Angus Deaton

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Angus Deaton

Sir Angus Stewart Deaton (born October 19, 1945 in Edinburgh ) is a British-American economist . He is Professor of Economics at Princeton University and received the 2015 Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics "for his analysis of consumption, poverty and welfare ".

Life

Angus Deaton

Deaton was born in Edinburgh, Scotland. He studied economics at Cambridge University ( BA , 1967; MA , 1971) and received his Ph.D. PhD . His doctoral supervisor was the economist Richard Stone .

He then taught from 1976 to 1983 at the University of Bristol as Professor of Econometrics . In 1978 he was the first ever to receive the Frisch Medal . Together with John Muellbauer , he published 'An Almost Ideal Demand System' in the American Economic Review in 1980, and this work is still considered one of his most important.

He moved from Bristol to Princeton, where he has taught at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and at Princeton University's Faculty of Economics as Dwight D. Eisenhower Professor of International Affairs and Professor of Economics and International Affairs . From 1990 to 1991 he was an Overseas Fellow at Churchill College, University of Cambridge.

His wife is the economist Anne Case.

Act

Research interests

Deaton's research interests are health and development economics as well as survey and the microeconomic behavior of households .

The Deaton Paradox

Deaton formulated together with John Y. Campbell in 1989 in the paper Why Is Consumption So Smooth? the Deaton paradox later named after him . They sit in with the hypothesis of permanent income of Milton Friedman apart. According to the hypothesis, people base their consumption decisions on their long-term income and increase their spending by less than their income growth. Consumer spending would therefore fluctuate less than income (it is “smoother”).

Although this hypothesis can explain aggregated data very well, Campbell and Deaton were able to show in their time series analysis of quarterly microdata that the hypothesis is not always true. On the contrary, it depends on the type of income involved and whether households expect further income increases in addition to previous income increases. In this case, consumer spending would fluctuate almost twice as much as income. The paradox is that there is still consumption smoothing in aggregated data that the now corrected hypothesis of permanent incomes does not predict.

Criticism of development aid

Deaton is a sharp critic of development aid . This would create an immediate benefit, but because it is not provided by the state itself and comes from outside, it destroys the social contract and therefore causes great damage. Development aid thus hampers the creation of a functioning state. If the services were brought in from outside, the democratic mechanism ("[E] in democratic or reciprocal interaction of taxes and expenditure") would no longer work. The interplay between the transfer of responsibility and accountability, as it exists in a modern society, is thus undermined.

“It is very cynical and extremely vicious to do something that harms people. If we help just to feel good, if we tell ourselves we have to do something for people and that's why I'm donating 1,000 francs, then that's not good, because we are doing it for ourselves. "

Instead, he sees potential in helping to draw up economic agreements that would do badly for developing countries. He is also a sharp opponent of the World Bank because it is dominated by the United States, which is already evident from the fact that the USA has provided all presidents since it was founded.

Memberships and volunteer work

In 2009, Deaton served as President of the American Economic Association . In 2014 he was elected to the American Philosophical Society and in 2015 to the National Academy of Sciences . He is a corresponding member of the British Academy , a member of the Econometric Society , Royal Society of Edinburgh and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

Honors

Works

Books

  • with John Muellbauer : Economics and Consumer Behavior. Cambridge University Press, New York 1980, ISBN 0-521-29676-5 .
  • Understanding Consumption. (= Clarendon Lectures in Economics). Clarendon Press, Oxford 1992, ISBN 0-19-828824-7 .
  • The Analysis of Household Surveys: A Microeconometric Approach to Development Policy. Johns Hopkins University Press for the World Bank, Baltimore 1997. PDF
  • The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality . Princeton University Press, Princeton 2013, ISBN 978-1-4008-4796-9 .
    • German: The great outbreak. Of the poverty and prosperity of nations . Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 2017, ISBN 978-3-608-94911-7 .
  • with Anne Case: Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism . Princeton University Press, 2020, ISBN 978-0-691-19078-5 .

Articles in collective works

Web links

Commons : Angus Deaton  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b The Prize in Economic Sciences 2015. nobelprize.org, October 12, 2015, accessed on October 12, 2015 (English).
  2. ^ Even Famous Female Economists Get No Respect - The New York Times. In: nytimes.com. Retrieved March 26, 2017 .
  3. ^ John Y Campbell, Angus Deaton: Why Is Consumption So Smooth? In: The Review of Economic Studies . tape 56 , no. 3 , 1989, pp. 357-373 , JSTOR : 2297552 (English).
  4. ^ Francis X. Diebold, Glenn D. Rudebusch: Is Consumption Too Smooth? Long Memory and the Deaton Paradox . In: The Review of Economics and Statistics . tape 73 , no. 1 , 1991, p. 1-9 , doi : 10.2307 / 2109680 (English).
  5. ^ Angus Deaton: Development aid is cynical. on: srf.ch , 2015.
  6. ^ Past and Present Officers. aeaweb.org ( American Economic Association ), accessed October 21, 2015 .
  7. ↑ Awards. econometricsociety.org , accessed on August 16, 2015 .
  8. ^ Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought. ase.tufts.edu, accessed October 12, 2015 .
personal data
SURNAME Deaton, Angus
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Deaton, Angus Stewart (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British-American economist
DATE OF BIRTH October 19, 1945
PLACE OF BIRTH Edinburgh , Scotland