Social Science Space

Economist Anne Case didn’t believe her eyes when she first identified the trend of what came to be called ‘deaths of despair’: looking at figures from the 1990s to the most recent data available from 2018, mortality among middle-aged, non-college-educated white Americans rose, stalled, then rose again.

When Angus Deaton crafted the term ‘randomista’ to denigrate the rampant use of randomized controlled trials in development economics, Angus Leigh saw an opportunity to make lemonade out of lemons. In this Social Science Bites podcasts he explains how he turned randomista into a compliment and promotes the use of trials to improve social programs worldwide.

Angus Deaton’s work is a model of what applied economics ought to be, says Ian Preston. No award the Nobel committee has made has pleased the author as much, for the recognition it gives both Deaton and the type of work he does.

Angus Deaton called for the applied microeconomists not to abandon economic theory in favor of experiments but instead to think more deeply about the consequences of economic theories and how they can be tested using real-world data. This is the approach he has followed throughout his career and what has led to him win a Nobel Prize.

The Nobel committee has awarded Princeton’s Angus Deaton ‘for his analysis of consumption, poverty, and welfare.’ But in fact, he was awarded for building bridges – between disciplines, between theory and reality, between people.

Angus Deaton is a social scientist and the author of The Great Escape: Health, Wealth and the Origins of Inequality. His Princeton colleague, the philosopher Peter Singer, argues that aid is vital to combat the terrible mortality rates in some countries. Angus Deaton disagrees..