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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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“Well, that's because you're on the New Jersey turnpike. In Princeton, for a long time, they wouldn't let fast food joints in the town. It's such a snooty place. There are a few places.”
2024-03-28 · Masters in Business · Angus Deaton on the Financial Advantage of College Degrees · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I think that's there, but I don't think they would have thought of that as the major effect. I mean, after all, there aren't that many fast food workers in Pennsylvania or New Jersey compared with everyone. So the amount of extra money they get from the minimum wage is going to be pretty small relative to the size.”
2024-03-28 · Masters in Business · Angus Deaton on the Financial Advantage of College Degrees · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, when you compare the difference of the two, it was big. It was quite large, and it went in the opposite direction to what people have predicted. But the action was actually in Philadelphia, in Pennsylvania rather than in New Jersey. But in their book and in dozens and dozens and dozens of studies since, that result has been pretty strongly replicated that for modest increases in the minimum wage, it does not give rise to increases.”
2024-03-28 · Masters in Business · Angus Deaton on the Financial Advantage of College Degrees · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What happened was not there were certainly no decrease in employment in New Jersey. There was a decrease in employment. Sorry, yes, there was a decrease in employment in Pennsylvania.”
2024-03-28 · Masters in Business · Angus Deaton on the Financial Advantage of College Degrees · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not sure that it's died down. I quote Jason Ferman as saying, even today, they've persuaded about half of the profession and the other half of the profession think it's not right. It's important too. They wrote a book called Myth and Measurement, which had many studies in it. And they did a really very good job of reconciling their findings and other findings. And that's in some ways much more important work. I mean, the Pennsylvania and New Jersey thing, it sounds like one's on either side of the Delaware water gap sort of idea, but some of the New Jersey restaurants were on the shore and some of the Pennsylvania ones were in Pittsburgh or something. So there were a lot of, and what should have happened was...”
2024-03-28 · Masters in Business · Angus Deaton on the Financial Advantage of College Degrees · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which were you had an aristocratic landowning class who passed the corn laws to keep the price of grain up, and that's what they lived off, was growing wheat and selling it. But here you worry a lot about people getting rich through lobbying, through restrictive practices, minor ones, major ones. You worry about the way that banks sometimes behave. I mean, are banks really sucking blood from the rest of us sort of ideas? Some people tend to think we need banks. Banks are very important about banks. And then, of course, you've got this healthcare system that seems to be making a huge amount of money, which they don't make in other countries. And there's a lot of people get paid huge sums of money, a lot of stuff that's being done. So that's the negative side of high inequality, which is inequality that's not doing anyone any good. Sometimes we talk about takers versus makers.”
2024-03-28 · Masters in Business · Angus Deaton on the Financial Advantage of College Degrees · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That we economists tend to use is rent seeking rather than rentier. I mean, a rent here is someone who owns land and rents it out or someone who lives off capital. But rent seeking is people who use the political system to try and butter their bread a little more thickly. And of course you get that in Britain too. I mean, the corn laws...”
2024-03-28 · Masters in Business · Angus Deaton on the Financial Advantage of College Degrees · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's very hard to complain about people who get rich in the public interest, right? So who do things that help spread wealth around, that creates jobs, that makes other people well off too. But there's a potential dark side, which is the takers, as it were, the people who use government or who use regulations or who lose lobbying, for example, renting?”
2024-03-28 · Masters in Business · Angus Deaton on the Financial Advantage of College Degrees · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, it's very much a UK thing, and it goes with not just the UK, but the European thing. And like when the Tocaville came here, you know, there were none of those kings or dukes or all the rest of it. And that was a big difference. And that made them very unequal. Compared with here, so America at its founding was a very equal place. And the founding fathers sort of assumed that democracy would work and would require a fairly equal class of artisans and farmers and so on. So it was only when it became a sort of industrial society and finance crept in and so on that you begin to get these enormous spreads. Now that's the good side of it.”
2024-03-28 · Masters in Business · Angus Deaton on the Financial Advantage of College Degrees · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, it's not a bad gig at all, but what happens if you're the third son of a landed gentry? Then you're in trouble. You're in trouble. You better have some skills. There's a lot of inequality there for that sort of thing. You forget about primagenities.”
2024-03-28 · Masters in Business · Angus Deaton on the Financial Advantage of College Degrees · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, that's something that People have thought about it in economics for hundreds of years, perhaps thousands of years, so that these two things certainly are connected for sure. And a lot of it's also got to do with mobility, societies that have a lot of mobility tend to be relatively equal, where societies where everybody inherits everything, like Britain landowning class in the 17th century.”
2024-03-28 · Masters in Business · Angus Deaton on the Financial Advantage of College Degrees · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, there's some truth to that. And as I think I say in the book, in America, ordinary people seem to like fat cats. They would like a dose of feline obesity for themselves.”
2024-03-28 · Masters in Business · Angus Deaton on the Financial Advantage of College Degrees · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of the wealthiest and the poorest. Yes. Well, or everybody. And a lot of that is good. You know, it is the land of opportunity. And, you know, people are encouraged to get very, very rich and very rich people are celebrated in America. In Britain, where I grew up, they were described as fat cats. And the newspapers really liked it. Here too, but...”
2024-03-28 · Masters in Business · Angus Deaton on the Financial Advantage of College Degrees · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a measure of how far people are apart on average, unless you want the mathematics. That's a good way of thinking about it, right? It's the sort of average distance between any two pairs of people divided by the mean.”
2024-03-28 · Masters in Business · Angus Deaton on the Financial Advantage of College Degrees · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's not just income inequality, it's inequality in many spaces. So the inequalities of extreme wealth and the extreme poverty, which seem to exist here. I mean, you have people, African Americans living along the Mississippi Delta who are probably the poorest, just about anyone in the world. And you have the richest people in the world. And you don't seem to have quite those same extremes in Europe to the same extent. But if you come to inquiry itself, that's pretty wide too. So, you know, we economists like to use things called geni coefficients and so on, and the genius coefficients are, you know, America is one of the champion Genie coefficients. Now, a lot of my defined”
2024-03-28 · Masters in Business · Angus Deaton on the Financial Advantage of College Degrees · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. And Chris Simms, who's a Nobel laureate, and Danny Kahneman was there, and I worked with Danny and I wrote a paper together. The one I don't want to forget is Arthur Lewis, who got the Nobel Prize the year I was visiting, and he remains the only black scientific Nobel laureate ever.”
2024-03-28 · Masters in Business · Angus Deaton on the Financial Advantage of College Degrees · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or even within the discipline, you know, and some of it was the mathematics, you know, I would have colleagues who knew how to do some obscure piece of mathematics, or I would say this person's using this estimator, you know, how does that work? I remember John Campbell and I, when he was a young assistant professor, he's now a very senior finance guy at Harvard, he and I went down to the engineering library to discover what the spectrum at zero meant sort of idea. And then we used that in our work. So it was a wonderful place to do that. Whereas at Bristol, it would be much harder. Quite apart from the fact that at Bristol University, the library was unionized and shut at 4 o'clock in the afternoon and was not open on weekends. Wow.”
2024-03-28 · Masters in Business · Angus Deaton on the Financial Advantage of College Degrees · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. And that's not happened in Britain and it hasn't happened in other European countries and it hasn't happened in Canada. It's just specific to my specific to the United States. And we could talk about some of the reasons for that. But when I first came here, I mean, the other bits about it that I really liked is, you know, I worked with and got to know and hung out with a lot of really great economists. And I learned a ton. I deflected a little bit your question, but my interests are fairly eclectic. So I work on a lot of different things. And at Princeton, I could always find some colleague.”
2024-03-28 · Masters in Business · Angus Deaton on the Financial Advantage of College Degrees · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I didn't notice that, but it's certainly true that not having to worry about healthcare is something that is a big difference between the two punishments. It's a huge burden.”
2024-03-28 · Masters in Business · Angus Deaton on the Financial Advantage of College Degrees · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They were then for sure in Britain in those days pretty much all professors were paid the same and it wasn't very much. I hit a lot more money.”
2024-03-28 · Masters in Business · Angus Deaton on the Financial Advantage of College Degrees · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, not everybody did everything, but the GPs, the general practitioners, were gatekeepers to more advanced care or specialized care. And I think that worked pretty well for us. So that was quite a shock. I also liked having a lot more money. That was certainly different. And I'd worried about money my whole life.”
2024-03-28 · Masters in Business · Angus Deaton on the Financial Advantage of College Degrees · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which was in the sense, you know, I felt a lot of awe at the amazing things that went on in America and also a good deal of shock. So the healthcare system was a big part of it, which was sort of feeling that I didn't know how to negotiate this. I didn't know the difference between a pediatrist and a pediatrician, which turned out to be something I had to know.”
2024-03-28 · Masters in Business · Angus Deaton on the Financial Advantage of College Degrees · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That rarely happened to me. I remember one student who didn't like the grade I'd given in the examination. Oh, by then it's too late. It was too late.”
2024-03-28 · Masters in Business · Angus Deaton on the Financial Advantage of College Degrees · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I'm told it does, but I'm a consumer of this just as you are. Read about it in the newspapers, and it makes me scared. Worry, I have grandchildren, two granddaughters at school in the city here, and I worry about the political correctness of their teachers, for example. But I haven't seen much of it in the university. So as far as Harvard, MIT, Penn, et cetera, I read about it in newspapers. I don't have anything original to say.”
