With the news this week that Angus Deaton of Princeton University had won the economics Nobel, the question of how best to help the poor in developing nations takes on a greater level of urgency. Honoring him with the The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences also highlights the value of economics as a moral science.

Born in Scotland in 1945, Deaton earned his Ph.D. from Cambridge University in 1974, and has served on the faculty at Princeton University since 1983. Throughout his career he has studied the microeconomic underpinnings of broader questions regarding consumption and saving, and their implications for poverty and efforts to reduce or eradicate it.

When it comes to understanding the specifics of global poverty, Deaton’s achievements are especially impressive. By pioneering household surveys in poor countries, he helped us gain a more accurate perspective on living standards and the particular consumption realities of the global poor. These data provided researchers with detailed micro-level data, so that economists working in economic development no longer needed to make broad and sweeping generalizations regarding the poor in a given nation based on less personal macro-level data. Indeed, Deaton helped us better understand the specific spending patterns of the poor, making it possible to see what economic life looks like through the eyes of a poor person trying be the best steward she can, given her currently limited resources.

Read the article “Nobel Laureate Angus Deaton and the Problem with Foreign Aid” on acton.org.