Your majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Your Excellencies, Laureates, Ladies and Gentlemen.
When I was a boy living in Edinburgh in Scotland, especially in December, when the hours of daylight were few, and it was cold, and often wet, I used to dream of escaping to a tropical magic kingdom. I searched the public libraries and museums for books and objects about sunny, warm, and exotic places; reading was the magic carpet that took me away from the cold and dark. Little did I know that when the magical day came, as it did today, it would indeed be in a kingdom, but one that was even further north, even colder, and with even fewer hours of daylight. Of course, the true magic kingdom that the wee boy sought was inside his head, inside books, and inside museums. I want to thank Sweden, not only for this honor, but also for being a kingdom that cares so much about learning, about intellectual pursuits, and about scientific achievement. You are a lantern of hope in a world where so much of what we care about is under threat.
I became an economist by accident, with little formal training, an absence that I regretted for many years, but can perhaps stop regretting now. I drifted from one topic to another, learning as I went. Because I had not been taught, I was free not only of what I should have known, but also of at least some prejudices and preconceptions.
Along the way, I was helped by distinguished mentors, several of whom have stood here before me, and by distinguished collaborators, several of whom are here tonight. I have the great good fortune that one of my collaborators in work, Anne Case, is also my collaborator in life.
One of my greatest pleasures in recent years has been seeing the subject matter of economics broaden and expand. It has not given up its core themes, its measurement or its mathematics, but it has re-embraced its origins in history, psychology, political science, sociology and philosophy. It has become a richer and more humane subject. But this award is also a great tribute to my tribe within the tribe, those of us who worry about measurement, about how to provide coherent accounts of what we measure, and continue to work on one of the oldest topics in economics, the study of prices, of market behavior, and of human welfare.
Angus Deaton获奖原因
How do consumers distribute their spending among different goods? Answering this question is not only necessary for explaining and forecasting actual consumption patterns, but also crucial in evaluating how policy reforms, like changes in consumption taxes, affect the welfare of different groups. In his early work around 1980, Deaton developed the Almost Ideal Demand System – a flexible, yet simple, way of estimating how the demand for each good depends on the prices of all goods and on individual incomes. His approach and its later modifications are now standard tools, both in academia and in practical policy evaluation.
How much of society's income is spent and how much is saved? To explain capital formation and the magnitudes of business cycles, it is necessary to understand the interplay between income and consumption over time. In a few papers around 1990, Deaton showed that the prevailing consumption theory could not explain the actual relationships if the starting point was aggregate income and consumption. Instead, one should sum up how individuals adapt their own consumption to their individual income, which fluctuates in a very different way to aggregate income. This research clearly demonstrated why the analysis of individual data is key to untangling the patterns we see in aggregate data, an approach that has since become widely adopted in modern macroeconomics.
How do we best measure and analyze welfare and poverty? In his more recent research, Deaton highlights how reliable measures of individual household consumption levels can be used to discern mechanisms behind economic development. His research has uncovered important pitfalls when comparing the extent of poverty across time and place. It has also exemplified how the clever use of household data may shed light on such issues as the relationships between income and calorie intake, and the extent of gender discrimination within the family. Deaton's focus on household surveys has helped transform development economics from a theoretical field based on aggregate data to an empirical field based on detailed individual data.（完）
