Nobel Prize winner Angus Deaton's aid ideas have stirred controversy
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Nobel Prize winner Angus Deaton’s aid ideas have stirred controversy
New Nobel economics laureate Angus Deaton is an optimist about economic progress, but his theory that poor countries’ development could be accelerated by cutting international aid has triggered controversy. In his 2013 book, “The Great Escape: Health, Wealth and the Origins of Inequality,” Deaton, a professor at Princeton University in the U.S., charts how human welfare has risen enormously over time. But he also says Western countries are wasting money trying to put poor countries on the same path of development they followed themselves.
You cannot talk about consumption and poverty in a serious way without mentioning him.
Philippe Aghion, economist and professor at the College of France
Deaton’s ideas on aid remain highly controversial. He argues that health, in particular the fight against malnutrition, should take precedence above all else. Improving the health of people in developing countries could be done more cheaply by financing research into diseases or distributing vaccines and food rations directly to the population, he argues. One major critic of Deaton’s theory is Bill Gates, the billionaire Microsoft founder and philanthropist. He has said he admires Deaton but finds his aid argument “very weak” and “strange.”
Deaton and other aid critics look at, say, aid that was designed to prop up some American industry, see that it didn’t raise GDP in poor countries, and conclude that aid must be a failure.
Bill Gates
