# Angus Deaton **Angus Deaton** (b. 1945) is a Scottish-born economist at Princeton, awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2015 for his work on consumption, poverty, and welfare measurement. He matters to this knowledge base for three reasons that pull in different directions. **The optimist.** His 2013 book *The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality* is the canonical statement of the case that humanity has made enormous, real progress against poverty and early death — and that inequality is the shadow that progress casts. See [[Great Escape]]. **The aid skeptic.** The same book argues that large foreign-aid inflows corrode the accountability between poor-country governments and their own citizens. This argument has been detached from its author and used as cover for dismantling development assistance — a use Deaton has publicly rejected. **The recanter.** With Anne Case he documented the rise in American mid-life mortality they named "deaths of despair," work that connects the [[Great Divergence]] to a body count. Then in a March 2024 essay for the IMF, "Rethinking My Economics," he publicly reversed long-held positions on unions, free trade, and immigration, and indicted his own profession for ignoring power. > [!note] Stub — fill out > Needs: full biography, the Case–Deaton deaths-of-despair research arc, the randomized-controlled-trial methodology debate with development economists, and the reception of *Economics in America* (2023). ## See Also - [[Great Escape]] — the thesis this page is anchored to - [[Great Divergence]] — the American inequality story his later work speaks to - [[Poverty Rate]] — the measurement problems he spent a career on