Vox - Nobel Prize 2015: Winners and updateshttps://cdn.vox-cdn.com/community_logos/52517/voxv.png2016-10-05T15:20:00-04:00http://www.vox.com/rss/stream/92473222016-10-05T15:20:00-04:002016-10-05T15:20:00-04:00How the Nobel Prize became the most controversial award on Earth
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<img alt="This Nobel Prize medal for Physics went to Joseph John Thomson 1906 for work on how gases conduct electricity." src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/8ItplMJ3H2ciX0S37doNA6xZA8A=/0x234:3128x2580/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/40990230/90766039.0.0.jpg" />
<figcaption>This Nobel Prize medal for Physics went to Joseph John Thomson 1906 for work on how gases conduct electricity. | SSPL/Getty Images</figcaption>
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<p>It's Nobel Prize season again, when a select few scientists, writers, economists, and people working toward peace will get phone calls at odd hours informing them that they've received one of the most prestigious awards on Earth.</p>
<p>From 1901 to 2015, 573 Nobel Prizes have been given out, including household names like Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, Nelson Mandela, Ernest Hemingway, and the International Committee of the Red Cross. It's a long, long history — long enough to be filled with plenty of drama and contention.</p>
<p>So here are the basics of how the Nobel Prizes work, and the biggest controversies from the past:</p>
<h3>Why are the Nobel Prizes such a big deal?</h3>
<p>No one can really agree on why the Nobel Prizes are a much bigger deal than all the other prizes out there. Perhaps it's because they've been around for more than a century or because the prize — roughly $1 million — is so large. But at this point, they're definitely one of the most impressive awards around.</p>
<p>The backstory for the awards is pretty well-known. There once was a Swedish man named Alfred Nobel. He was a chemist and engineer, he invented dynamite, got rich, and — when he died in 1896 — did something unusual. He bequeathed about $260 million to create prizes to reward various scientific and cultural advances produced by people or organizations anywhere in the world. Thus, the Nobel Prizes were born. (<span>Note: The prize is pronounced No-BELL, emphasis on the bell.)</span></p>
<h3>How do they choose who wins?</h3>
<p>There are Nobel Prizes in five categories: Physics, Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine, Literature, and Peace. (The <a href="http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic-sciences/">Economic Sciences Prize</a>, established in 1968 by Sweden's central bank, is not technically a Nobel but a prize in honor of Alfred Nobel.)</p>
<p>Nobel winners must be alive, and a Nobel cannot be shared by more than three people. There's no limit to how many prizes a person can receive. Organizations can get them, too. (For example, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has received multiple Peace Prizes.)</p>
<p>The Nobel committees invite thousands of people each year to nominate recipients. Those records are secret for 50 years, after which they're unsealed. That means you can search the Nobel Prize <a style="font-size: 15.4545450210571px; line-height: 1.5; background-color: #ffffff;" href="http://www.nobelprize.org/nomination/archive/">nomination archives</a> and find out who proposed whom throughout history.</p>
<p>For example, below are all the times that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was nominated or nominated someone else. Notice that he and his secretary of state, Cordell Hull, nominated each other in the same year. FDR never actually received one, but Hull got a Peace Prize in 1945 for helping establish the United Nations:</p>
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<img alt="Franklin D Roosevelt Nobel" data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/gYmxuXZFhzpSmyf432Z7WHnLUro=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/2323012/Screen_Shot_2014-10-03_at_4.14.37_PM.0.png">
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<p class="caption"><span>An example of a nominations record from the Nobel Prize's public archives. </span><span>(</span><a href="http://www.nobelprize.org/nomination/archive/show_people.php?id=7856">Nobelprize.org</a><span>)</span></p>
<p>So who makes the decisions? The Royal Swedish Academy appoints its own members to committees for the Nobels in Physics, Chemistry, Literature, and Economics. The Karolinska Institutet, a Swedish medical university, does the same for the Physiology and Medicine prize. Membership lasts three years. If you want to know who exactly is on the roster, the names are public (here's the 2014 <a href="http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/prize_awarder/committee.html">literature committee</a>).</p>
