Angus Deaton

Princeton University

Angus Deaton is a British-American economist and Senior Scholar at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, and Professor Emeritus of Economics and International Affairs. He was awarded the 2015 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for his analysis of consumption, poverty, and welfare. Deaton made three major contributions to economics. First, in work on consumer demand, he developed the Almost Ideal Demand System (AIDS) with Angus Muellbauer, one of the most flexible and widely used empirical frameworks for estimating how households allocate spending across goods as prices and income change—a cornerstone of applied welfare analysis. Second, his work on consumption and savings tested and refined the permanent income hypothesis and life-cycle model, using Indian panel data to show that consumption tracks income more closely than simple models predict, contributing to understanding of consumption smoothing, insurance, and the buffer-stock model of saving. Third, and perhaps most influentially, Deaton's work on poverty measurement in developing countries—particularly his Purchasing Power Parity adjustments and analysis of survey data quality—shaped global poverty measurement methodology at the World Bank. His book The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality provided a sweeping narrative of how economic development has dramatically improved human well-being. His recent work on deaths of despair (with Anne Case) documenting rising mortality among middle-aged white Americans without college degrees has had enormous social and policy impact.