Scottish economist Angus Deaton wins Nobel prize in Economics

British economist Angus Deaton won the 2015 Nobel Prize in Economics Sciences for “his analysis of consumption, poverty, and welfare”, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said on Monday. How poor countries treat young girls. He had been in the running for the prize several times in past years.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences praised his groundbreaking work using household surveys to show how consumers, particularly the poor, decide what to buy and how policymakers can help them, which it said had helped to transform modern microeconomics, macroeconomics and development economics.

And though he said he expects extreme poverty in the world to continue decreasing, he insisted that he doesn’t want to be “blindly optimistic”. In fact, he thought he was unlikely to get the Nobel Prize because he had never worked in a specific field and instead explored many different areas. After the press conference announced that the award-winning Deaton said he was very happy in such a way that honored the research.

“I do tend to emphasize too that there is much to be done”, he said. “Fortunately, my father didn’t think that way”.

Angus Deaton, the victor of the 2015 Nobel Prize for Economics, who is the Dwight D. Eisenhower Professor of Economics and worldwide Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and global Affairs and the Economics Department at Princeton University. “Stabilising political instability in war zones would help”, Deaton said.

“He’s an economist’s economist”, said Dani Rodrik, a Harvard economist. “Deaton’s been awarded the Nobel … his work brought out rigour and organised thinking to the questions of consumption in India and remains valuable to our understanding of poverty”, National Institute of Public Finance and Policy Director and member of the task force Prime Minister Modi has set up on poverty, Rathin Roy, told The Hindu.

His more recent research also has focused on health in rich and poor countries, including India. “That is a direct result of Deaton’s research”.

Deaton took a new approach to analyzing consumption by not simply focusing on aggregate figures, or an economy’s big picture data, but on individual households.

“I feel passionately about measurement, about how hard it is, about how much theory and conceptualization is involved in it, and indeed how much politics is involved in it”, Deaton said.

His surprising conclusion: They didn’t. That system, updated by subsequent researchers, is now a standard tool to study effects of economic policy. “His work is based on being meticulous at every stage”. He also noted that Deaton’s 2013 book, “The Great Escape,” is flying off bookshelves.

Deaton, a British and American citizen, is best known among economists for his insight that learning about the specific economic circumstances and choices of individual people, rather than relying on typical measures of larger groups, could produce a better perspective on the workings of the economy as a whole. That may be because his views on inequality are complicated. Angus has been a leader not only in his field but on this campus, where he has taught for more than 30 years.

The announcement concludes this year’s presentations of Nobel winners.

“You can not talk about consumption and poverty in a serious way without mentioning him”, said Philippe Aghion, economist and professor at the College of France, adding that Deaton’s Nobel is “absolutely deserved”. “It was a cold, messy and miserable place to grow up and I dreamed of going to tropical, colourful, hot countries”.