<p>Each year, the committees confidentially invite qualified people to nominate potential winners. The nominators generally <a href="http://www.nobelprize.org/nomination/physics/">consist</a> of members of the academy or institute itself, members of the relevant Nobel committee, past Nobel laureates in the field, tenured professors from Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, and Norway, department chairs from elsewhere, and other scientists or <a href="http://www.nobelprize.org/nomination/literature/">presidents of author societies</a>.</p>
<p>The <a href="http://www.nobelprize.org/nomination/peace/index.html">Norwegian Nobel Committee</a>, appointed by the Norwegian Parliament, handles the Peace Prize. Nominators don't need to be invited, but have to be members or advisers of the committee, previous Nobel laureates, people working in relevant fields (social sciences, peace research, etc.), national politicians, or members of international courts.</p>
<p>Depending on the prize, nominators may fill out a <a href="http://www.nobelprize.org/nomination/physics/">form</a> or write a <a href="http://www.nobelprize.org/nomination/peace/index.html">letter</a>. <span>You can't nominate yourself. </span><span>The relevant committee, often aided by advisers, either </span><a href="http://www.nobelprize.org/nomination/peace/index.html" style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: #ffffff;">votes</a><span> for a winner or </span><a href="http://www.nobelprize.org/nomination/medicine/" style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: #ffffff;">submits</a><span> </span><span>recommendations to a larger assembly. All decisions are final.</span></p>
<h3>What do the winners actually get?<br> <figure class="e-image">
<img alt="Nobel Prize banquet" data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/4WEuQofeerdfsHjYke9AuVAbpHo=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/2326778/454805749.0.jpg">
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<p class="caption">Queen Silvia of Sweden sits between Nobel Laureate in Physics Francois Englert and Carl-Henrik Heldin, chairman of the board of the Nobel Foundation, at the 2013 banquet. (Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images)</p>
<p>Later this year, the winners will go to Stockholm; attend a fancy <a href="http://www.nobelprize.org/ceremonies/dresscode/">white tie</a> ceremony; meet Swedish royalty; and get a beautiful diploma, a heavy gold medal, and a document confirming their award money. This year, the award is 8 million Swedish krona (roughly $931,000 US) and can be split by up to three people.</p>
<p>The ceremony is followed by a lavish banquet. In 2013, attendees <a href="http://www.nobelprize.org/ceremonies/menus/menu-2013.html">dined</a> on a guinea hen "mosaic," turbot fish stuffed with lobster, and a "chocolate silhouette with nougat and sea buckthorn explosion." (All <a href="http://www.nobelprize.org/ceremonies/menus/">menus</a> are public.)</p>
<p>There's one exception, though. The Nobel Peace Prize is awarded at a separate event in Oslo, Norway. Alfred Nobel <a href="http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/faq.html">never explained</a> why he wanted certain prizes given by the Swedes and the peace one by the Norwegians.</p>
<h3>What are the best Nobel Prize controversies?</h3>
<p> <figure class="e-image">
<img alt="Ostracized blob person Nobel" data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/NLD88eQNUKUCiZI0yfikPNbZmQg=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/2326876/shutterstock_93007474.0.jpg">
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<p class="caption">Clearly the pink blob person on the right didn't get to share a Blob Person Nobel Prize with the other two blob people. So sad. (<a href="http://www.shutterstock.com/pic-93007474/stock-photo-workplace-bullying.html?src=FBA_ZyCv3-cs0XXy6r7QvQ-1-65" style="font-size: 0.8em; text-align: inherit; line-height: 1.5;">Shutterstock</a><span>)</span></p>
<p><span>The Literature Prize is very often controversial. For exampl</span><span>e</span><span>, many widely </span><span>admired writers </span><span>like Vladimir Nabokov and James Joyce never won, while some now-forgotten authors have.</span></p>
<p>The rule that no more than three people can share a Nobel has made for some good controversies in science, especially in fields that require a lot of collaboration. It's not that uncommon for someone to get left out. Physicist Mark Jackson has a good <a href="http://theconversation.com/the-not-so-noble-past-of-the-nobel-prizes-18939">roundup</a> at the Conversation of people who were robbed of a prize because of this rule, including Freeman Dyson for his contributions to quantum electrodynamics.</p>
