Results for “angus deaton” 38 found
Hermance, Switzerland
I am here to give a talk on randomized control trials, a public choice perspective. Angus Deaton and Josh Angrist are among the other speakers, along with many people in the medical field. The first question, not quite resulting from a controlled experiment, is whether this setting, on Lake Geneva, improves or worsens my mood…
Place plays a part in helping the poor live longer
There is a new Raj Chetty paper out in JAMA ( with seven co-authors, including David Cutler), and it is garnering a lot of media attention. Here is to my mind the main result, although it is not being presented as such (NYT here):
The JAMA paper found that several measures of access to medical care had no clear relationship with longevity among the poor. But there were correlations with smoking, exercise and obesity.
I enjoyed the NYC angle from Margot Sanger-Katz:
New York is a city with some of the worst income inequality in the country. But when it comes to inequality of life spans, it’s one of the best.
Impoverished New Yorkers tend to live far longer than their counterparts in other American cities, according to detailed new research of Social Security and earnings records published Monday in The Journal of the American Medical Association. They still die sooner than their richer neighbors, but the city’s life-expectancy gap was smaller in 2014 than nearly everywhere else, and it has shrunk since 2001 even as gaps grew nationwide.
That trend may appear surprising. New York is one of the country’s most unequal and expensive cities, where the poor struggle to find affordable housing and the money and time to take care of themselves.
But the research found that New York was, in many ways, a model city for factors that seem to predict where poor people live longer. It is a wealthy, highly educated city with a high tax base. The local government spends a lot on social services for low-income residents. It has low rates of smoking and has many immigrants, who tend to be healthier than native-born Americans.
Here is the accompanying NYT graphic about “your county.” Here is Emily Badger and Christopher Ingraham, good graphics too:
The poor live shorter lives in Las Vegas, Louisville and industrial Midwest towns, such as Gary, Ind. Geography also matters much more for the poor than the rich. The health behaviors of the wealthy are similar wherever they live. For the poor, their likelihood of risky behaviors such as smoking depends a great deal on geography, on whether they live in a place where smoking is common or where, as in San Francisco, cigarettes have been shunted out of view.
It’s almost as if health care policy should be local in orientation. The link to the paper includes three comments, including one by Angus Deaton.
Swiss conference on randomized control trials
Working conference on ethics of randomized trials in development economics and health policy: An opportunity for graduate students and young scholars; application deadline March 11
Applications are invited for participating in a five day working conference and summer school on ethical issues posed by randomized trials in development economics and health policy, to be held June 20-24 at the beautiful Brocher Foundation villa in Hermance, Switzerland. Participants will include Angus Deaton, Joshua Angrist, Michael Marmot, Will MacAskill, and yours truly.
The application deadline is March 11, 2016. Further information is available here. For remaining questions, please email [email protected].
Be there or be square!
Monday assorted links
1. English departments are better than you think.
2. Angus Deaton on stuff, including what TV he watches (good taste).
3. More Alesina, on fiscal adjustments.
4. The Iranian film “About Elly” is one of the best movies to come out this year. It is by the director of “A Separation,” and it will take you forty-five minutes to start realizing how good it is.
5. Michael Specter CRISPR article from The New Yorker, very interesting, more than just the usual.
Death rates are rising for white middle-aged Americans
Gina Kolata from the NYT reports:
Something startling is happening to middle-aged white Americans. Unlike every other age group, unlike every other racial and ethnic group, unlike their counterparts in other rich countries, death rates in this group have been rising, not falling.
That finding was reported Monday by two Princeton economists, Angus Deaton, who last month won the 2015 Nobel Prize for Economic Sciences, and Anne Case. Analyzing health and mortality data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and from other sources, they concluded that rising annual death rates among this group are being driven not by the big killers like heart disease and diabetes but by an epidemic of suicides and afflictions stemming from substance abuse: alcoholic liver disease and overdoses of heroin and prescription opioids.
The original research is here (pdf).
Friday assorted links
1. “…there are only a few ways to be liked but many ways to be disliked.”
2. “It’s also repugnant, and not just because it is degrading to faculty members.” He is talking about the Revenue Equivalence Theorem.
3. “Darwin had his Galapagos finches; Milot had his Quebecois islanders.”
Saturday assorted links
Friday assorted links
1. American Museum of Tort Law.
2. Are “bedchamber” and “amidst” becoming more popular words?
3. Angus Deaton’s consumer theory (boring link but well done).
Effective Altruism: where charity and rationality meet
That is the title of my current column at The Upshot. I very much enjoyed my read of William MacCaskill’s Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference. The point of course is to apply science, reason, and data analysis to our philanthropic giving.
I am more positive than negative on this movement and also the book, as you can see from the column. Still, I think my more skeptical remarks are the most interesting part to excerpt:
Neither Professor MacAskill nor the effective-altruism movement has answered all the tough questions. Often the biggest gains come from innovation, yet how can a donor spur such advances? If you had a pile of money and the intent to make the world a better place in 1990, could you have usefully expected or encouraged the spread of cellphones to Africa? Probably not, yet this technology has improved the lives of many millions, and at a profit, so for the most part its introduction didn’t draw money from charities. Economists know frustratingly little about the drivers of innovation.
And as Prof. Angus Deaton of Princeton University has pointed out, many of the problems of poverty boil down to bad politics, and we don’t know how to use philanthropy to fix that. If corruption drains away donated funds, for example, charity could even be counterproductive by propping up bad governments.
Sometimes we simply can’t know in advance how important a donation will turn out to be. For example, the financier John A. Paulson’s recently announced $400 million gift to Harvard may be questioned on the grounds that Harvard already has more money than any university in the world, and surely is not in dire need of more. But do we really know that providing extra support for engineering and applied sciences at Harvard — the purpose of the donation — will not turn into globally worthwhile projects? Innovations from Harvard may end up helping developing economies substantially. And even if most of Mr. Paulson’s donation isn’t spent soon, the money is being invested in ways that could create jobs and bolster productivity.
In addition, donor motivation may place limits on the applicability of the effective-altruism precepts. Given that a lot of donors are driven by emotion, pushing them to be more reasonable might backfire. Excessively cerebral donors might respond with so much self-restraint that they end up giving less to charity. If they are no longer driven by emotion, they may earn and save less in the first place.
On Paulson, here is Ashok Rao’s recent post on compounding returns.
Assorted links
1. Puffin holding flower (Proposing puffin).
2. Andrew Wylie on Amazon and other matters. Angus Deaton on replication.
3. Iceland is no longer doing better in terms of gdp than Latvia or Estonia or Ireland.
5. The favorite albums of Pope Francis. He has very good taste in pieces and performances both. And seventeen Janet Yellen papers that you can read about at this link.
*The Great Escape*
The author is Angus Deaton and the subtitle is Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality. It is a very good book, as you might expect. Here are two bits I found especially interesting:
In Sweden in 1751 — well before the modern mortality decline — it was riskier to be a newborn than to be an 80-year old.
And, somewhat more recently:
…until around 1900, adult life expectancy in Britain was actually higher than life expectancy at birth. In spite of having lived for 15 years, those teenagers could expect a longer future than when they were born.
The book’s home page is here.
Handicapping the 2012 Nobel
This article mentions Alvin Roth, Bob Shiller, Richard Thaler, Robert Barro, Lars Hansen, Anthony Atkinson, Angus Deaton, Jean Tirole, Stephen Ross, and William Nordhaus.
I’ll predict a triple prize to Shiller, Thaler, and Eugene Fama. Fama clearly deserves it, can’t win it solo (too strongly EMH in an age of financial crisis), but can be bundled with two people from behavioral finance and irrational exuberance theories.
Barro will get it, but not in an election year. Hansen and Ross are good picks but I don’t see them getting it before Fama does. Paul Romer deserves mention but this is probably not his year because of politics in Honduras.
William Baumol cannot be ruled out. A neat idea — but unlikely — is Martin Feldstein and Joseph Newhouse for their pioneering work in health care economics, plus for Feldstein there is public finance too.
Tirole and Nordhaus are deserving perennials, with various bundlings (e.g., Oliver Hart, or for Nordhaus other names in environmental). I hope the Krueger-Tullock idea is not dead but I would bet against it, same with Armen Alchian and Albert Hirschman. Dale Jorgensen has a shot.
I believe Duflo and Banerjee (and possibly Michael Kremer too, maybe even Robert Townsend) will get it sooner than people are expecting, though not this year as they just presented in Stockholm. Next year I think.
Not once in the past have I been right about this.
Addendum: Here is the talk from Northwestern.
Is the economic crisis still making Americans unhappy?
In a new paper, Angus Deaton says maybe not so much (pdf). Happiness surveys show a big negative effect from the downturn in 2008, but most of it has since evaporated. You can conclude that a) things really are better, b) they are not focusing enough on the long-term unemployed, c) I shouldn’t trust happiness surveys, d) this explains why we are still headed off a cliff, or some combination of the above. For the pointer I thank Eric Barker.
Tall people are happy
Here is the abstract to a new paper by Angus Deaton and Raksha Arora.
According to the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index daily poll of the US population, taller people live better lives, at least on average. They evaluate their lives more favorably, and they are more likely to report a range of positive emotions such as enjoyment and happiness. They are also less likely to report a range of negative experiences, like sadness, and physical pain, though they are more likely to experience stress and anger, and if they are women, to worry. These findings cannot be attributed to different demographic or ethnic characteristics of taller people, but are almost entirely explained by the positive association between height and both income and education, both of which are positively linked to better lives.
Now if I were in favor of redistribution…
The Copenhagen Consensus and its critics
Abhijit Banerjee, Angus Deaton, and Esther Duflo are all upset. You might recall the most famous recommendation of the Copenhagen Consensus was to invest in anti-HIV/AIDS programs as a higher priority than global warming. Banerjee writes:
Similarly, the proposal on HIV/AIDS seems to have entirely missed the mounting evidence…that we do not really know how to get people to behave in ways that would reduce the transmission of HIV.
Angus Deaton writes:
Lomborg’s Consensus does not even identify the "we" who are to spend the $50 billion, although it certainly shares Sachs’ confidence in the usefulness of social engineering by well-meaning outside experts.
Maybe that criticism is unfair; Lomborg might say he is playing by the rules of other people’s games. Esther Duflo writes:
…to my knowledge there is very little rigorous evidence on effective [HIV-AIDS] prevention strategies in Africa.
The three reviews are all in the Journal of Economic Literature, December 2007. The bottom line is that $50 billion doesn’t go as far as you might think.