Angus Deaton

Overview

Angus Deaton is the Dwight D. Eisenhower Professor of Economics and International Affairs Emeritus at Princeton University. He received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2015, cited for his analysis of consumption, poverty, and welfare. His research spans consumption measurement, poverty in developing countries, health inequality, and — in collaboration with Anne Case — the deaths of despair phenomenon in the United States.

Key Contributions

• Deaths of Despair (Case and Deaton 2015): Co-documented the reversal in midlife white non-Hispanic mortality after 1998, identifying drug/alcohol poisoning, suicide, and chronic liver disease as the three-cause cluster. Quantified the counterfactual scale (96,000–488,500 excess deaths), the morbidity deterioration, and the education gradient.
• Mortality and Morbidity in the 21st Century (Case and Deaton 2017): Extended through 2015; introduced the cumulative disadvantage hypothesis — cohort-entry labor market deterioration as the underlying driver rather than contemporaneous income. Key empirical test: BNH and Hispanic incomes tracked WNH incomes, yet their mortality kept falling, falsifying the contemporaneous income explanation. The paper uses a latent factor model showing that suicide, pain, drug overdose, non-marriage, and labor force detachment all move in parallel across WNH non-BA birth cohorts 1940–1988.
• Nobel Prize (2015): Awarded for analysis of consumption, poverty, and welfare — particularly for methods to measure household consumption surveys and assess living standards across countries.
• The Great Escape (2013): Examined long-run improvements in living standards and their distributional consequences globally.
• The Determinants of Mortality (Cutler, Deaton, and Lleras-Muney 2006): JEP synthesis arguing that knowledge and technology — not income — are the ultimate determinants of mortality. The Preston Curve (income vs. LE across countries) has shifted upward dramatically over the 20th century due to public health technology diffusion, not income growth. Cross-country time-series regressions find income explains only ~10–15% of LE changes. Within poor countries, institutional capacity is the binding constraint; within rich countries, education's role as a "fundamental cause" (Link and Phelan) explains the persistent SES-mortality gradient.

Related

• Anne Case
• Deaths of Despair
• Morbidity-Mortality Distinction
• Income-Mortality Gradient
• Preston Curve
• Adriana Lleras-Muney
• David Cutler
• Education-Mortality Gradient

Sources

• Case and Deaton 2015 — Rising Morbidity and Mortality in Midlife Among White Non-Hispanic Americans in the 21st Century
• Case and Deaton 2017 — Mortality and Morbidity in the 21st Century
• Cutler Deaton and Lleras-Muney 2006 — The Determinants of Mortality
• Autor, Dorn, and Hanson 2019 — When Work Disappears Manufacturing Decline and the Falling Marriage Market Value of Young Men
• Gelman and Auerbach 2016a — Age-Aggregation Bias in Mortality Trends
• Sanzenbacher et al 2017 — Rising Inequality in Life Expectancy by Socioeconomic Status
• Woolf and Schoomaker 2019 — Life Expectancy and Mortality Rates in the United States, 1959-2017