<p>The Nobel Prizes are the work of fallible humans and therefore have been accused of their share of Eurocentrism, sexism, and the rest. For instance, back in 1967, physics researcher Jocelyn Bell<a href="http://www.smh.com.au/technology/sci-tech/no-bell-had-hollow-ring-20130220-2eq2p.html"> discovered</a> an odd pattern in her data that turned out to be the first discovery of a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulsar">pulsar</a> star. But she never won a Nobel for this. Instead, in 1974 her adviser Antony Hewish <a href="http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1974/">received</a> a Nobel Prize in Physics for "his decisive role in the discovery of pulsars." He shared the prize with fellow astronomer Martin Ryle.</p>
<p>The Nobel Peace Prize is probably the most controversial Nobel of all —and not just because Mahatma Gandhi never got one.</p>
<h3>Why is the Nobel Peace Prize always so controversial?<br> <figure class="e-image">
<img alt="Obama Nobel Prize" data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/7mb5zjI_oWkD8jMtnoQgM31Fie8=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/2326836/95187384.0.jpg">
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<p class="caption">Obama decided to send 30,000 more troops into Afghanistan a week before this picture was taken at the Nobel ceremony, where he got his Nobel Peace Prize in 2009. (Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images)</p>
<p>There's almost always controversy around the Peace Prize — in part because it's so political. What's more, some politicians win the prize for certain peace-promoting actions, but then engage in conflict later on (or have engaged in conflict previously). That can get messy.</p>
<p>In 2009, New York Times ethics columnist Randy Cohen <a style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: #ffffff;" href="http://ethicist.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/06/taking-back-nobel-prizes/">argued</a> that "the prize should be rescinded in those extreme cases when a past winner has repeatedly acted contrary to the values the prize enshrines." He suggested a few possibly unworthy winners, including President Teddy Roosevelt, Henry Kissinger, and Yasser Arafat. (According to the Nobel Prize rules, a prize cannot be taken back.)</p>
<p>Arguably the most controversial Nobel Peace Prize in recent memory is <a href="http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/2009/">President Obama's</a> in 2009, "for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples." Obama was still in the first year of his first term, and <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/10/world/10nobel.html?_r=0">many</a> at the time argued that the prize was <a href="http://kristof.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/09/obama-and-the-nobel-peace-prize/">premature</a>. Plus, he's engaged in quite a few bombing and drone campaigns since.</p>
<p>In a different flavor of controversy, three Peace Prize winners have been under arrest by their home countries when awarded the prize (which turns the award into a very political statement): Chinese human rights activist Liu Xiaobo in 2010, Burmese politician Aung San Suu Kyi in 1991, and German journalist and pacifist Carl von Ossietzky in 1935.</p>
<p><span></span></p>
<h3>Can dead people win?</h3>
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<img alt="Ralph Steinman" data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/bRHOaYshqb36E83AsmjjTthufBk=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/2326802/127924707.0.jpg">
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<p class="caption"><span>Ralph Steinman died three days before his Nobel Prize was announced. Here, his family speaks at a press conference after the announcement. (</span>Stan Honda/AFP/Getty Images<span>)</span></p>
<p><span>No. In 1974, the Nobel Foundation </span><a style="font-size: 15.4545450210571px; line-height: 20.4545440673828px; background-color: #ffffff;" href="http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_organizations/nobelfoundation/history/lemmel/">changed</a><span> its rules so that awards couldn't be given out posthumously. </span><span>This rule has created tons of controversy, especially because it often takes decades to determine whether a person's work has had a significant enough impact to be worthy of a Nobel.</span></p>
<p><b style="font-size: 15.4545450210571px; line-height: 20.4545440673828px;"></b></p>
