Top 100 Quotes & Sayings by Angus Deaton
Explore popular quotes and sayings by a British economist Angus Deaton.
Last updated on December 21, 2024.
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.
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.
The key is to somehow find a way of tackling rent-seeking, crony capitalism, and corruption - legal and illegal - and build fairer, more equal society without compromising innovation or entrepreneurship.
Globalization and technical change are the guarantee of our future prosperity. And reversing on that will not only make things worse, but it will make things worse for a very large number of people around the world who have benefitted - people in China and India who have been dragged out of the most awful poverty.
The first thing we need to understand when we think about globalization is that it has benefited an enormous number of people who are not part of the global elite.
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.
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.
Political and legal institutions play a central role in setting the environment that can nurture prosperity and economic growth.
I was born in Edinburgh, in Scotland, a few days after the end of the Second World War. Both my parents had left school at a very young age, unwillingly in my father's case. Yet both had deep effects on my education, my father influencing me toward measurement and mathematics, and my mother toward writing and history.
The people who hate immigrants are people who have never met them!
The call to rein in globalization reflects a belief that it has eliminated jobs in the West, sending them East and South. But the biggest threat to traditional jobs is not Chinese or Mexican; it is a robot.
Businesses have moved from doing business to doing lobbying, and I think that's a very bad thing.
Europeans tend to feel more positively about their governments than do Americans, for whom the failures and unpopularity of their federal, state, and local politicians are a commonplace. Yet Americans' various governments collect taxes and, in return, provide services without which they could not easily live their lives.
I'm not a left-wing nut pushing for single-payer!
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.
Inequality is not the same thing as unfairness; and, to my mind, it is the latter that has incited so much political turmoil in the rich world today.
In Scotland, I was brought up to think of policemen as allies and to ask one for help when I needed it.
The Nobel thing is like dying and going to heaven for a while. It's like being transported to a fairyland.
The World Bank adjusts its poverty estimates for differences in prices across countries, but it ignores differences in needs.
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.
Although globalization and technological change have disrupted traditional work arrangements, both processes have the potential to benefit everyone. The fact that they have not suggests that the wealthy have captured the benefits for themselves.
Many people have mixed views about unions, but unions used to give people some measure of control at work. They gave them a social life and political representation in Washington, which doesn't really exist anymore.
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.
Success breeds inequality, and you don't want to choke off success.
I don't think that globalisation is anywhere near the threat that robots are.
Globalisation, for me, seems to be not first-order harm, and I find it very hard not to think about the billion people who have been dragged out of poverty as a result.
Despite broad public support, raising the minimum wage is always difficult owing to the disproportionate influence that wealthy firms and donors have in Congress.
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.
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 believe, as do most people, that we have an obligation to assist the truly destitute.
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 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.
Without properly functioning civil courts, there is no guarantee that innovative entrepreneurs can claim the rewards of their ideas.
Economic growth is very important, but it is not the only thing, and it must be accompanied by sharing with those who are left behind, through effective social services and provision.
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.
I think inequality has gone past the point where it's helping us all get rich, and it's really becoming a serious threat.
Policies aimed at reversing globalization will lead only to a decrease in real income as goods become more expensive.
International development aid is based on the Robin Hood principle: take from the rich and give to the poor.
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.
Like many in academia and in the development industry, I am among globalization's greatest beneficiaries - those who are able to sell our services in markets that are larger and richer than our parents could have dreamed of.
I think putting numbers together into a coherent framework always seemed to me to be what really matters.
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.
A good theoretical account must explain all of the evidence that we see. If it doesn't work everywhere, we have no idea what we are talking about, and all is chaos.
Foreign aid, especially when there is a lot of it, affects how institutions function and how they change.
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.
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 didn't care for school much - it was very strict, corporal punishment in the form of the 'tawse' was common and unpredictable, and I was often afraid - but I believe that I did well enough; indeed, my mother always regretted that I had not stayed long enough to become the 'dux,' as the best pupil was called.
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.
I have the great good fortune that one of my collaborators in work, Anne Case, is also my collaborator in life.
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.
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.
When citizens believe that the elite care more about those across the ocean than those across the train tracks, insurance has broken down, we divide into factions, and those who are left behind become angry and disillusioned with a politics that no longer serves them.
Trade, migration, and modern communications have given us networks of friends and associates in other countries. We owe them much, but the social contract with our fellow citizens at home brings unique rights and responsibilities that must sometimes take precedence, especially when they are as destitute as the world's poorest people.
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!
I don't think income solely determines health. I think lots of other things determine health.
International cooperation is vital to keeping our globe safe, commerce flowing, and our planet habitable.
It's a murky world out there, and it's hard to figure things out sometimes.
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.
If poverty and underdevelopment are primarily consequences of poor institutions, then by weakening those institutions or stunting their development, large aid flows do exactly the opposite of what they are intended to do.
The educational highlights I remember were not in the classroom. My father spent a lot of time with me when he could. He taught me how to take square roots, a skill I have retained but do not use often, except to check that I still remember.
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