Princeton’s Angus Deaton wins Nobel economics prize

Next, the victor of the Nobel Prize in Economics.

Angus Deaton’s research has challenged the way economic well-being is measured and defined. Deaton’s focus on household surveys has helped transform development economics from a theoretical field based on social group data to an empirical field based on detailed individual data, the statement said.

Cecilia Rouse, dean of Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and global Affairs, called him a devoted teacher and mentor to generations of students.

“It established an alternative, peaceful political process at a time when the country was on the brink of civil war”, the committee said.

“Angus Deaton is a brilliant economist whose pioneering research attacks big questions with rigor, imagination and daring”, said Princeton President Christopher L. Eisgruber.

Deaton said at a news conference in Richardson Auditorium on Monday that while receiving the Nobel Prize was something he thought of as a possibility, he was certainly not awake at 6 a.m. anticipating a phone call. “The discoveries have provided humankind with powerful new means to combat these debilitating diseases that affect hundreds of millions of people annually”, the Nobel committee said. “There are many people who are worthy of this award”.

Health, Wealth And the Origins of Inequality, Deaton documents how that progress is now spreading around the globe and is the reason we are living longer, wealthier and healthier lives than at any time in history.

In several papers published around 1990, Deaton showed that understanding consumption should start by showing how individuals adapt their own consumption to their individual income.

“Deaton’s work has important implications not only for the substance of economic policy in India, but also for the process of policy-making”, he added. And today, it also won the 69-year-old Princeton University professor the Nobel Prize for Economics. I have an experience at both ends of the distribution. “I do expect that to continue”, he said, noting that there are still 700 million extremely poor people according to the World Bank, “so we are not out of the woods yet”.

A more arcane achievement was in developing (with another economist John Muellbauer) a theory of demand for goods and services – how people allocate their spending between different products – that was motivated by problems in earlier analysis. Well, maybe it was. For many years, he has worked on these issues in India. You don’t want to think of Princeton as just a bunch of elite kids doing whatever elite kids do. On the left, people denounced inequality.

“I’m hugely anxious about inequality…”

And there’s been very little serious discussion until recently. 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… So I think inequality is a very two-edged sword.

“I was surprised and delighted”, he said.

Nobel Prize victor Angus Deaton’s current research focuses on the determinants of health in rich and poor countries as well as on the measurement of poverty in India and around the world.

ANGUS DEATON: Thank you very much, indeed.