Deaton wins Nobel prize for economics
ANGUS Deaton of Princeton University was awarded the 2015 Nobel Prize in Economics for his analysis of consumption, poverty and welfare, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said yesterday.
When the academy called, “I was pretty sleepy… I was delighted”, Deaton said.
“Like many economists, I knew this was a possibility, and was delighted to hear from Stockholm.”
Fans were quick to applaud the choice. “Angus Deaton is the Obi-Wan Kenobi of Economics,” Amitabh Chandra of Harvard University said in a tweet. The 69-year-old laureate’s research has focused on health in both rich and poor countries, as well as on measuring poverty in India and around the world.
Born in Scotland, and a citizen of the US and the UK, Deaton obtained his PhD from the University of Cambridge. His 2013 book, The Great Escape, maps the origins of inequality and its fallout spanning 250 years of economic history.
“To design economic policy that promotes welfare and reduces poverty, we must first understand individual consumption choices,” the academy said.
“More than anyone else, Angus Deaton has enhanced this understanding. By linking detailed individual choices and aggregate outcomes, his research has helped transform the fields of micro-economics, macro-economics and development economics.”
Deaton’s early research has helped develop a greater understanding of consumer spending patterns and how people adapt their consumption to their incomes.
Deaton’s more recent focus on household surveys had helped to change development economics from a theoretical field based on aggregate data to an empirical field based on detailed individual data, the academy said.