Angus Deaton

One

of the tough decisions that we know frequently does not pay off involves education, right? And it's not so much the undergrad education, because there's plenty of research that shows, Nobel Prize winner Angus Deaton's research that says the greatest indicator of who falls below the poverty level is who does not have a college degree.

But master's degrees, the experience is widely different.

And one of your lifetime decisions is how much education does someone need?

The contemporary behavioral economics research on this question is genuinely useful alongside the philosophical tradition.

The most widely cited work from the psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton found that day-to-day emotional well-being rises with income up to a certain point.

After which, additional income produces diminishing and eventually negligible improvements in daily emotional experience, even though people's global life satisfaction, their evaluation of how their life is going overall, continues to rise somewhat with income well beyond that point.

Later research, including work by Matthew Killingsworth, has complicated the precise shape of this curve, suggesting the plateau may be less sharp than the original study found.

This is supported by most other reputable studies too, so the evidence is pretty clear on this one.

So much so that economists like William Easterly, Danby Samoyo, Haijun Chang, Angus Deaton and many others have made bold critiques of foreign aid which has forced the issue into mainstream discussion.

The findings feel counterintuitive and blows the previously discussed theory right out of the water.

How can giving a country money to invest in expanding its production, healthcare and education not help its economy grow? Well, there are a number of reasons.

In 1979, a planning commission task force tied the line to food, whatever it cost to buy 2,400 calories a day in villages and 2,100 in cities.

That held until Angus Deaton and Jean Drez showed that Indians were eating fewer calories even as their real incomes rose, possibly because their work had become less physically demanding.

So calories stopped telling you who was poor.

So in 2009, the Tendulkar Committee dropped calories altogether and built its line around a broader basket of spending.

So I kind of quit after the pilot.

And I have to say, Angus Deaton was a lot better at it than I was.

He was brilliant.

He was very good, wasn't he?

It's a much smaller minority ethnic community.

But secondly, because unlike in England and Wales, there has been a massive explosion in what Angus Deaton calls deaths of despair.

The number of white men particularly, but white people in general without degrees, dying prematurely tripled.

This is drugs, this is alcoholism, this is suicide.

And then there was another starter conference at Princeton, which I missed.

And Angus Deaton was there, a later Nobel laureate.

And Angus, again, is very far from a neuroscientist.

He's interested in demand systems.

I dearly miss him every day.

Angus Deaton says, a vitally important book.

My childhood is in your book.

I went to camp.