being greatly influential in practical policy evaluation”.

2015 Nobel Prize in Economics Sciences victor Angus Deaton’s works on India which provoked discussions on the most accurate way to measure poverty in India.

Deaton’s work is also based on the question: How much of society’s income is spent and how much is saved?

The 69-year-old Scottish-born economist uses his meticulous study of households and their spending habits to help calculate overall consumption and poverty, both on a national level and worldwide.

“By linking detailed individual choices and aggregate outcomes, his research has helped transform the fields of microeconomics, macroeconomics, and development economics”. Deaton, now a professor of economics and global affairs at Prince University, has been known for emphasising the importance of democratic practices in formulating public policy, especially focusing on the social sector. The bank’s donation established the economic sciences prize 74 years after the Nobels were founded.

For CRI, this is Chen Xuefei reporting from Stockholm. “He’s somebody with quite a sharp tongue, and he’s often had as his target people who make very strong statements about this policy or that policy”.

Mr Deaton, who was born in Edinburgh in 1945, now works at Princeton University in the United States.

“You can not talk about consumption and poverty in a serious way without mentioning him”, Philippe Aghion, economist and professor at the College of France, told AFP, adding that Deaton’s Nobel is “absolutely deserved”.

“Yet, compared with other rich countries, and in spite of the popular belief in the American dream that anyone can succeed, the United States is in fact not particularly good at actually delivering equal opportunities”. He wrote that “to worry about these consequences of extreme inequality has nothing to do with being envious of the rich and everything to do with the fear that rapidly growing top incomes are a threat to the well being of everyone else”.

“There are these strokes of luck that, if you read around the world, they would be shuffled in very different ways”, Deaton said.

Deaton wins the prize sum of eight million Swedish kronor (about 860,000 euros, $950,000).

The oldest award victor is Leonid Hurwicz, who was awarded it in 2007, when he was 90 years old.

The awards will be handed out December 10, the anniversary of Alfred Nobel’s death in 1896, at ceremonies in Stockholm and Oslo.

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.