## PEOPLE IN ECONOMICS

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**Canonical URL:** [PEOPLE IN ECONOMICS](https://www.imf.org/-/media/files/publications/fandd/article/2018/march/people.pdf)

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### Biography and career trajectory
- Born days after the end of the Second World War; grew up in 1950s Edinburgh and later a small village near the Scottish-English border.
- Scholarship to Fettes College at age 13 as one of two boys from underprivileged backgrounds admitted that year.
- Admitted to the University of Cambridge to study mathematics; switched to economics after finding mathematics “incredibly badly taught.”
- Worked summers selling clothes aboard the transatlantic ocean liners Queen Elizabeth and Queen Mary; disembarked at New York’s Pier 92.
- After graduation in 1967, brief stint at the Bank of England; returned to Cambridge for a PhD and work as a research assistant.
- 1975: became professor of econometrics at the University of Bristol.
- Spent the 1979–80 academic year on sabbatical at Princeton; moved permanently to Princeton in 1983.
- Instrumental at the World Bank in the evolution of the Living Standards Measurement Study and in the development of household surveys.

### Key research contributions and insights
- Developed the Almost Ideal Demand System with John Muellbauer; the Nobel Committee noted it “remains a cornerstone of demand estimation around the world.”
- Used empirical observation (e.g., hesitating to buy coffee in high-inflation 1970s Britain) to argue that unanticipated inflation can increase savings.
- Formulated the Deaton Paradox: the representative agent version of the permanent income hypothesis is internally inconsistent because the time-series behavior of average income implies that temporary changes in income should lead to larger changes in consumption, not smaller ones.
- Challenged the poverty trap thesis: with Shankar Subramanian, showed in India that an adequate diet cost just 5 percent of a day’s wages, concluding malnutrition is a consequence, rather than a cause, of poverty.
- Pioneered methods for using and interpreting household surveys to describe consumption, analyze birth cohorts, and estimate local market prices—work conducted extensively in India.

### Health, wages, and the opioid epidemic (Case and Deaton research)
- 2015 paper “Rising Morbidity and Mortality in Midlife among White Non-Hispanic Americans in the 21st Century”:
  - Found mortality rates for non-Hispanic white men and women ages 45 to 54 increased by half a percent a year from 1999 to 2013, after falling in the previous two decades.
  - Identified drugs, alcohol, and suicide as the main drivers of the rebound in mortality, with trends more pronounced among those without a college degree.
  - Found morbidity also increased, with significantly more reports of poor physical and mental health.
  - Contrasted these trends with continued declines in mortality among other US demographic groups and in other advanced economies.
  - Linked the timing of increased availability of prescription painkillers (opioids) in the late 1990s to the increases in mortality and morbidity.
  - Highlighted economic insecurity factors: slow growth in US median wages and shifts from defined-benefit to defined-contribution pension plans transferring financial risk to employees.
  - Warned that failure to control the epidemic could result in a “lost generation.”
- 2017 follow-up paper “Mortality and Morbidity in the 21st Century” found that the trend continued through 2015.

### The Great Escape, foreign aid, and globalization
- In The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality (2013), argued:
  - Foreign aid can be harmful because it makes recipient governments more accountable to foreign donors than to their own people, eroding the social contract and reducing incentives to strengthen institutions and undertake reforms.
  - The past 70 years have seen remarkable reductions in poverty and improvements in health worldwide; these advances are “inconceivable” without globalization.
  - Rejected the notion that globalization is the problem; blamed winners who “pull up the ladders behind them,” leading to poor public policies, corporate rent seeking, inadequate health care, and stagnant wages.
- Noted controversy and debate:
  - Critics highlight tangible benefits of aid (nurses, teachers, vaccinations, avoided deaths) against the claim of long-term institutional damage.
  - Others argue the key issue is how foreign aid is delivered rather than aid per se.

### Personal life, honors, and public engagement
- Married to economist Anne Case in 1997; the two work in adjacent offices at Princeton and have collaborated on high-profile research.
- December 2015: received the Nobel Prize in economics.
- Their 2015 paper generated public attention comparable to or exceeding press from the Nobel Prize.
- December 2016: knighted by Prince William, Duke of Cambridge; styled Professor Sir Angus Deaton.
- Personal interests include fly-fishing, cooking, and travel.

*Source: PEOPLE (PDF chapter/section).*

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_Source: https://www.imf.org/-/media/files/publications/fandd/article/2018/march/people.pdf_