YouSaid · the spoken record

Angus Deaton

lines on the record: 136
first: 2024-03-28
most recent: 2024-03-28
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“So not only that, but those are the people who are not getting fired from their jobs because of the rising health care costs, whereas the people without that degree are not. Had really changed my mind about, you know, and this happened to me very late in life after I went to the Nobel Prize, was this realization that when Anne and I were working on these people who were dying from the deaths of despair, from opioid overdoses, from suicide, from alcoholism,”
2024-03-28 · Masters in Business · Angus Deaton on the Financial Advantage of College Degrees · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the gap is enormous. If you look at the wages we used to when I first came to Princeton, you were handed out with a ration was that a BA bought you a 40% premium in your wage. That much 40%.”
2024-03-28 · Masters in Business · Angus Deaton on the Financial Advantage of College Degrees · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then there's a third who have high school or less. And the people who didn't graduate from high school are not all that many anymore.”
2024-03-28 · Masters in Business · Angus Deaton on the Financial Advantage of College Degrees · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're at a community college. It's called an associate's degree or something. Or they've been to college but didn't finish. So the people with the two year degree and been to college but didn't finish or another third. Gotcha.”
2024-03-28 · Masters in Business · Angus Deaton on the Financial Advantage of College Degrees · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About a third of the population has a four year BA or more. About a third of the population has some college. Which means they went up for two.”
2024-03-28 · Masters in Business · Angus Deaton on the Financial Advantage of College Degrees · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so let me go back to not income inequality again so much, but this education inequality, because I think this distinction that is so important here between people who have a four-year college degree and people who do not, that inequality is threatening to bring us down. I think that's the most serious.”
2024-03-28 · Masters in Business · Angus Deaton on the Financial Advantage of College Degrees · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pretty good for penal call. You know, they call the latest the new immigrants, they call them boat people. And that's because the first thing they do when they get to Australia is buy a bunk. That's very funny.”
2024-03-28 · Masters in Business · Angus Deaton on the Financial Advantage of College Degrees · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Many places, I think, I mean, they're very strong Serbian Greek communities, but also a lot of them from East Asia nowadays.”
2024-03-28 · Masters in Business · Angus Deaton on the Financial Advantage of College Degrees · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And they would like more. And that's because they have an income test or they have a wealth test or whatever. Oh, really? Yes.”
2024-03-28 · Masters in Business · Angus Deaton on the Financial Advantage of College Degrees · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And legal immigrants, you've got both because a lot of them are families of unskilled people, not particularly skilled, but you also compared with the general population where you think it would probably be a normal curve with skills in the middle, immigrants. I think in almost all countries are more like bimodal. Yes, you've got these very skilled people. Places like Australia and”
2024-03-28 · Masters in Business · Angus Deaton on the Financial Advantage of College Degrees · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But it's just if you look at these inequality patterns in the Gilded Age, when you had these huge houses and many servants and all the rest of it, now we don't have domestic servants, but we do have people who do the same things, who look after our yards and who look after it. And if you go to European countries, you just don't see that. I mean, I remember talking to some Danish friends and they say they can't afford to have the roof on their house replaced because, you know, relative to their salaries, it costs four or five times what it would cost in Princeton. Really?”
2024-03-28 · Masters in Business · Angus Deaton on the Financial Advantage of College Degrees · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“who work in agriculture, who work. You know, if you go to Princeton, New Jersey and walk around town, there are all these beautifully maintained houses covered with velvet green lawns, and everything has immaculately been tained. Well, I don't think anyone who you would see doing that work.”
2024-03-28 · Masters in Business · Angus Deaton on the Financial Advantage of College Degrees · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think it is true that what's happened is if you bring in large numbers of unskilled immigrants, then that is good for rich people because it's good for employers and provides a very large, very cheap. Labor Force.”
2024-03-28 · Masters in Business · Angus Deaton on the Financial Advantage of College Degrees · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I know, Paul. It's not like debating Larry Summers, which I did recently. Oh, I'm so sorry. Yeah, but you should watch the video. There's a video. Oh, really? I'll link to it.”
2024-03-28 · Masters in Business · Angus Deaton on the Financial Advantage of College Degrees · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I think so, though I'm now out on a limb and lots of my economist friends are going to denounce me and Paul Krugman tonight is probably going to beat me over the head with a chair or something. But even in that, you know, David Lee and Hardy.”
2024-03-28 · Masters in Business · Angus Deaton on the Financial Advantage of College Degrees · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. Well, what happened was the laws, the banning of immigrants, making it almost impossible, were in the 20s. So it took a long time to come down. And then there was this heart-seller act, which was passed in, I think, 1968. And it was passed under the promise that there would be no increase in immigration at all. And that turned out to be completely false. And it was completely false because they weren't counting the family members who were allowed to come in afterwards. And that's what's driven the huge increase.”
