Born Angus Deaton Wins Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences

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

In Data and Dogma: The Great Indian Poverty Debate, a seminal review published by Deaton and Valerie Kozel, they analysed the fierce debate politically and statistically about the high number of people living in poverty.

The very wealthy have little need for state-provided education or health care; they have every reason to support cuts in Medicare and to fight any increase in taxes.

Deaton has also co-authored numerous papers on income inequality with his wife, Princeton economist Anne Case. Deaton said, laughing at the press conference announcing his award.

Although Deaton is an inveterate optimist, he also recognizes that the march of progress has been flawed. In his writings, Deaton has been skeptical about foreign aid and attempts by rich countries to improve the lives of poor ones, and for that he was criticized by Bill Gates.

“On the substance, his work calls for significant rethinking of policy priorities, with much greater attention to the social sector in particular”.

Fellow economist Tyler Cowen, of George Mason University, called the Nobel Committee’s decision “brilliant”.

He is the 76th victor of the economics prize and the 55th of USA or dual U.S. citizenship since it was first awarded in 1969.

British-born economist Angus Deaton has changed how economists think as well as how they conduct their research.

In recent decades, he has spent much of his time using those ideas to investigate poverty in developing nations, especially India and South Africa, reported the Washington Post.

Angus Deaton enhanced the understanding in design of economic policy that promotes welfare and reduces poverty, the royal Swedish Academy of Sciences which makes the awards said in a statement.

Another Deaton study challenged the once-popular notion that malnutrition caused poverty by making people too weak to find work. In his early work around 1980, Deaton developed the “Almost Ideal Demand System” – a flexible, yet simple way of estimating how the demand for each good depends on the prices of all goods and on individual incomes. Yet he is also skeptical of attempts to end poverty through sweeping national mandates that ignore the level at which a state and its economy are actually delivering services: “That’s not the right way to go about it”, Deaton said.

For Eric Maskin, the real value of the Nobel Prize in economics is its ability to show the world the very significant work researchers contribute to the field.

But that didn’t discourage Deaton, now a Princeton University professor who on Monday was awarded the 2015 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.

“There are these strokes of luck that, if you read around the world, they would be shuffled in very different ways”, Deaton said. Since 1983 Deaton has taught at Princeton University, where he is the Dwight D. Eisenhower Professor of Economics and worldwide Affairs.

The prize is eight million Swedish krona, or about 977,000 US dollars.

Last year, French economist Jean Tirole won the Nobel award for research on market power and regulation.

Monday’s announcement concluded the selection of this year’s Nobel winners.

Annual prizes for achievements in physics, chemistry, medicine, peace and literature were established in the will of Alfred Nobel, the Swedish inventor of dynamite, who died in 1896. But it was added in 1968 by Sweden’s central bank and is presented with the others and carries the same prize money.