Quotes from 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.

In the high-income English-speaking world, the elderly get treated very well indeed.

There is much that remains mysterious about why some countries grow rapidly and some grow slowly.

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.

I've written about how mortality is a wonderful indicator of societal progress.

I don't think income solely determines health. I think lots of other things determine health.

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

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.

High quality, open, transparent, and uncensored data are needed to support democracy.

It's a murky world out there, and it's hard to figure things out sometimes.

I argue that experiments have no special ability to produce more credible knowledge than other methods, and that actual experiments are frequently subject to practical problems that undermine any claims to statistical or epistemic superiority.

The world is hugely unequal.

Inequality is not the same thing as unfairness; and, to my mind, it is the latter that has incited so much political turmoil in the rich world today.

The educational highlights I remember were not in the classroom. My father spent a lot of time with me when he could. He taught me how to take square roots, a skill I have retained but do not use often, except to check that I still remember.

My work shows how important it is that independent researchers should have access to data so that government statistics can be checked and so that the democratic debate within India can be informed by the different interpretations of different scholars.

There's this narrative that is entrenched in some of the professions that there's this mysterious thing called 'socioeconomic status' that is immutably correlated with health. And it isn't.

The Nobel thing is like dying and going to heaven for a while. It's like being transported to a fairyland.

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

I believe, as do most people, that we have an obligation to assist the truly destitute.

Putting, say, an 85 per cent income tax rate is unlikely to bring in much revenue.

I'm very keen that we have this debate about the good parts of inequality and the bad parts of inequality. It's not a one-sided thing.

I don't think equality is intrinsically valuable, meaning in and of itself. I'm not against inequality... if Bill Gates gets another hundred million dollars, it's no skin off my nose.

I really don't think we've become a plutocracy, but I worry about the enormous influence that money has in a democracy such as ours.

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.