<p>The rule can also lead to awkwardness. In 2011, the Board of the Nobel Foundation announced that it would be giving a Prize in Physiology or Medicine to <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-15156342">Ralph Steinman</a>, only to find out that he had just died three days before.</p>
<p>Steinman's award was for discovering a new type of immune system cell, the dendritic cell, decades earlier. Later in life, after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, he created and tried an experimental dendritic cell therapy on himself, which seems to have prolonged his life by about four years (most people with pancreatic cancer die in one year). Unfortunately, he didn't live long enough to hear about his Nobel.</p>
<p>However, the board resolved to still give him the award, on the logic that it hadn't known that he was dead when the initial decision was made.</p>
<p>By the way, it's often claimed that Rosalind Franklin, a co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, got left out of the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine because she had died four years earlier. But that's not technically true. The posthumous rule wasn't formally in effect at the time, although it was exceptionally rare for awards to be given after death. As <a href="http://msmagazine.com/blog/2012/12/31/dont-forget-rosalind-franklin/">recently unsealed documents showed</a>, Franklin was never nominated. Instead, Francis Crick, James Watson, and Maurice Wilkins <a href="http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1962/">won the prize</a><span>.</span></p>
<h3>Why isn't there a Nobel for mathematics? Or art? Or music?</h3>
<p> <figure class="e-image">
<img alt="Math chalkboard woman" data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/chEXEBENm1WVsmfwf_72aySHzgA=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/2326864/shutterstock_167441195.0.jpg">
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<p class="caption">(<a href="http://www.shutterstock.com/pic-167441195/stock-photo-schoolgirl-with-glasses-solving-math-problem-on-blackboard.html?src=NhtMrwscp1vfxJ8KKCxdOA-1-18">Shutterstock</a>)</p>
<p>The Nobels started with five prizes: Physics, Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine, Literature, and Peace. Then, in 1968, Sweden's central bank made a donation to establish a prize in Economic Sciences, which is not technically a Nobel but "the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel."</p>
<p>T<span>he Nobel's board seems to have no interest in adding new categories. The Nobel Prize website repeatedly </span><a href="http://www.nobelprize.org/faq/questions_in_category.php?id=2#2">says</a><span> that the board has decided "</span>not to permit new additions."<span> </span></p>
<p><span></span><span>So no, there's no prize in environmental sciences, engineering, fine art, mathematics, or any number of other things that matter. There's a longstanding myth that there's no Nobel Prize in math because Alfred Nobel's wife had an affair with a brilliant mathematician. However, this myth </span><a style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: #ffffff;" href="http://mathforum.org/social/articles/ross.html">seems baseless</a> — f<span>or one, Nobel never even married.</span></p>
<h3><span>Who refused a Nobel Prize? And why?</span></h3>
<p> <figure class="e-image">
<img alt="Sartre" data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/OAML1gDN1NxvI8iyzXNlXhud7tU=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/2326818/503015661.0.jpg">
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<p class="caption">Jean-Paul Sartre said no thanks. (Votava/Imagno/Getty Images)</p>
<p>It doesn't happen often. But when it does, it's dramatic. Jean-Paul Sartre was awarded the Prize in Literature in 1964, but turned it down because he was Jean-Paul Sartre. He <a href="http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1964/press.html">stated</a> that writers shouldn't affiliate themselves with institutions and lived by that — he even turned down membership in the French Legion of Honor.</p>
<p><span>Henry Kissinger and Vietnamese politician and negotiator</span><span> </span><a style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: #ffffff;" href="http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1973/tho-facts.html">Le Duc Tho</a><span> </span><span>were awarded the </span><span>1973 Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating an armistice in Vietnam, but Tho refused it, </span><a style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: #ffffff;" href="http://www.nytimes.com/1990/10/14/obituaries/le-duc-tho-top-hanoi-aide-dies-at-79.html">reasoning that</a><span> </span><span>''peace has not yet been established.''</span><span> </span></p>
<p><span></span></p>
<p>Meanwhile, four other awardees have been <a href="http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/facts/">forced</a> to decline the prize by their governments. Hitler didn't allow three Germans to collect their prize money in the 1930s: chemist <a href="http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/1938/index.html">Richard Kuhn</a>, for work on vitamins, chemist <a href="http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/1939/index.html">Adolf Butenandt</a>, for work on sex hormones, and <a href="http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1939/index.html">Gerhard Domagk</a>, discoverer of the first antibiotic to become commercially available.</p>
<p>And Russian writer <a href="http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1958/pasternak-facts.html">Boris Pasternak</a>, author of <i>Doctor Zhivago </i>(which had to be published outside the USSR), initially accepted his prize for literature in 1958 but was then forced by the Soviet government to turn it down.</p>
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<p><b>Correction:</b> The man appearing to the left of Queen Silvia in the photograph was originally misidentified.</p>
https://www.vox.com/2014/10/6/6895363/nobel-prizes-winners-controversies-explainedSusannah Locke2015-10-12T15:30:02-04:002015-10-12T15:30:02-04:00Nobel winner Angus Deaton is very critical of foreign aid. The reality's more complicated.
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<img alt="A real product of the Nobel Committee." src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/6G7PDz7anxhqINbao4S1I8xmc5o=/1730x0:7472x4307/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/47399258/fig_ek_15_deaton.0.0.jpg" />
<figcaption>A real product of the Nobel Committee. | <a href='http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic-sciences/laureates/2015/press.html''> Johan Jarnestad/The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences</a></figcaption>
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<p>The Nobel Prize in Economics aspires to reward scientific achievement, just like the prizes in physics, chemistry, and medicine. But given how politically divided economics is as a field, it's normal for prize selections to be interpreted in ideological terms.</p>
<p>Indeed, commentators are already interpreting this year's award to Princeton professor Angus Deaton as a victory for skeptics of foreign aid, of which Deaton has been relentlessly critical:</p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en">
<p lang="en" dir="ltr">The Deaton choice will not make the aid industry happy. He is a vocal critic of foreign aid.</p>
— Dani Rodrik (@rodrikdani) <a href="https://twitter.com/rodrikdani/status/653533950904823808">October 12, 2015</a>
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<p lang="en" dir="ltr">Prepare for an onslaught of anti-foreign aid pieces invoking Deaton. NB: this is only tangentially related to work that won him Nobel.</p>
— Justin Sandefur (@JustinSandefur) <a href="https://twitter.com/JustinSandefur/status/653573690517385216">October 12, 2015</a>
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<p>But Deaton's views are more subtle than "aid is bad" — and the reality is more subtle, and more auspicious for foreign aid, than even Deaton's nuanced take suggests.</p>
<h3>Deaton: We can give the poor medicine, we just can't give them growth</h3>
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<img alt="This is the kind of suffering aid can help alleviate" data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/RqPtU9tHaCZVrAXB_v3uARwaXKo=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/4151502/147813283.jpg">
<cite><p>Paula Bronstein/Getty Images</p></cite>
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<p>A 2-year-old in South Sudan suffering from skin infections and malnourishment at a Doctors Without Borders hospital.</p>
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<p>In his popular op-ed writings and his book <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Great-Escape-Origins-Inequality/dp/0691165629">The Great Escape</a></em>, Deaton argues that foreign aid can't solve the big problem that's keeping poor countries poor: weak governments that make it impossible to grow. In fact, he argues that aid designed to address that problem only makes it worse. "If poverty is not a result of lack of resources or opportunities, but of poor institutions, poor government, and toxic politics, giving money to poor countries — particularly giving money to the <em>governments</em> of poor countries — is likely to perpetuate and prolong poverty, not eliminate it," he writes in <em>The Great Escape</em>.</p>
<p>But Deaton's claim is rather weaker than "all foreign aid in all contexts will fail." For one thing, he thinks a major reason aid has had lackluster results is that it's often given not out of a desire to alleviate poverty but out of a need to court countries' leaders for political purposes. The US gives Israel billions in aid not because Israel is particularly poor — it's the richest country in its region — but because it considers Israel an important ally. Critiquing that kind of aid doesn't necessarily indict aid that <em>is</em> explicitly geared toward helping poor people.</p>
<p>Deaton also allows that health aid can, in some cases, help.</p>
<p>He cites examples like the international efforts to eliminate smallpox, river blindness, and polio, programs that spread vaccinations and HIV antiretroviral therapy, and the provision of antimalarial bednets and oral rehydration therapy.</p>
<p>"External aid," he concludes, "has saved millions of lives in poor countries." His take on health aid isn't entirely positive — he thinks that it has in some ways made it harder for poor countries to develop their own health systems — but he allows at least one very important exception to his general aid skepticism.</p>
<p>He has also expressed sympathy for another common kind of aid that's become more popular in recent years: cash. In 1998, well before cash became trendy in foreign aid circles, Deaton and his wife, fellow Princeton economist Anne Case, released a <a href="http://www.princeton.edu/~accase/downloads/Large_Cash_Transfers_to_the_Elderly_in_South_Africa.pdf">positive evaluation</a> of a cash pension program in South Africa. While he still thinks cash isn't enough to build government capacity in poor countries, he has <a href="http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/economic-development-requires-effective-governments-by-angus-deaton">argued it beats other kinds of aid</a>: "Certainly, the immediate effects are likely to be better, especially in countries where little government-to-government aid actually reaches the poor."</p>
<h3>Deaton is probably too pessimistic about aid</h3>
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<img alt="Child mortality fell considerably" data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/DWRt8vAEEraW9BVcDv6w7x-OX-0=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/4151528/108000059.jpg">
<cite><p>Majid Saeedi/Getty Images</p></cite>
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<p>A doctor in a hospital in Kabul. Afghanistan's public health system is a product of an effective aid intervention.</p>
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<p>Those caveats aside, it's definitely true that Deaton doesn't think aid can effect the fundamental changes needed for poor countries to become rich. There's a weak claim here and a strong claim here. The weak claim is that aid alone won't lift a country out of poverty or build meaningful state capacity; the strong claim is that aid will actually <em>hurt</em> that effort.</p>
<p>The strong claim doesn't really hold up. The most natural way that aid could undermine states' abilities to operate would be by replacing domestic sources of funds — that is, by substituting for, rather than supplementing, taxes. And indeed, some studies find a <a href="http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=860826">correlation between higher aid levels and lower tax collection</a> (<a target="_blank" href="http://www.ictd.ac/en/publications/aid-and-taxation-exploring-relationship-using-new-data">others</a> <a target="_blank" href="http://www.degruyter.com/view/j/jgd.2013.4.issue-1/jgd-2013-5009/jgd-2013-5009.xml">don't</a>). But it's hard to say that more aid <em>causes</em> less tax collection. "This could simply reflect the fact that aid favors poorer countries, with less state capacity generally," development economist Martin Ravallion wrote in <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/roiw.12136/abstract?userIsAuthenticated=false&deniedAccessCustomisedMessage=">a review of Deaton's book</a>. "The numerous studies using controls have not come up with conclusive evidence that aid has a causal effect in diminishing tax levels."</p>
