By Angus Deaton
How progress creates winners and losers
Subject
Themes
Throughout history, humanity has made remarkable escapes from poverty, disease, and premature death. Over the past 250 years, living standards have multiplied many times, life spans have more than doubled, and people live fuller lives than ever before. This progress, however, has created enormous inequalities between nations and within them.
Throughout history, humanity has made remarkable escapes from poverty, disease, and premature death. Over the past 250 years, living standards have multiplied many times, life spans have more than doubled, and people live fuller lives than ever before. This progress, however, has created enormous…
Angus Deaton received the 2015 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, with the award committee citing his analysis of consumption, poverty, and welfare. This recognition came two years after publishing The Great Escape, validating his contributions to understanding how progress and inequality…
Progress and inequality exist in a fundamental and often uncomfortable relationship. Throughout history, major advances in human wellbeing have created gaps between those who benefit first and those who follow later or never catch up at all. This pattern operates at multiple scales, from individual…
Human health has undergone transformations more dramatic than almost any other aspect of wellbeing over the past two and a half centuries. Life expectancy in wealthy nations increased by thirty years during the twentieth century alone and continues rising by two to three years every decade. A white,…
Material living standards have undergone a transformation as profound as the health revolution, with average global income increasing seven to eight times between 1820 and 1992. This unprecedented economic growth lifted the fraction of humanity living in extreme poverty from 84 percent to 24…
Nearly a billion people still live in terrible destitution, millions of children die from preventable causes, and vast health inequalities persist between rich and poor nations. For many in wealthy countries, these injustices create moral obligation to help, typically fulfilled through foreign aid…
Understanding progress and inequality requires measurement, yet the data underlying claims about global development often prove far less reliable than commonly assumed. Enlightened government and effective policy depend on accurate information, but many of the statistics about poverty, health, and…
The greatest escape in human history involves freedom from poverty and premature death. Over thousands of years, most people who survived childhood faced grinding poverty, but building on Enlightenment ideas, the Industrial Revolution, and germ theory, living standards have multiplied and life spans…
Life expectancy provides the most fundamental measure of health, representing the simple fact of being alive or dead. While limited for individual diagnosis, measures of life and death prove invaluable for assessing population health. A newborn in Singapore has survival chances as good as or better…
Mortality measurement provides essential tools for understanding population health. Life expectancy at birth indicates average years a newborn can expect to live based on current mortality rates, though actual outcomes differ as conditions change. In the United States, a hundred-year-old today has…
For the majority not born in wealthy countries, battles against infectious disease had barely begun by 1945. Yet history need not repeat at the same pace. By 1950, germ theory was common knowledge, enabling improvements that took a century in pioneer countries to happen faster in followers. India…
Since World War II, people in poor countries began seeing health benefits wealthy nations long enjoyed. Germ theory made possible great infectious disease burden reduction, but science and science-based policies took over a century spreading from origins to the globe. If this had been the whole…
Starting in mid-eighteenth-century Britain, longevity slowly began improving in countries worldwide. As people escaped disease and early death, living standards improved too, with health and living levels moving largely in parallel. Ideas from the Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment eventually…
In years since World War II, the modern world has seen the greatest escape of all. Rapid economic growth in many countries delivered hundreds of millions from destitution. Material wellbeing rose as death rates fell, with people living longer and richer lives. As always, progress has not been even;…
By Angus Deaton
Subject
Themes
Throughout history, humanity has made remarkable escapes from poverty, disease, and premature death. Over the past 250 years, living standards have multiplied many times, life spans have more than doubled, and people live fuller lives than ever before. This progress, however, has created enormous inequalities between nations and within them.