Why Angus Deaton Deserved the Economics Nobel Prize
The central contribution of Angus Deaton, the latest winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in economics, has been to shift the gaze of his fellow economists beyond measures of income, to broader measures of well-being.Much of his research has focused on consumption — measures of the food people eat, the condition of their housing, and the services they consume. And he has been a trailblazer in shifting the attention of economists away from the behavior of economywide aggregates such as gross domestic product, and toward the analysis of individual households.This is also the first Nobel to acknowledge explicitly the increasingly empirical nature of modern economic research. There are probably more such Nobels to come.Yet for all the power that modern statistics brings, Mr. Deaton has argued forcefully that it is neither a panacea nor a substitute for economic theory.
He has been an influential counterweight against a popular strand of econometric practice arguing that if you want to know whether something works, you should just test it, preferably with a randomized control trial. In Mr. Deaton’s telling, the observation that a particular government intervention worked is no guarantee that it will work again, or in another context. By this view, theory is a complement to measurement, and generalizable insights arise only when the underlying economic mechanisms are elucidated and tested.
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