Angus Deaton > Quotes

“If poverty is not a result of lack of resources or opportunities, but of poor institutions, poor government, and toxic politics, giving money to poor countries—particularly giving money to the governments of poor countries—is likely to perpetuate and prolong poverty, not eliminate it. The”
― Angus Deaton, The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality

“To worry about these consequences of extreme inequality has nothing to do with being envious of the rich and everything to with the fear that rapidly growing top incomes are a threat to the wellbeing of everyone else.”
― Angus Deaton, The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality

“Averages are no consolation to those who have been left behind.”
― Angus Deaton, The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality

“We should also be careful not to count the “leisure” of the unemployed as a benefit. Those who have lost their jobs are not choosing to spend more time at home, and study after study has documented that unemployed people are among the most dissatisfied with their lives. So the data in Figure 1 would not be improved by any mechanical adjustment for the value of leisure.”
― Angus Deaton, The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality

“Economists focus on income, public health scholars focus on mortality and morbidity, and demographers focus on births, deaths, and the size of populations. All of these factors contribute to wellbeing, but none of them is wellbeing.”
― Angus Deaton, The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality

“Globalization gives workers in Asia better access to rich-country markets than ever before, and they can do many of the jobs that used to be done in the rich countries, even without being able to migrate. If this happens on a large scale, Asian wages will rise, and American and European wages will fall, narrowing earnings inequality in the world as a whole. The”
― Angus Deaton, The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality

“This book is about the endless dance between progress and inequality, about how progress creates inequality, and how inequality can sometimes be helpful—showing others the way, or providing incentives for catching up—and sometimes unhelpful—when those who have escaped protect their positions by destroying the escape routes behind them.”
― Angus Deaton, The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality

“One escape route from this negative conclusion is to argue, once again, that progress is being understated because quality improvements and new goods are not being adequately captured in the statistics. That would mean that inflation is being overstated, because some of the increase in prices comes from better things, not just from dearer things. If so, the poverty line is being increased too fast, and an ever-increasing proportion of the poor are not poor at all. If”
― Angus Deaton, The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality

“It can be bad if the winners try to stop others from following them, pulling up the ladders behind them.”
― Angus Deaton, The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality

“The effects of migration on poverty reduction dwarf those of free trade. Migrants who succeed in moving from poor countries to rich countries become better off than they were at home, and their remittances help their families do better at home. Remittances have very different effects than aid, and they can empower recipients to demand more from their governments, improving governance rather than undermining it. Of course, the politics of migration is even tougher than the politics of free trade, even in countries where the urge to help is most strongly developed. A helpful type of temporary migration is to provide undergraduate and graduate scholarships to the West, especially for Africans. With luck, these students will develop in a way that is independent of aid agencies or of their domestic regimes. Even if they do not return home, at least at once, the African diaspora is a fertile (and internal) source of development projects at home.”
― Angus Deaton, The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality

“Indeed, as we shall see, it is a bad mistake to confuse life satisfaction and happiness; the former is an overall judgment about life that comes from consideration, while the latter is an emotion, a mood, or a feeling, which is part of experiencing life.16”
― Angus Deaton, The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality

“As we shall see, GDP is a poor indicator of wellbeing, but it is limited even as a measure of income. It includes income generated in the United States that belongs to foreigners; it includes incomes in the form of undistributed corporate profits (which ultimately belong to shareholders) as well as surpluses run by federal, state, and local government.”
― Angus Deaton, The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality

“Mark Nathan Cohen, whose Health and the Rise of Civilization”
― Angus Deaton, The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality

“Economic growth requires investment in things—more machines, more basic facilities like highways or broadband—and in people, who need more and better education. Knowledge needs to be acquired and extended. Some of that extension is the product of new basic science, and some of it comes from the engineering that turns science into goods and services, and from the endless tweaking and improvement of design that, over time, turned a Model-T Ford into a Toyota Camry, or my clunky personal computer of 1983 into the sleek, almost weightless, and infinitely more powerful laptop on which I am writing this book. Investment in research and development enhances the flow of innovation, but new ideas can come from anywhere; the stock of knowledge is international, not national, and new ideas disperse quickly from the places where they are created. Innovation also needs entrepreneurs and risk-taking managers to find profitable ways of turning science and engineering into new products and services. This will be difficult without the right institutions. Innovators need to be free from the risk of expropriation, functioning law courts are needed to settle disputes and protect patents, and tax rates cannot be too high. When all of these conditions come together—as they have in the United States for a century and a half—we get sustained economic growth and higher living standards.”
― Angus Deaton, The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality

“Material wellbeing, and measures of it—GDP, personal income, and consumption—have recently received a bad press. Spending more, we are often told, does not bring us better lives, and religious authorities regularly warn against materialism. Even among those of us who endorse economic growth, there are many critics of GDP as it is currently defined and measured. GDP excludes important activities, such as services by homemakers; it takes no account of leisure; and it often does a poor job of measuring those things that are included. It also includes things that arguably should be excluded, like the cost of cleaning up pollution or building prisons or commuting. These “defensive” expenditures are not good in and of themselves but are regrettably necessary to enable things that are good.4 If crime goes up, and we spend more on prisons, GDP will be higher. If we neglect climate change, and spend more and more on cleaning up and repairing after storms, GDP will go up, not down; we count the repairs but ignore the destruction.”
― Angus Deaton, The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality

