Angus Deaton Quotes

Angus Deaton

Profession : Economist

Birth : October 19, 1945

Despite broad public support, raising the minimum wage is always difficult owing to the disproportionate influence that wealthy firms and donors have in Congress.

Angus Deaton

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.

Angus Deaton

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.

Angus Deaton

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.

Angus Deaton

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.

Angus Deaton

The people who hate immigrants are people who have never met them!

Angus Deaton

Growth does not bring any 'automatic' improvement in the health component of wellbeing.

Angus Deaton

Inequality is an enormously complicated thing that is both good and bad.

Angus Deaton

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.

Angus Deaton

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.

Angus Deaton

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.

Angus Deaton

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.

Angus Deaton

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.

Angus Deaton

After a day's fishing, I'll know the solution to something or have good ideas that were not accessible before.

Angus Deaton

European countries give much larger shares of aid for poverty relief than the U.S.

Angus Deaton

I think putting numbers together into a coherent framework always seemed to me to be what really matters.

Angus Deaton

I've always - and not always happily - considered myself an outsider. Certainly at Fettes. And then the Scots are always outsiders in England. They are always putting you in your place in one way or another, and there is this pretty rigid class hierarchy.

Angus Deaton

I think there are a lot of policies that have been unfriendly to workers' wages.

Angus Deaton

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.

Angus Deaton

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.

Angus Deaton