Princeton’s Angus Deaton wins Nobel prize for economics,
Scottish economist Angus Deaton, who has studied relationships among income, consumption and poverty by blending economics with politics, psychology and philosophy, said he wasn’t quite sure what he did until he won the Nobel Prize in economics Monday.
“I’ve always thought I was unlikely to win this prize because I’ve never really had a field,” the hulking but soft-spoken Princeton University professor, 69, told reporters, students and faculty at the school. But when the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences described why he won the Nobel Memorial Prize in economic sciences, “I thought, ‘Oh, that’s what I’ve been doing.’ ”
By rooting his study of macroeconomics in “detailed individual choices,” Deaton’s research “helped transform the fields of microeconomics, macroeconomics, and development economics,” the academy said. It said Deaton’s work has revolved around how consumers distribute their spending, how much is saved vs. spent and ways to measure and analyze welfare and poverty.
But in a discipline awash in statistics, Deaton has insisted the big picture can’t be framed without first understanding individual behavior and differences among people. As a result, he developed detailed surveys to compile data on households, including in pov- erty-stricken sections of India.
“He takes it from the ground up,” says Cecilia Rouse, dean of Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and a colleague of Deaton’s since 1992. “He cares deeply and he thinks deeply. … And he’s not just interested in academics. He understands how important it is for public policy.”
His work includes a 2010 study that found Americans need a salary of $75,000 a year to be happy but amounts above that do nothing to improve well-being. He also has found that taller people are happier, and he has studied the relationship between income and calorie consumption.
Ufuk Akcigit, a University of Chicago economist recently collaborated with Deaton on a study of why innovation doesn’t increase the well-being of societies as much as expected. He said Deaton routinely pushed him and other colleagues to think about the subject from the perspective of the individual by genially but persistently showing them data to support his point. “He’s a gentleman,” he says.
Born in Edinburg, Scotland, in 1945, Deaton earned bachelor’s, master’s and doctorate degrees from the University of Cambridge and was a professor of econometrics at the University of Bristol before joining Princeton in 1983.
He told the Daily Princetonian in 2012 that he became interested in economics as a math student and “sort of drifted into” the field. Deaton, who holds U.S. and British citizenship, credited Princeton colleague and 2002 Nobel prize winner Daniel Kahneman for sparking his interest in the study of subjective well-being.
“He tried to get me interested in this and succeeded,” he told the newspaper.
Asked about his plans, Deaton, a fly-fishing buff, said, “I would like to get back to work.”