“But on average over all the countries, rich or poor, a fourfold difference in incomes comes with a one-point increase in the evaluation of life.”
― Angus Deaton, The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality

“People who suffer deprivation in terms of material living standards—such as much of the population of sub-Saharan Africa—are generally also the people who suffer deprivation in terms of health; they get to live for fewer years, and they live with the misery of seeing many of their children die.”
― Angus Deaton, The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality

“As we already know from the poverty numbers, the bottom fifth of families gained very little. The growth in their average incomes was less than 0.2 percent a year over the past forty-four years and, even before the recession, their real incomes were no higher than they had been in the late 1970s. Average incomes of the top fifth, by contrast, grew more quickly, at 1.6 percent a year, though not as quickly as those of the top 5 percent, whose average incomes grew at 2.1 percent a year. Once”
― Angus Deaton, The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality

“After all, millions of people in India live on less than a dollar a day, converted at the PPP exchange rate of about 22 rupees per dollar, and the whole point of these exchange rates is to equalize purchasing power across countries. So if people can live in India on 22 rupees a day—and be far from the worst off—why can’t people in the United States live on a dollar a day?”
― Angus Deaton, The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality

“Global poverty is a cosmopolitan idea and its measurement must be performed on a cosmopolitan basis.”
― Angus Deaton, The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality

“At the same time, the fraction of the world’s population in extreme poverty fell from 84 to 24 percent. This”
― Angus Deaton, The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality

“Until the early 1970s, the United States was the very model of a modern major economy.”
― Angus Deaton, The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality

“American family of four could buy enough cheap foods—like bulk rice, oatmeal, beans, and a few vegetables—to survive on $1,460 a year; one recent paper has priced out a “bare-bones” bundle for the United States at around $1.25 a person a day, or $1,825 a year for a family of four.14 Advocates of the validity of the line can also note, correctly, that 22 rupees a day buys a miserable life in India too, and that poor people and their children in India, if not hungry on a daily basis, are among the most malnourished in the world.”
― Angus Deaton, The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality

“One key to African growth is what happens to commodity prices. Many African countries have long been and are still dependent on exports of “primary” commodities, mostly unprocessed minerals or agricultural crops. Botswana exports diamonds; South Africa, gold and diamonds; Nigeria and Angola, oil; Niger, uranium; Kenya, coffee; Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana, cocoa; Senegal, groundnuts; and so on. The world prices of primary commodities are notoriously volatile, with huge price increases in response to crop failures or increases in world demand and equally dramatic price collapses, none of which are easily predictable.”
― Angus Deaton, The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality

“Necessity may be the mother of invention, but there is nothing that guarantees a successful pregnancy.”
― Angus Deaton, The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality

“The need to do something tends to trump the need to understand what needs to be done.”
― Angus Deaton, The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality

“The major credit for the decrease in child mortality and the resultant increase in life expectancy must go to the control of disease through public health measures. At first, this took the form of improvements in sanitation and in water supplies. Eventually science caught up with practice and the germ theory of disease was understood and gradually implemented, through more focused, scientifically based measures. These included routine vaccination against a range of diseases and the adoption of good practices of personal and public health based on the germ theory. The”
― Angus Deaton, The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality

“The spread is often measured by the Gini coefficient, named after Corrado Gini, an Italian economist who worked in the first half of the twentieth century. Gini’s coefficient, or simply the Gini, is a number that lies between 0 (perfect equality—everyone has the same) and 1 (perfect inequality, with one person having everything). It measures how far people are apart on average. (If you really want know the details, it is the average difference in income between all pairs of people divided by twice the average income. If there are two of us, and you have everything, the difference between us is twice the mean, and the Gini is 1. If we both have the same, the difference between us is 0, and so is the Gini.)”
― Angus Deaton, The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality

“In the early years, top incomes were derived from capital, and the richest people were what Piketty and Saez call “coupon clippers,” who received most of their incomes from dividends and interest. The fortunes underlying these receipts were eroded over the century by increasingly progressive income and estate taxes. Those who used to live off their (or their ancestors’) fortunes have been replaced at the top by earners, people like CEOs of large firms, Wall Street bankers, and hedge fund managers, who receive their incomes as salaries, bonuses, and stock options. Entrepreneurial”
― Angus Deaton, The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality

“If democracy becomes plutocracy, those who are not rich are effectively disenfranchised. Justice Louis Brandeis famously argued that the United States could have either democracy or wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but not both. The political equality that is required by democracy is always under threat from economic inequality, and the more extreme the economic inequality, the greater the threat to democracy.”
― Angus Deaton, The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality