Deaton: A trilogy

This essay reviews three books spanning a decade, written by Angus Deaton, the 2015 winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics.The second was co-authored with his wife, also an accomplished Professor of Economics.Deaton was brought up in Cambridge, England, 'in the shadow of Keynes'.Nick Stern was a friend and fellow undergraduate at Cambridge.Deaton was primarily influenced by two sources at Cambridge.First, there was the work of Amartya Sen, Anthony Atkinson, and James Mirrlees on the various dimensions of inequality, redistributive taxation, and broader notions of well-being, including health and education.Second, there was Richard Stone who was his mentor and from whom he learned about measurement.What distinguishes Deaton is his very careful attention to data, including data deficiencies, how data is assembled, how reliable is the data, and its appropriate interpretationwhat it does and does not show.In particular, he warns that statistics are the numbers of the state, and politics determines every detail of how they are collected (2023, 73).It is the meticulous analysis of data that is the hallmark of all three books.The Great Escape (2013) is a positive and hopeful story of how over the last 250 years there have been great improvements in human life, including longevity, and material living standards.Indeed, the historical interaction between progress and inequality is a constant theme in Deaton's writings.The 'escape' of the book's title is from poverty, deprivation, and early death.Economic growth, he argues, has on balance been enormously beneficial.Globally, average income increased between seven and eight times from 1820 to 1992 while extreme poverty fell from 84% to 24%.Globally, the number of people living in extreme poverty has fallen by half in the last forty years.However, this was accompanied by huge increases in income inequality, both between and within countries (2013, 167), although most inequality in the world is between countries, rather than differences within them.Another theme is broader, looking beyond wealth to