2024-03-28 · Masters in Business · Angus Deaton on the Financial Advantage of College Degrees · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But just about this question as to whether immigration lowers the wages of Native Americans. Now, David Card is one of the big authors who claims it doesn't have any such effect at all. And Paul Krugman, who you've talked about, has been writing blistering pieces in New York Times saying it doesn't decrease local wages, denouncing the lump fallacy, which says that there's only a finite number of jobs in America, and if immigrants get them, there's none left or there's fewer left for ordinary people. And I suspect that's not true. I think we've been getting this wrong, actually, and I think it does, in fact. And so I think one of the reasons that inequality is so high now is because 15% of the population is foreign born, which was also true during the Gilded Age. And we had this huge dip. I don't know if you've seen these pictures, but if you go back to 1890, about 15% of the population was foreign-born. If you look at it now, 15% is foreign-born. And in the trough.”
2024-03-28 · Masters in Business · Angus Deaton on the Financial Advantage of College Degrees · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that's right. But of course, the big controversy nowadays is not about that end of things. It's about the other end. The illegal immigration? Well, the less skilled, undocumented aliens who are swarming across the border in large numbers. And we have no mechanism for stopping that. So I don't want to talk about that because that's not my area of expertise. And you hear about it in the newspapers and on the radio and television all the time.”
2024-03-28 · Masters in Business · Angus Deaton on the Financial Advantage of College Degrees · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're immigrants, and there's some suggestion immigrants are much healthier than non-immigrants. And that's partly because immigrants are sort of selected special people.”
2024-03-28 · Masters in Business · Angus Deaton on the Financial Advantage of College Degrees · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're not born in the United States. And there's also a long literature of creativity in immigrants so that many of immigrants into the United States, Tesla, not Elon Musk, but Elon Musk, of course, was born in South America. Yeah, South Africa.”
2024-03-28 · Masters in Business · Angus Deaton on the Financial Advantage of College Degrees · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, there's actually a bunch of places you could go. I could do what Sean Connery did and insist that it be given to me in Scotland, which is where I grew up at Holyrood Palace. But there's a whole bunch of dates over the years. And it's an interesting thing because the Royal family always does it. They've never delegated, even during wartime, to civil servants, however elevated or anything. So there's about four members of the Royal family who do this. And the Queen did very few towards the end of her life. But Charles did a lot. Princess Anne does a lot. And William Wills does a lot. He did me.”
2024-03-28 · Masters in Business · Angus Deaton on the Financial Advantage of College Degrees · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it doesn't come from the queen or even from the prime minister, but it does come from the British consulate here in New York City and say, would you accept a knighthood if it was bestowed on you? And I said, well, are you kidding? Of course. Of course.”
2024-03-28 · Masters in Business · Angus Deaton on the Financial Advantage of College Degrees · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, no, no, no, no, but it's a very British thing that are secret committees that you've no idea who are members of those, of the great and the good who decide who they're going to give knighthoods to or other honors. And I have friends who are British who have a Nobel Prize who did not get one for many, many years”
2024-03-28 · Masters in Business · Angus Deaton on the Financial Advantage of College Degrees · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have dual passports, which in Britain they allow you to do. I would not be Sir Angus if I'd given up my passport. And they check on that. Oh, really? You get a phone.”
2024-03-28 · Masters in Business · Angus Deaton on the Financial Advantage of College Degrees · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that could well be. No, I don't know much about that. And I am obviously a well-documented alien. I'm not an alien. I'm not an American citizen. Though it took me 30 years to get around to doing that.”
2024-03-28 · Masters in Business · Angus Deaton on the Financial Advantage of College Degrees · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, there's an informal economy. Yeah, but they're probably not getting healthcare benefits. So you've shifted the healthcare benefits out of the company essentially. And it means you're much more interested in hiring high-income workers. And very uninterested, you said, as someone who's being paid $30,000 a year, $40,000 a year, you don't want to carry $11,000 worth of healthcare insurance.”
2024-03-28 · Masters in Business · Angus Deaton on the Financial Advantage of College Degrees · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The Ramjam Cleaning Company, a wheels driving company. And this CEO at least, and I've no way verifying this, thought that many of these workers were undocumented.”
2024-03-28 · Masters in Business · Angus Deaton on the Financial Advantage of College Degrees · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As long as I remember three or four years, then it can be 40%. So there's this sort of thing. And so the company said, you know, that we can't do that. It's not going to happen. And what should we do? And they said, you get McKinsey and you fire all your low-paid staff.”
2024-03-28 · Masters in Business · Angus Deaton on the Financial Advantage of College Degrees · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One CEO told us that their HR people came around to the annual conference where they were looking ahead for the pricing and all the rest of it. And he said, we have bad news for you that your healthcare costs, the policies you have, are going to cost 40% more.”
2024-03-28 · Masters in Business · Angus Deaton on the Financial Advantage of College Degrees · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, this puts an enormous burden on low wage workers. And it's been a big contributor to outsourcing jobs so that most companies don't hire their own security, their elevator operators, their transport people, their food service people and all the rest of it. And a lot of good jobs have been lost because of that. So that's one of the ways in which this very expensive healthcare is eating the heart of our economy.”
2024-03-28 · Masters in Business · Angus Deaton on the Financial Advantage of College Degrees · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I've gone in there to try and get things, and I didn't get what I wanted to go somewhere else. But I think there are things like that which are helping control costs. But I'm now out of my zone of expertise here. But I mean, the one thing that Anne and I... Spend a lot of time writing about in our book that if you have insurance through your employer, right, that costs nowadays about $11,000 a year. That costs about the same for the CEO as it does for the CEO's driver, right? Because you're insuring the body, not the salary.”
2024-03-28 · Masters in Business · Angus Deaton on the Financial Advantage of College Degrees · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some of them are very cheap. They don't do very much, most of them, and a lot of people go in there wanting an antibiotic, but they've got flu and it's a virus, or it's a cold virus. They say you can't do that.”
2024-03-28 · Masters in Business · Angus Deaton on the Financial Advantage of College Degrees · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The total expenditure on health has stopped growing, and there are people who were involved in the writing of Obamacare who claim that the provisions in Obamacare are actually kicking in. But I don't think anyone knows the answer to that.”
2024-03-28 · Masters in Business · Angus Deaton on the Financial Advantage of College Degrees · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well here's something, maybe let's just go back one second because the hospitals are a big part of this. They're just unbelievably expensive and they're very luxurious compared with hospitals in Britain. If you go into a hospital in Britain, there might be 12 people in the ward. There's no private rooms, for instance. And that sort of thing is very, very expensive. And maybe we're a rich country. Maybe we want to have that, but it certainly costs a lot. And there are cheaper ways of doing that. And it seems to have very little effect on life expectancy. And, you know, it doesn't kill you as part of it. And one other thing that's worth noting is no one really understands that, but I think the last four or five years has stopped growing.”
2024-03-28 · Masters in Business · Angus Deaton on the Financial Advantage of College Degrees · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“While because it's allowed to become crazy and pantheon, you know, they have different delivery systems or slightly different drugs, so they'll tell you the drugs are a little bit better and all the rest of it. So they can keep rolling this out and then get patents on things that don't change the basic thing very much. And so that happens. And I think it's not Medicaid. I think it's anyone on Medicare. Medicare who's like anyone over 65. And there's a limit on how much. And so it's pretty widespread.”
2024-03-28 · Masters in Business · Angus Deaton on the Financial Advantage of College Degrees · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“and is done on a regular basis. So for instance, if you want to have an MRI in Britain, you might have to drive ways or travel in order to get one, or you might have to wait a month or two. Whereas every doctor's office in President has one of these things. They're lying idle most of the time. That costs a lot of money. So there's just a lot more of those procedures being done, which are helpful, but maybe not super helpful.”
2024-03-28 · Masters in Business · Angus Deaton on the Financial Advantage of College Degrees · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a one, which it may be New Zealand, either New Zealand or Australia, forget, but that's illegal everywhere else in the rich world. And it's true, I went along to my doctorate and he said, well, you know, if you were a pregnant woman, maybe it would be a good idea, but you're not. So we don't really need that. But that's part of it. The other part of it is there's a very large amount of relatively low value stuff that's quite profitable.”
2024-03-28 · Masters in Business · Angus Deaton on the Financial Advantage of College Degrees · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't they charge the full freight? So it just costs a lot more. There are arguments for that that you hear from the pharma companies all the time, which they say we're doing the research here. And Britain is just piggybacking off that. I think those arguments are wearing a little bit thin nowadays, but I can't disprove that.”
2024-03-28 · Masters in Business · Angus Deaton on the Financial Advantage of College Degrees · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, everything healthcare. So if you look at the price of drugs and you can look at the identical drugs and you can look at them across countries and there's any number of papers who've done this in the New England Journal of Medicine and the JAMA and so on. And they cost the same company selling the same drug at twice the price or more than twice the price here than they do in other countries. Now, in Britain, for instance, they have a thing called NICE, which is the National Institute for Healthcare Excellence or something. And what they do is they evaluate new drugs and they do a cost-benefit test and they disallow it if it doesn't save enough lives, as it were, or cause enough extra health rel per dollar. So then what happens is the pharma companies, if they want to sell it in Britain, they reduce the price to meet that cutoff. In America, they...”
2024-03-28 · Masters in Business · Angus Deaton on the Financial Advantage of College Degrees · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the major thing my colleague, my late colleague Uve Reinhardt, who is our sort of local healthcare expert, and it was a very fine researcher and lecturer, was a very funny man, very witty man. He wrote a book called It's the Price is Stupid sort of idea. And the argument is that almost everything in the U.S. costs about twice as much as it costs in other countries. Really? Yeah, so all these drugs. Everything healthcare.”
2024-03-28 · Masters in Business · Angus Deaton on the Financial Advantage of College Degrees · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not entirely clear preventive medicine sounds like a great idea, but it's not always such a great idea. So, for instance, one thing about preventive medicine I worry about a lot is smart watches, for instance. So if you've got one of those, you're going to get all sorts of false positives. And you're going to spend a huge amount of time getting tests. For things that you know, you probably don't have. And so prevented medicine of that sort can cost a lot of money. There are types of prevented medicine like taking anti-hypertensives or taking statins, for instance, which save an enormous number of lives. They don't cost hardly anything. And those have been the things that have been largely responsible for the rapidly increase, well, the decrease in mortality and the increase in life expectancy in the last quarter of the 20th century.”
2024-03-28 · Masters in Business · Angus Deaton on the Financial Advantage of College Degrees · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well because it's full of rent seekers, which is what we were talking about before. I mean, there's a lot of people getting very wealthy out of that. They're device manufacturers, they're pharma companies, there's hospitals, which are a huge part of this. Also remember, if you're in the UK and the government pays for everything, there's no insurance industry, right? So that insurance industry is a big chunk of change. And it's not their profits that are making it so expensive, though that's in there too, but it's just that they exist.”
2024-03-28 · Masters in Business · Angus Deaton on the Financial Advantage of College Degrees · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it depends where you are, and it can be quite soon, but you might have to wait a couple of years to get a hip replaced, for example. Really? And the same is true in Canada.”
2024-03-28 · Masters in Business · Angus Deaton on the Financial Advantage of College Degrees · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not for there are some things where you have to pay. Unlike prescriptions, prescription drugs, but very heavily subsidized. And also you have to wait. And so there's a lot of private healthcare in Britain where people avoid the lines.”
2024-03-28 · Masters in Business · Angus Deaton on the Financial Advantage of College Degrees · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's the sort of number that comes out in these polls. I haven't looked at the most recent one. And yet, you know, it doesn't go through in Washington because the lobbyists are very powerful and they're paying campaign contributions and all the rest of it.”
2024-03-28 · Masters in Business · Angus Deaton on the Financial Advantage of College Degrees · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But another part of this that's very important is most states, or I don't know what fraction of American work is above the federal, have minimum wages that are above the federal ones. It's also true that something like 70% of Americans would like to see a higher minimum wage.”
2024-03-28 · Masters in Business · Angus Deaton on the Financial Advantage of College Degrees · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That I think is an important part of the story. And I don't think they have the lobby that they have here by the fast food industry to help keep wages down. That's a big deal. A lot of the opposition against Cardin Kruger was from the EPI, which is a lobbying institute for fast food.”
2024-03-28 · Masters in Business · Angus Deaton on the Financial Advantage of College Degrees · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In economics? There may be some of that. I think it's rather more than a half. And in Britain, where they have a much, much higher minimum wage than here, it's supported by everyone on the right and the left. Really?”
2024-03-28 · Masters in Business · Angus Deaton on the Financial Advantage of College Degrees · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, what economists call that is monopsony, which means they have some power over the workers so they can actually deliberately lower their wages because it's hard for the workers to go somewhere else. Whereas in the textbook, if you lower someone's wage below the prevailing wage, those people will just vanish. They'll quit the job. They'll quit the job. So what you've got here is there is monopsony in that you can force people's wages down, and it's hard for them to move.”
2024-03-28 · Masters in Business · Angus Deaton on the Financial Advantage of College Degrees · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, that's the belief, and that's what happens in textbook models of labor markets. It's just that the textbook model doesn't do a very good job. But there's a very important issue with this that I talk about in the book. And I think this over the last years since that paper was written and that book was written, not only has there been a lot of replication, but what it's suggesting is there really is some surplus in these joints, which could be dedicated to either prophets or labor wages.”
2024-03-28 · Masters in Business · Angus Deaton on the Financial Advantage of College Degrees · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source