Angus Deaton Quotes
I think putting numbers together into a coherent framework always seemed to me to be what really matters.
Deaton, Angus. Interview. NobelPrize.org, Nobel Prize Outreach AB, 12 Oct. 2015.
Stockman was the member of the Reagan staff who was in charge of the budget. He admitted that neither he nor any of the other staff or officials really understood the complexities of the United States budget. It had become so huge and complicated that it is likely that no one person was capable of understanding it any longer. However, Stockman, a brilliant man, has been the only OMB Budget Director to admit his lack of total understanding. He was fired from his job for his candor.
While the context applied to making business policy decisions, he also advocated it for politics and managing government. If policy makers or managers speculate and then act to fix possible and imaginable problem, they will waste time and resources dealing with eventualities that may never come to pass. A better strategy is to obtain data, analysize that, and fix the problems that we know will occur.
Historically, in the first half of the 20th century, nuclear scientists discovered that probability governed and was necessary for understanding quantum mechanics—the laws of physics governing tiny objects like atoms, electrons, protons and even quarks. To many, this seemed a contradiction in that it was hard to conceive particles following laws and yet behaving randomly at the same time. However, it did not take long before all the scientists adjusted their thinking and learned to live and work with that was then a type of contradiction but is no longer thought so as men and women have learned to think in a new way. This quotation illustrates that the greatest scientists in the world, in a very short period of time, had to change their entire mode of thinking. There were no real holdouts or “conservatives” who wanted to maintain the older values. This would never happen in politics, where change is not accepted very quickly.
Sir Angus Stewart Deaton FBA is a British-American economist and academic. Deaton is currently a Senior Scholar and the Dwight D. Eisenhower Professor of Economics and International Affairs Emeritus at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs and the Economics Department at Princeton University. His research focuses primarily on poverty, inequality, health, wellbeing, and economic development.