2024-03-28 · Masters in Business · Angus Deaton on the Financial Advantage of College Degrees · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How do you look at this? The mess that's happening in Israel and Gaza is something very different, I think, and huge. And it's affecting all parts of American society in ways that we really have not seen before. But there's a sort of separate issue of sort of political correctness within American universities. It's interesting that, I mean, I taught at Princeton for more than 30 years. I never encountered that at Princeton. So I never felt that I had to issue trigger warnings or that students wouldn't let me talk about certain things or they put their hands over their face when I said the wrong words.”
2024-03-28 · Masters in Business · Angus Deaton on the Financial Advantage of College Degrees · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, when we got this burst of inflation in the early 70s, the universities were going bankrupt. Wow. And Mrs. Thatcher, I think it's not uncommon. I mean, I don't think Mrs. Thatcher thought much of sort of pointy-headed intellectuals, as it were. And even though she'd been to Oxford herself, and I think it was probably true that most of the university establishment was fairly hostile.”
2024-03-28 · Masters in Business · Angus Deaton on the Financial Advantage of College Degrees · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, they're really British universities are nothing like that now, and then they were a million miles away from there. So there were places like Cambridge, whose colleges were immensely wealthy. So you could walk on Trinity Land all the way from Trinity College to the center of London. But that did not accrue to the university, which was relatively poor. And what had happened was that there was a five-year financial settlement every five years at conquenium with the universities. And unfortunately, it was not indexed.”
2024-03-28 · Masters in Business · Angus Deaton on the Financial Advantage of College Degrees · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“While I was working at Bristol, I was publishing papers that were attracting a certain amount of attention. I'd met some of the Princeton people at a conference that I'd organized, helped organize in Italy, become very good friends with Orley Ashenfelter, who's another incredibly influential person in modern economics. And I went to visit Princeton for a year in 79 and really liked it. Bristol at that time was suffering from a real cash crunch. Mrs. Thatcher didn't care for the universities very much. Really?”
2024-03-28 · Masters in Business · Angus Deaton on the Financial Advantage of College Degrees · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There weren't a lot of people I remember reading the Princeton studies in international finance, which seemed to me very interesting at the time. I'd met Fritz Makloop, who was at Princeton when I was still in Britain, for instance. There was Bob Solo, who was always a great hero of mine even long before I met.”
2024-03-28 · Masters in Business · Angus Deaton on the Financial Advantage of College Degrees · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think I remember I was an academic economist. And it was pretty clear from the very first economics book I read, which was by Paul Samuelson, that the most famous and most interesting economists were working in the US. I mean, it was a bigger country. That had not been true 40 years before when Keynes was in Cambridge and so on. But, you know, the Keynesianism had sort of lost its, well, he was no longer alive, and the old Keynesians were a bit grumpy and not so very interesting.”
2024-03-28 · Masters in Business · Angus Deaton on the Financial Advantage of College Degrees · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Something like that. I wasn't a bad mathematician and I've used a lot of math in my career as an economist and it's a very useful thing. But I just had lost interest in it anymore. And as soon as I started studying economics, I was sort of hooked.”
2024-03-28 · Masters in Business · Angus Deaton on the Financial Advantage of College Degrees · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're really good at this. So after a couple of years in something of despair, my tutor said to me, you have to give up doing this. And I said, well, you know, what could I do? They said, well, you could leave. And I said, without a degree, my dad would be very unhappy. So I said, what's the alternative? He said, there's only one other thing for people like you. It's called economics. Right.”
2024-03-28 · Masters in Business · Angus Deaton on the Financial Advantage of College Degrees · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I was always interested in a wide range of things. So when I was at this very fancy private school that I was at as a kid, I did math because it gave me a huge amount of free time to do the things I really cared about, like reading books and playing the pipe organ and playing rugby and sports and things. But when I got to Cambridge, the math was sort of serious there. And so I discovered this was not really for me. And like most students, you move up a grade and you discover you've been the smartest thing there's ever been until you get there and all of a sudden there's a whole lot of other people who are much better.”
2024-03-28 · Masters in Business · Angus Deaton on the Financial Advantage of College Degrees · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“While I was not cut out to be a banker, but one of the things that was good about spending nine months there was I discovered that I wasn't cut out to be a banker and that it was much more fun to be an academic. I had a girlfriend in Cambridge. So it worked out.”
2024-03-28 · Masters in Business · Angus Deaton on the Financial Advantage of College Degrees · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm interested in people's well-being. And that's to do with how much they spend, how much they save. It's to do with getting from poor country, turning poor countries into rich countries. It's to do with poverty. It's to do with inequality. All of these things hang together. And I'm a data guy. So I'm really interested in how you interpret data.”
2024-03-28 · Masters in Business · Angus Deaton on the Financial Advantage of College Degrees · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think they're all sort of sides of the same thing, which is I'm interested in what makes people tick You know, what makes people do what they do? I'm interested in their well-being in a fairly broad sense. I mean, in England we used to call it welfare, but welfare here means something else. It's got a dirty connotation in the United States.”
2024-03-28 · Masters in Business · Angus Deaton on the Financial Advantage of College Degrees · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source