The Great Escape Quotes

“If poverty is not a result of lack of resources or opportunities, but of poor institutions, poor government, and toxic politics, giving money to poor countries—particularly giving money to the governments of poor countries—is likely to perpetuate and prolong poverty, not eliminate it. The”
― Angus Deaton, The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality

“To worry about these consequences of extreme inequality has nothing to do with being envious of the rich and everything to with the fear that rapidly growing top incomes are a threat to the wellbeing of everyone else.”
― Angus Deaton, The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality

“Averages are no consolation to those who have been left behind.”
― Angus Deaton, The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality

“This book is about the endless dance between progress and inequality, about how progress creates inequality, and how inequality can sometimes be helpful—showing others the way, or providing incentives for catching up—and sometimes unhelpful—when those who have escaped protect their positions by destroying the escape routes behind them.”
― Angus Deaton, The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality

“Economists focus on income, public health scholars focus on mortality and morbidity, and demographers focus on births, deaths, and the size of populations. All of these factors contribute to wellbeing, but none of them is wellbeing.”
― Angus Deaton, The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality

“It can be bad if the winners try to stop others from following them, pulling up the ladders behind them.”
― Angus Deaton, The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality

“Globalization gives workers in Asia better access to rich-country markets than ever before, and they can do many of the jobs that used to be done in the rich countries, even without being able to migrate. If this happens on a large scale, Asian wages will rise, and American and European wages will fall, narrowing earnings inequality in the world as a whole. The”
― Angus Deaton, The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality

“One escape route from this negative conclusion is to argue, once again, that progress is being understated because quality improvements and new goods are not being adequately captured in the statistics. That would mean that inflation is being overstated, because some of the increase in prices comes from better things, not just from dearer things. If so, the poverty line is being increased too fast, and an ever-increasing proportion of the poor are not poor at all. If”
― Angus Deaton, The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality

“We should also be careful not to count the “leisure” of the unemployed as a benefit. Those who have lost their jobs are not choosing to spend more time at home, and study after study has documented that unemployed people are among the most dissatisfied with their lives. So the data in Figure 1 would not be improved by any mechanical adjustment for the value of leisure.”
― Angus Deaton, The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality

“The effects of migration on poverty reduction dwarf those of free trade. Migrants who succeed in moving from poor countries to rich countries become better off than they were at home, and their remittances help their families do better at home. Remittances have very different effects than aid, and they can empower recipients to demand more from their governments, improving governance rather than undermining it. Of course, the politics of migration is even tougher than the politics of free trade, even in countries where the urge to help is most strongly developed. A helpful type of temporary migration is to provide undergraduate and graduate scholarships to the West, especially for Africans. With luck, these students will develop in a way that is independent of aid agencies or of their domestic regimes. Even if they do not return home, at least at once, the African diaspora is a fertile (and internal) source of development projects at home.”
― Angus Deaton, The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality

“If democracy becomes plutocracy, those who are not rich are effectively disenfranchised. Justice Louis Brandeis famously argued that the United States could have either democracy or wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but not both. The political equality that is required by democracy is always under threat from economic inequality, and the more extreme the economic inequality, the greater the threat to democracy.”
― Angus Deaton, The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality

“The rising cost of medical care has also been important; most employees receive health insurance as part of their overall compensation, and most research shows that increases in premiums ultimately come out of wages.16 Indeed, average wages have tended to do badly when health-care costs are rising most rapidly and to do better when health-care costs are rising more slowly.”
― Angus Deaton, The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality

“People who suffer deprivation in terms of material living standards—such as much of the population of sub-Saharan Africa—are generally also the people who suffer deprivation in terms of health; they get to live for fewer years, and they live with the misery of seeing many of their children die.”
― Angus Deaton, The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality

“The need to do something tends to trump the need to understand what needs to be done.”
― Angus Deaton, The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality

“Necessity may be the mother of invention, but there is nothing that guarantees a successful pregnancy.”
― Angus Deaton, The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality

“Economic growth has been the engine of international income inequality.”
― Angus Deaton, The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality

“Mark Nathan Cohen, whose Health and the Rise of Civilization”
― Angus Deaton, The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality

“The slowdown in growth is likely overstated, because the statisticians miss a lot of quality improvements, especially for services, which represent an increasing share of national output. The information revolution and its associated devices do more for wellbeing than we can measure. That these pleasures are barely captured in the growth statistics tells us about the inadequacies of the statistics, not the inadequacies of the technology or the joys that it brings.”
― Angus Deaton, The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality

“One key to African growth is what happens to commodity prices. Many African countries have long been and are still dependent on exports of “primary” commodities, mostly unprocessed minerals or agricultural crops. Botswana exports diamonds; South Africa, gold and diamonds; Nigeria and Angola, oil; Niger, uranium; Kenya, coffee; Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana, cocoa; Senegal, groundnuts; and so on. The world prices of primary commodities are notoriously volatile, with huge price increases in response to crop failures or increases in world demand and equally dramatic price collapses, none of which are easily predictable.”
― Angus Deaton, The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality

“In 2008, there were about 800 million people in the world living on less than $1.00 a day. On average, each of these people is “short” about $0.28 a day; their average daily expenditure is $0.72 instead of the $1.00 it would take to lift them out of poverty.1 We could make up the shortfall with less than a quarter of a billion dollars a day; $0.28 times 800 million is $0.22 billion. If the United States were to try to do this on its own, each American man, woman, and child would have to pay $0.75 each day, or $1.00 a day each if children were exempted. We could cut this to $0.50 a person per day if the adults of Britain, France, Germany, and Japan joined in. Even”
― Angus Deaton, The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality

“American family of four could buy enough cheap foods—like bulk rice, oatmeal, beans, and a few vegetables—to survive on $1,460 a year; one recent paper has priced out a “bare-bones” bundle for the United States at around $1.25 a person a day, or $1,825 a year for a family of four.14 Advocates of the validity of the line can also note, correctly, that 22 rupees a day buys a miserable life in India too, and that poor people and their children in India, if not hungry on a daily basis, are among the most malnourished in the world.”
― Angus Deaton, The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality

“After all, millions of people in India live on less than a dollar a day, converted at the PPP exchange rate of about 22 rupees per dollar, and the whole point of these exchange rates is to equalize purchasing power across countries. So if people can live in India on 22 rupees a day—and be far from the worst off—why can’t people in the United States live on a dollar a day?”
― Angus Deaton, The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality

“Global poverty is a cosmopolitan idea and its measurement must be performed on a cosmopolitan basis.”
― Angus Deaton, The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality

“To be able to use rich-country methods of production requires rich-country infrastructure—roads, railways, telecommunications, factories, and machines—not to mention rich-country educational levels, all of which take time and money to achieve. Yet the gaps between rich and poor provide plenty of incentives to make the investment in that infrastructure and equipment, and, as Robert Solow showed in one of the most famous papers in all of economics, average living standards should draw closer over time.4 Why this has not happened is a central question in economics. Perhaps the best answer is that poor countries lack the institutions—government capacity, a functioning legal and tax system, security of property rights, and traditions of trust—that are a necessary background for growth to take place.”
― Angus Deaton, The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality

“The decade of the 1960s was the postwar golden age, with an average growth rate of more than 4 percent a year, a rate that is high enough to increase incomes by a half in ten years. Growth”
― Angus Deaton, The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality

“If everyone were free to migrate from one country to another, wages in rich countries would fall and wages in poor countries would rise, and the world would be a much more equal place. Of course, opposition to lower wages in rich countries is precisely why people are not permitted to migrate at will, and it is why meals and haircuts are so cheap in poor countries. The price of land, like the price of labor, cannot be arbitraged between rich countries and poor countries. Cheap housing in India or Africa cannot be brought up to American prices by simply moving the land across the ocean. The presence of cheap land and cheap labor in poor countries explains why price levels in poor countries are so much lower than in rich countries. The market sets the exchange rate to equalize the prices of steel, gasoline, automobiles, and computers—everything that can be and is part of international trade—but the price level depends on goods and services that cannot be traded. Because those are cheaper in poor places, the poorer the country, the lower are the average prices.”
― Angus Deaton, The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality

“In the early years, top incomes were derived from capital, and the richest people were what Piketty and Saez call “coupon clippers,” who received most of their incomes from dividends and interest. The fortunes underlying these receipts were eroded over the century by increasingly progressive income and estate taxes. Those who used to live off their (or their ancestors’) fortunes have been replaced at the top by earners, people like CEOs of large firms, Wall Street bankers, and hedge fund managers, who receive their incomes as salaries, bonuses, and stock options. Entrepreneurial”
― Angus Deaton, The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality

“the top 10 percent of tax units in 2011 commanded 47 percent of all income, with an average income of $255,000. (A tax unit is not identical to a family, nor is income for tax purposes the same as other measures of income, but the overlaps are big enough that these trends are not misleading.)”
― Angus Deaton, The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality

“If the family incentive scheme runs long enough, inequality may be increased even more if the children save part of their allowances. Even if all children save the same share of their allowances, one is regularly adding more to her wealth than the others, and she will get steadily richer than her siblings. Saving will ramp up the inequality in the allowances, and inequality in wealth will soon dwarf the inequality in allowances, just as, in the actual economy, inequality in wealth dwarfs inequality in earnings. This ramping up of inequality will be even faster if the children who are naturally inclined to be tidy are also those who are naturally inclined to save for the future. In the society at large, the same forces are at work if those who are more oriented to the future and have more self-control are the same people who are more able to benefit from education and more likely to accumulate wealth from their education-enhanced earnings. There is a deep conflict between incentives and inequality, in families and in countries.”
― Angus Deaton, The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality

“Rising wage inequality is a by-product of this mechanism and plays a key role in raising the supply of skills. So while the inequality is not particularly welcome in its own right, it is part of a system that is raising living standards for everyone.”
― Angus Deaton, The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality