ANGUS DEATON

I've always - and not always happily - considered myself an outsider. Certainly at Fettes. And then the Scots are always outsiders in England. They are always putting you in your place in one way or another, and there is this pretty rigid class hierarchy.

My work on happiness is the only thing I've ever done where I've heard people in the supermarket talking about it, for instance.

The first thing we need to understand when we think about globalization is that it has benefited an enormous number of people who are not part of the global elite.

Growth does not bring any 'automatic' improvement in the health component of wellbeing.

High quality, open, transparent, and uncensored data are needed to support democracy.

I think inequality has gone past the point where it's helping us all get rich, and it's really becoming a serious threat.

European countries give much larger shares of aid for poverty relief than the U.S.

I think putting numbers together into a coherent framework always seemed to me to be what really matters.

Although globalization and technological change have disrupted traditional work arrangements, both processes have the potential to benefit everyone. The fact that they have not suggests that the wealthy have captured the benefits for themselves.

The call to rein in globalization reflects a belief that it has eliminated jobs in the West, sending them East and South. But the biggest threat to traditional jobs is not Chinese or Mexican; it is a robot.

I'm very keen that we have this debate about the good parts of inequality and the bad parts of inequality. It's not a one-sided thing.

There's this narrative that is entrenched in some of the professions that there's this mysterious thing called 'socioeconomic status' that is immutably correlated with health. And it isn't.

Success breeds inequality, and you don't want to choke off success.

It is true that globalization has fueled greater income inequality. But much of this increase should be welcomed, not condemned. There is nothing inherently bad about inequality. Whether it is bad depends on how it comes about and what it does.

A lot of our sources for income-inequality measures come from household surveys in which people report how much they earned in the last year, how much income they have, and so on. Those are not as well funded as they should be. We need to have those numbers.

Foreign aid, especially when there is a lot of it, affects how institutions function and how they change.

I really don't think we've become a plutocracy, but I worry about the enormous influence that money has in a democracy such as ours.

The best moments are when, together with... you bring information, you bring data to bear in a way that helps illuminate something that you just don't really understand. Even if it doesn't completely clarify it, it just, you know, helps bring it together.

The absence of state capacity - that is, of the services and protections that people in rich countries take for granted - is one of the major causes of poverty and deprivation around the world.

Many people have mixed views about unions, but unions used to give people some measure of control at work. They gave them a social life and political representation in Washington, which doesn't really exist anymore.

I was born in Edinburgh, in Scotland, a few days after the end of the Second World War. Both my parents had left school at a very young age, unwillingly in my father's case. Yet both had deep effects on my education, my father influencing me toward measurement and mathematics, and my mother toward writing and history.

The world is hugely unequal.

International cooperation is vital to keeping our globe safe, commerce flowing, and our planet habitable.

Aid can only reach the victims of war by paying off the warlords and, sometimes, extending the war.

A good theoretical account must explain all of the evidence that we see. If it doesn't work everywhere, we have no idea what we are talking about, and all is chaos.