Angus Deaton

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In Scotland, I was brought up to think of policemen as allies and to ask one for help when I needed it.

I have the great good fortune that one of my collaborators in work, Anne Case, is also my collaborator in life.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I think there are a lot of policies that have been unfriendly to workers' wages.

Without properly functioning civil courts, there is no guarantee that innovative entrepreneurs can claim the rewards of their ideas.

It's a murky world out there, and it's hard to figure things out sometimes.

After a day's fishing, I'll know the solution to something or have good ideas that were not accessible before.

Policies aimed at reversing globalization will lead only to a decrease in real income as goods become more expensive.

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.