Quotes from Angus Deaton

To worry about these consequences of extreme inequality has nothing to do with being envious of the rich and everything to with the fear that rapidly growing top incomes are a threat to the wellbeing of everyone else.

This book is about the endless dance between progress and inequality, about how progress creates inequality, and how inequality can sometimes be helpful—showing others the way, or providing incentives for catching up—and sometimes unhelpful—when those who have escaped protect their positions by destroying the escape routes behind them.

One escape route from this negative conclusion is to argue, once again, that progress is being understated because quality improvements and new goods are not being adequately captured in the statistics. That would mean that inflation is being overstated, because some of the increase in prices comes from better things, not just from dearer things. If so, the poverty line is being increased too fast, and an ever-increasing proportion of the poor are not poor at all. If

If democracy becomes plutocracy, those who are not rich are effectively disenfranchised. Justice Louis Brandeis famously argued that the United States could have either democracy or wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but not both. The political equality that is required by democracy is always under threat from economic inequality, and the more extreme the economic inequality, the greater the threat to democracy.

It can be bad if the winners try to stop others from following them, pulling up the ladders behind them.

We should also be careful not to count the "leisure" of the unemployed as a benefit. Those who have lost their jobs are not choosing to spend more time at home, and study after study has documented that unemployed people are among the most dissatisfied with their lives. So the data in Figure 1 would not be improved by any mechanical adjustment for the value of leisure.

Globalization gives workers in Asia better access to rich-country markets than ever before, and they can do many of the jobs that used to be done in the rich countries, even without being able to migrate. If this happens on a large scale, Asian wages will rise, and American and European wages will fall, narrowing earnings inequality in the world as a whole. The

Most of the private "physicians" visited by the people we talked to in Rajasthan were not qualified doctors but quacks of one kind or another—what in Rajasthan are slightingly referred to as "Bengali doctors.

Mark Nathan Cohen, whose Health and the Rise of Civilization

The evolution of income can be looked at from three different perspectives: growth, poverty, and inequality. Growth is about the average and how it changes, poverty about the bottom, and inequality about how widely incomes are spread across families or people. The

As we already know from the poverty numbers, the bottom fifth of families gained very little. The growth in their average incomes was less than 0.2 percent a year over the past forty-four years and, even before the recession, their real incomes were no higher than they had been in the late 1970s. Average incomes of the top fifth, by contrast, grew more quickly, at 1.6 percent a year, though not as quickly as those of the top 5 percent, whose average incomes grew at 2.1 percent a year. Once

The slowdown in growth is likely overstated, because the statisticians miss a lot of quality improvements, especially for services, which represent an increasing share of national output. The information revolution and its associated devices do more for wellbeing than we can measure. That these pleasures are barely captured in the growth statistics tells us about the inadequacies of the statistics, not the inadequacies of the technology or the joys that it brings.

Indeed, as we shall see, it is a bad mistake to confuse life satisfaction and happiness; the former is an overall judgment about life that comes from consideration, while the latter is an emotion, a mood, or a feeling, which is part of experiencing life.16

The decade of the 1960s was the postwar golden age, with an average growth rate of more than 4 percent a year, a rate that is high enough to increase incomes by a half in ten years. Growth

People who suffer deprivation in terms of material living standards—such as much of the population of sub-Saharan Africa—are generally also the people who suffer deprivation in terms of health; they get to live for fewer years, and they live with the misery of seeing many of their children die.

The explanation for why progress should be so uneven differs from case to case; the reason why poor people are more likely to smoke is not the same as the reason why so many poor children are not vaccinated. These accounts are to come, but for now the point is simply that health progress creates gaps in health just as material progress creates gaps in living standards.

one careful study estimates that the average income of all the inhabitants of the world increased between seven and eight times from 1820 to 1992.

At the same time, the fraction of the world's population in extreme poverty fell from 84 to 24 percent. This

Global poverty is a cosmopolitan idea and its measurement must be performed on a cosmopolitan basis.

Until the early 1970s, the United States was the very model of a modern major economy.

Life is a great escape from deprivation and early death.

But on average over all the countries, rich or poor, a fourfold difference in incomes comes with a one-point increase in the evaluation of life.

The rising cost of medical care has also been important; most employees receive health insurance as part of their overall compensation, and most research shows that increases in premiums ultimately come out of wages.16 Indeed, average wages have tended to do badly when health-care costs are rising most rapidly and to do better when health-care costs are rising more slowly.

Rising wage inequality is a by-product of this mechanism and plays a key role in raising the supply of skills. So while the inequality is not particularly welcome in its own right, it is part of a system that is raising living standards for everyone.