Quotes from Angus Deaton

I don't think that globalisation is anywhere near the threat that robots are.

I think inequality has gone past the point where it's helping us all get rich, and it's really becoming a serious threat.

The call to rein in globalization reflects a belief that it has eliminated jobs in the West, sending them East and South. But the biggest threat to traditional jobs is not Chinese or Mexican; it is a robot.

As recognized since ancient times, the coexistence of very rich and very poor leads to two possibilities, neither a happy one. The rich can rule alone, disenfranchising or even enslaving the poor, or the poor can rise up and confiscate the wealth of the rich.

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.

People who have children, by and large, want children. People who don't want children are people who, by and large, don't want to have children. And why would you expect one set to be happier than another?

Globalisation, for me, seems to be not first-order harm, and I find it very hard not to think about the billion people who have been dragged out of poverty as a result.

I don't think Brexit is going to help people in Britain.

Parents tend to value their lives more highly than people without kids, but they're different in lots of ways: They're richer. They're better educated. They're healthier.

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.

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

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.

The World Bank adjusts its poverty estimates for differences in prices across countries, but it ignores differences in needs.

A lot of people, including me, are worried that inequality will lead to bad things.

It's hard to know what's going to be replaced by technology tomorrow. It feels like we're all at risk. I feel only safe as an emeritus professor!

A lot of people in America and Europe feel that their governments are not representing them very much.

The best moments are when, together with... you bring information, you bring data to bear in a way that helps illuminate something that you just don't really understand. Even if it doesn't completely clarify it, it just, you know, helps bring it together.

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

I doubt that Donald Trump would be happier... if he was a different person. But Trump is always telling people how great his life is and about all the great things that he's done, and that's also all about his income. And that's also what we found. If you ask people how their lives are going, as a whole, it seems they tend to point to income.

When citizens believe that the elite care more about those across the ocean than those across the train tracks, insurance has broken down, we divide into factions, and those who are left behind become angry and disillusioned with a politics that no longer serves them.

Success breeds inequality, and you don't want to choke off success.

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

Foreign aid, especially when there is a lot of it, affects how institutions function and how they change.

I was born in Edinburgh, in Scotland, a few days after the end of the Second World War. Both my parents had left school at a very young age, unwillingly in my father's case. Yet both had deep effects on my education, my father influencing me toward measurement and mathematics, and my mother toward writing and history.