Angus Deaton Quotes

I'm from a working-class background, and I've experienced that worry of not having a job next week because the unions are going on strike. I know that because I don't come from a wealthy background.

The first priority of any serious program against poverty is to strengthen the male role in poor families.

When women earn more, families are stronger, and children have better access to quality health care and education.

I have been poor and I wanted to document poverty; I had lost a child and I was obsessed with birth; I was interested in politics and I wanted to know how it affected our lives; I am a woman and I wanted to know about women.

When mothers earn their fair share, young children have greater access to quality health care, educational opportunities, and safe communities. By ending the wage gap, we will help ensure that every child can achieve his or her God-given potential.

What it takes just to earn a living - working two or three jobs - is driving a wedge in families that shouldn't be there.

I lived for two years in an abandoned gas station with no running water and no electricity after my parents got divorced and my stepdad couldn't get a job. So I think a lot about families like mine who were middle class and struggled. So that experience really drives my philosophy.

So when we're really addressing issues like poverty, you can't do that without addressing the real driver of some of those, which is stable homes, families. So that's why to me those issues are important. They're not frivolous. They're critical economic issues.

Without better economic opportunity, you can't have better public security and vice versa.

There are more and more products with fewer people able to consume them. We have to help those who don't have the economic stability to grow, or one day there will be very few who are able to buy what we're selling.

There is no question in the world that educating a girl is good for her country and good for her. The challenge is, is it good for her parents who are living in extreme poverty, who need the girl's help to take care of getting firewood, water, taking care of young children?

We don't have a major problem right now in our country, and life is normal. Things like unemployment, which the youth are suffering from, and the rate of inflation - these are chronic conditions and we have to solve them.

I don't think there is such a definition of a perfect family, but I do think that our marriages are in crisis. Our families are in crisis. And I think the African-American family is at one of the worst stages it's been at in a very long time in this country. Fatherlessness is rampant.

I'm working class, my family was working class, and we have struggled the same way our neighbors here in San Francisco have struggled.

When you're unhappy in your marriage, your children are the ones who suffer.

The number one thing I will take with me is my experience as a social worker who saw what happened to families who couldn't find jobs, struggled to take care of their health and saw opportunity slipping away for their kids. I ran for Congress because politicians were fighting with each other instead of looking out for these families.

The economic dimension is very clear. I was at a dinner party, a mother got up, who's a very distinguished scientist, and said she had to get home and help her daughter with her homework. The two waiters, their faces changed. They were working their second jobs, they couldn't get home to help their kids with homework.

Far less wealthy industrialized countries have committed to end child poverty, while the United States is sliding backwards. We can do better. We must demand that our leaders do better.

The economic sense of possibility was so great when I was growing up that my parents had no question that I could do anything I wanted to do, even as a girl. I've always believed that the economics of a story intersects with the women's story - that stuff often happens at the time it happens because of the economy.

[The congressman visited Boston.] We often wonder how things are made so cheap among the Yankees. Come here and you will see women doing men's work, and happy and cheerful as the day is long, and why not?

A strong economy is perfectly consistent with concern for equity and economic justice.

If you work, you should not be poor.

You cannot fight poverty unless you have stability.

Preventing poverty beats curing it.

Sadly, half of marriages end in divorce. Half of my girl friends and male friends have been through one, and their kids are doing great. There's no shame around it - unless you want to project that on to yourself - but certainly there's no longer cultural shame. Everyone is walking through it.