Words matter. These are the best Angus Deaton Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I really don’t think we’ve become a plutocracy, but I worry about the enormous influence that money has in a democracy such as ours.
Inequality is partly a marker of success.
When I was a boy living in Edinburgh in Scotland, especially in December, when the hours of daylight were few, and it was cold, and often wet, I used to dream of escaping to a tropical magic kingdom.
There is much that remains mysterious about why some countries grow rapidly and some grow slowly.
The people who hate immigrants are people who have never met them!
Globalization obviously has the potential to be good. That doesn’t mean it’s good for everybody. There’s a very large number of people in India and China who benefited directly from globalization, but it doesn’t mean everybody in America benefits from globalization.
I have the great good fortune that one of my collaborators in work, Anne Case, is also my collaborator in life.
Broadly shared progress can be achieved with policies that are designed specifically to benefit consumers and workers. And such policies need not even include redistributive taxation, which many workers oppose. Rather, they can focus on ways to encourage competition and discourage rent-seeking.
If someone thinks of something, some new innovation that benefits us all, and the market works properly, they get richly rewarded for that, and that’s just terrific, and that creates inequality.
You can find episodes like the flu epidemic or war times when mortality rates go up, but sustained increases in mortality for any major group in any society are really quite rare. It’s an indication that something is very wrong.
I argue that experiments have no special ability to produce more credible knowledge than other methods, and that actual experiments are frequently subject to practical problems that undermine any claims to statistical or epistemic superiority.
You can certainly draw a picture of 2016 which makes it look like the 1930s, which, of course, is what everyone is doing.
The world is hugely unequal.
The globalization that has rescued so many in poor countries has harmed some people in rich countries, as factories and jobs migrated to where labor is cheaper.
European countries give much larger shares of aid for poverty relief than the U.S.
What is not OK is for rent-seekers to get rich.
The very wealthy have little need for state-provided education or health care… They have even less reason to support health insurance for everyone or to worry about the low quality of public schools that plagues much of the country.
You accumulate emotional wisdom as you get older. You know, when you’re 25, you go on blind dates with people that, when you’re 50, you know to stay away from.
Those of us who were lucky enough to be born in the right countries have a moral obligation to reduce poverty and ill health in the world.
I think inequality has gone past the point where it’s helping us all get rich, and it’s really becoming a serious threat.
I don’t think that globalisation is anywhere near the threat that robots are.
A lot of our sources for income-inequality measures come from household surveys in which people report how much they earned in the last year, how much income they have, and so on. Those are not as well funded as they should be. We need to have those numbers.
In the high-income English-speaking world, the elderly get treated very well indeed.
People who have children, by and large, want children. People who don’t want children are people who, by and large, don’t want to have children. And why would you expect one set to be happier than another?
A lot of people in America and Europe feel that their governments are not representing them very much.
As recognized since ancient times, the coexistence of very rich and very poor leads to two possibilities, neither a happy one. The rich can rule alone, disenfranchising or even enslaving the poor, or the poor can rise up and confiscate the wealth of the rich.
International cooperation is vital to keeping our globe safe, commerce flowing, and our planet habitable.
Despite broad public support, raising the minimum wage is always difficult owing to the disproportionate influence that wealthy firms and donors have in Congress.
High quality, open, transparent, and uncensored data are needed to support democracy.
I don’t think equality is intrinsically valuable, meaning in and of itself. I’m not against inequality… if Bill Gates gets another hundred million dollars, it’s no skin off my nose.
The World Bank adjusts its poverty estimates for differences in prices across countries, but it ignores differences in needs.
I don’t think Brexit is going to help people in Britain.
Success breeds inequality, and you don’t want to choke off success.
I both love inequality and am terrified of it.
The school in the Yorkshire mining village in which my father grew up in the 1920s and 1930s allowed only a few children to go to high school, and my father was not one of them. He spent much of his time as a young man repairing this deprivation, mostly at night school.
My work on happiness is the only thing I’ve ever done where I’ve heard people in the supermarket talking about it, for instance.
It’s hard to know what’s going to be replaced by technology tomorrow. It feels like we’re all at risk. I feel only safe as an emeritus professor!
There’s this narrative that is entrenched in some of the professions that there’s this mysterious thing called ‘socioeconomic status’ that is immutably correlated with health. And it isn’t.
I do worry about a world in which the rich get to write the rules.
Without properly functioning civil courts, there is no guarantee that innovative entrepreneurs can claim the rewards of their ideas.
Without effective states working with active and involved citizens, there is little chance for the growth that is needed to abolish global poverty.
People on left have to better understand what are the benefits of inequality, and people on right have to understand better what the dangers are… It has to become properly hardwired into the American democratic debate in a way that it hasn’t really been.
China and India are the success stories; rapid growth in large countries is an engine that can make a colossal dent in world poverty.
The best moments are when, together with… you bring information, you bring data to bear in a way that helps illuminate something that you just don’t really understand. Even if it doesn’t completely clarify it, it just, you know, helps bring it together.
The absence of state capacity – that is, of the services and protections that people in rich countries take for granted – is one of the major causes of poverty and deprivation around the world.
It is true that globalization has fueled greater income inequality. But much of this increase should be welcomed, not condemned. There is nothing inherently bad about inequality. Whether it is bad depends on how it comes about and what it does.
I believe, as do most people, that we have an obligation to assist the truly destitute.
I, who do not believe in socialized health-care, would advocate a single-payment system… because it will get this monster that we’ve created out of the economy and allow the rest of capitalism to flourish without the awful things that healthcare is doing to us.
Inequality is an enormously complicated thing that is both good and bad.
I think there are a lot of policies that have been unfriendly to workers’ wages.
I’m very keen that we have this debate about the good parts of inequality and the bad parts of inequality. It’s not a one-sided thing.
Policies aimed at reversing globalization will lead only to a decrease in real income as goods become more expensive.
I feel passionately about measurement – about how difficult it is, about how much theory and conceptualization is involved in measurement, and indeed, how much politics is involved.
I’m not a left-wing nut pushing for single-payer!
The history of Montana has been of the government giving land grants to people that could not possibly turn it into decent farms. And that’s destroying their lives. So they don’t see the government as something that’s out there to help them.
Americans, like many citizens of rich countries, take for granted the legal and regulatory system, the public schools, health care and social security for the elderly, roads, defense and diplomacy, and heavy investments by the state in research, particularly in medicine.
Growth does not bring any ‘automatic’ improvement in the health component of wellbeing.
I’ve written about how mortality is a wonderful indicator of societal progress.
I’m in favor of inequality if it comes about from people making great innovations that make us all better off. And I think those people deserve to be rich. But the people who get rich by lobbying the Congress to give them special protections that come out of the hides of the workers seems to be a bad idea.
Inequality is not so much a cause of economic, political, and social processes as a consequence. Some of these processes are good, some are bad, and some are very bad indeed.
A lot of people, including me, are worried that inequality will lead to bad things.
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