Economic growth is very important, but it is not the only thing, and it must be accompanied by sharing with those who are left behind, through effective social services and provision.
— Angus Deaton
European countries give much larger shares of aid for poverty relief than the U.S.
High quality, open, transparent, and uncensored data are needed to support democracy.
There is much that remains mysterious about why some countries grow rapidly and some grow slowly.
I feel passionately about measurement - about how difficult it is, about how much theory and conceptualization is involved in measurement, and indeed, how much politics is involved.
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.
China and India are the success stories; rapid growth in large countries is an engine that can make a colossal dent in world poverty.
My work on happiness is the only thing I've ever done where I've heard people in the supermarket talking about it, for instance.
A lot of people in America and Europe feel that their governments are not representing them very much.
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.
Without effective states working with active and involved citizens, there is little chance for the growth that is needed to abolish global poverty.
I've written about how mortality is a wonderful indicator of societal progress.
It's hard to think that Mark Zuckerberg is actually impoverishing anyone by getting rich with Facebook. But driverless cars are another matter entirely.
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.
Success breeds inequality, and you don't want to choke off success.
You can certainly draw a picture of 2016 which makes it look like the 1930s, which, of course, is what everyone is doing.
After a day's fishing, I'll know the solution to something or have good ideas that were not accessible before.
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 think lower wages have made men much less marriageable than they were before. It's not just like your job goes to hell. Your marriage goes to hell. You don't know your children anymore. Your children have a higher chance of being screwed up.
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.
Growth does not bring any 'automatic' improvement in the health component of wellbeing.
A lot of people, including me, are worried that inequality will lead to bad things.
In the high-income English-speaking world, the elderly get treated very well indeed.
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.
We are trying to say that low income and low job opportunities, after a long period of time, tears at the social fabric.
I don't think Brexit is going to help people in Britain.
What is not OK is for rent-seekers to get rich.
The absence of state capacity - that is, of the services and protections that people in rich countries take for granted - is one of the major causes of poverty and deprivation around the world.
A lot of our sources for income-inequality measures come from household surveys in which people report how much they earned in the last year, how much income they have, and so on. Those are not as well funded as they should be. We need to have those numbers.
I don't think that globalisation is anywhere near the threat that robots are.
Inequality is an enormously complicated thing that is both good and bad.
I do worry about a world in which the rich get to write the rules.
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.
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.
Businesses have moved from doing business to doing lobbying, and I think that's a very bad thing.
Globalization obviously has the potential to be good. That doesn't mean it's good for everybody. There's a very large number of people in India and China who benefited directly from globalization, but it doesn't mean everybody in America benefits from globalization.
If poverty and underdevelopment are primarily consequences of poor institutions, then by weakening those institutions or stunting their development, large aid flows do exactly the opposite of what they are intended to do.
The world is hugely unequal.
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?
You accumulate emotional wisdom as you get older. You know, when you're 25, you go on blind dates with people that, when you're 50, you know to stay away from.
I grew up pretty poor - not poor compared with people in India or Africa who are really poor, but poor enough so that the worry about money really cast a pall over your life a lot of the time.
If you think about those bailouts that happened in 2008, that was a situation in which the government gave, at our expense, enormous sums of money to some of the richest people who have ever existed on Earth.
The key is to somehow find a way of tackling rent-seeking, crony capitalism, and corruption - legal and illegal - and build fairer, more equal society without compromising innovation or entrepreneurship.
The very wealthy have little need for state-provided education or health care... They have even less reason to support health insurance for everyone or to worry about the low quality of public schools that plagues much of the country.
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.
I both love inequality and am terrified of it.
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.
Putting, say, an 85 per cent income tax rate is unlikely to bring in much revenue.
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.
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.
