Inequality is partly a marker of success.
— Angus Deaton
I'm in favor of inequality if it comes about from people making great innovations that make us all better off. And I think those people deserve to be rich. But the people who get rich by lobbying the Congress to give them special protections that come out of the hides of the workers seems to be a bad idea.
Foreign aid, especially when there is a lot of it, affects how institutions function and how they change.
Many people have mixed views about unions, but unions used to give people some measure of control at work. They gave them a social life and political representation in Washington, which doesn't really exist anymore.
I believe, as do most people, that we have an obligation to assist the truly destitute.
The World Bank adjusts its poverty estimates for differences in prices across countries, but it ignores differences in needs.
I think putting numbers together into a coherent framework always seemed to me to be what really matters.
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.
It's a murky world out there, and it's hard to figure things out sometimes.
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.
I was born in Edinburgh, in Scotland, a few days after the end of the Second World War. Both my parents had left school at a very young age, unwillingly in my father's case. Yet both had deep effects on my education, my father influencing me toward measurement and mathematics, and my mother toward writing and history.
The history of Montana has been of the government giving land grants to people that could not possibly turn it into decent farms. And that's destroying their lives. So they don't see the government as something that's out there to help them.
In Scotland, I was brought up to think of policemen as allies and to ask one for help when I needed it.
Like many in academia and in the development industry, I am among globalization's greatest beneficiaries - those who are able to sell our services in markets that are larger and richer than our parents could have dreamed of.
It is true that globalization has fueled greater income inequality. But much of this increase should be welcomed, not condemned. There is nothing inherently bad about inequality. Whether it is bad depends on how it comes about and what it does.
Broadly shared progress can be achieved with policies that are designed specifically to benefit consumers and workers. And such policies need not even include redistributive taxation, which many workers oppose. Rather, they can focus on ways to encourage competition and discourage rent-seeking.
Inequality is not so much a cause of economic, political, and social processes as a consequence. Some of these processes are good, some are bad, and some are very bad indeed.
If someone thinks of something, some new innovation that benefits us all, and the market works properly, they get richly rewarded for that, and that's just terrific, and that creates inequality.
I think there are a lot of policies that have been unfriendly to workers' wages.
Political and legal institutions play a central role in setting the environment that can nurture prosperity and economic growth.
You can find episodes like the flu epidemic or war times when mortality rates go up, but sustained increases in mortality for any major group in any society are really quite rare. It's an indication that something is very wrong.
International cooperation is vital to keeping our globe safe, commerce flowing, and our planet habitable.
I think inequality has gone past the point where it's helping us all get rich, and it's really becoming a serious threat.
It's hard to know what's going to be replaced by technology tomorrow. It feels like we're all at risk. I feel only safe as an emeritus professor!
I don't think income solely determines health. I think lots of other things determine health.
I have the great good fortune that one of my collaborators in work, Anne Case, is also my collaborator in life.
I didn't care for school much - it was very strict, corporal punishment in the form of the 'tawse' was common and unpredictable, and I was often afraid - but I believe that I did well enough; indeed, my mother always regretted that I had not stayed long enough to become the 'dux,' as the best pupil was called.
The people who hate immigrants are people who have never met them!
Without properly functioning civil courts, there is no guarantee that innovative entrepreneurs can claim the rewards of their ideas.
Europeans tend to feel more positively about their governments than do Americans, for whom the failures and unpopularity of their federal, state, and local politicians are a commonplace. Yet Americans' various governments collect taxes and, in return, provide services without which they could not easily live their lives.
The globalization that has rescued so many in poor countries has harmed some people in rich countries, as factories and jobs migrated to where labor is cheaper.
Policies aimed at reversing globalization will lead only to a decrease in real income as goods become more expensive.
Despite broad public support, raising the minimum wage is always difficult owing to the disproportionate influence that wealthy firms and donors have in Congress.
The call to rein in globalization reflects a belief that it has eliminated jobs in the West, sending them East and South. But the biggest threat to traditional jobs is not Chinese or Mexican; it is a robot.
People on left have to better understand what are the benefits of inequality, and people on right have to understand better what the dangers are... It has to become properly hardwired into the American democratic debate in a way that it hasn't really been.
Globalization and technical change are the guarantee of our future prosperity. And reversing on that will not only make things worse, but it will make things worse for a very large number of people around the world who have benefitted - people in China and India who have been dragged out of the most awful poverty.
Aid can only reach the victims of war by paying off the warlords and, sometimes, extending the war.
As recognized since ancient times, the coexistence of very rich and very poor leads to two possibilities, neither a happy one. The rich can rule alone, disenfranchising or even enslaving the poor, or the poor can rise up and confiscate the wealth of the rich.
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.
A good theoretical account must explain all of the evidence that we see. If it doesn't work everywhere, we have no idea what we are talking about, and all is chaos.
I'm not a left-wing nut pushing for single-payer!
The best moments are when, together with... you bring information, you bring data to bear in a way that helps illuminate something that you just don't really understand. Even if it doesn't completely clarify it, it just, you know, helps bring it together.
When I was a boy living in Edinburgh in Scotland, especially in December, when the hours of daylight were few, and it was cold, and often wet, I used to dream of escaping to a tropical magic kingdom.
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.
The Nobel thing is like dying and going to heaven for a while. It's like being transported to a fairyland.
Americans, like many citizens of rich countries, take for granted the legal and regulatory system, the public schools, health care and social security for the elderly, roads, defense and diplomacy, and heavy investments by the state in research, particularly in medicine.
When citizens believe that the elite care more about those across the ocean than those across the train tracks, insurance has broken down, we divide into factions, and those who are left behind become angry and disillusioned with a politics that no longer serves them.
International development aid is based on the Robin Hood principle: take from the rich and give to the poor.
The first thing we need to understand when we think about globalization is that it has benefited an enormous number of people who are not part of the global elite.
Although globalization and technological change have disrupted traditional work arrangements, both processes have the potential to benefit everyone. The fact that they have not suggests that the wealthy have captured the benefits for themselves.