<p>Indeed, <a href="http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.296.6263&rep=rep1&type=pdf">more recent studies</a> suggest that one-for-one substitution only happens in countries with very weak institutions. Countries that start out with better ones are able to use the aid to supplement taxes. "In the average recipient country, a dollar of extra aid reduces taxes collected by the government by only nine cents," the Center for Global Development's <a href="http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2013/12/books.htm">Charles Kenny</a> writes. That result sure doesn't look like aid undermining local institutions. The <a href="https://chrisblattman.com/2013/10/17/is-aid-a-roadblock-to-development-some-thoughts-on-angus-deatons-new-book/">evidence here is murky</a>, and we can't definitely say that aid has <em>no</em> deleterious impact. But Deaton also can't definitively say that we'd be making poor people better off by denying them aid.</p>
<p>The claim that aid can't <em>build up</em> institutions in the first place is more defensible. Building institutions is very difficult. But even here, there are some aid success stories. After invading Afghanistan in late 2001, the US teamed up with the World Bank and European nations to <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/10/heres-the-best-thing-the-us-has-done-in-afghanistan/280484/">fund a new, comprehensive public health system</a> for the country, run through its own Ministry of Public Health. The system emerged, and it worked: It reached 90 percent of the country, and sharply reduced infant mortality, contributing to a spike in life expectancy from 42 to 62 years from 2004 to 2010. Not every aid project will be a glowing success story like that. But the fact that such successes are possible should chasten critics like Deaton who argue that huge categories of aid should be ended, rather than reformed.</p>
<h3>Deaton's a useful skeptic. But he doesn't give the whole picture.</h3>
<p>I'm actually glad Deaton is voicing skepticism on aid. A lot of aid really hasn't worked. A lot of it really is politically motivated. And his criticism of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) as the be-all and end-all of program evaluations has helped make the aid community's approach to evidence more sophisticated. It's true an RCT showing that an anti-malaria program worked in one village in Kenya doesn't necessarily imply that such a program will work in a totally different village in Nepal. Deaton is doing a service by banging that drum.</p>
<p>But his aid criticism betrays a fatalism that isn't warranted. Not all aid is about building state capacity, and the evidence that such aid actually hurts poor countries trying to build functioning governments is weak. And there are cases when aid arguably <em>has </em>helped poor governments develop their institutions. The lesson isn't to give up. It's to <a href="http://www.cgdev.org/blog/lot-aid-doesn%E2%80%99t-work-that%E2%80%99s-reason-reform-not-retrenchment">make aid better</a>.</p>
https://www.vox.com/2015/10/12/9512143/nobel-economics-angus-deaton-aidDylan Matthews2015-10-12T12:16:00-04:002015-10-12T12:16:00-04:00Where Nobel Prize winners were born, in one map
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<p>2015's <a href="http://www.vox.com/2015/10/8/9483281/nobel-peace-prize-2015" target="_blank">Nobel Prize week</a> wrapped up today with the announcement of the economics prize for <a href="http://www.vox.com/2015/10/12/9505213/angus-deaton-nobel-prize" target="_blank">Angus Deaton</a>. And because these awards are open to anybody anywhere, questions of nationality can get interesting.</p>
<p>So which countries are racking up the most Nobels? If you do it by people's country of birth, you end up with this:</p>
<p></p>
<p><span>(Note that this data set doesn't include</span><span> the </span><span><a href="http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/lists/organizations.html" target="_blank">roughly two dozen organizations</a> that have won, including the 2015 Peace Prize for the Tunisian <a href="http://www.vox.com/2015/10/9/9486511/nobel-prize-peace-tunisian-national-dialogue-quartet" target="_blank">National Dialogue Quartet</a>.)</span></p>
<p><span></span><span>So, it's pretty easy to see that the US comes out far on top, with 258 prizes. It's followed by the UK, Germany, and France. And in terms of sheer numbers, no one else really compares. (Of course, some countries have a lot more people than others, so depending on your attitude, this might not seem like the most fair of rankings.) </span></p>
<p><span>The US dominates most types of Nobel Prizes, except the French have the most for literature. If you want to explore more, the Nobel Prize website has an interesting </span><a style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: #ffffff;" href="http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/country-birth-map/map.php">interactive</a> that lets you sort by prize type and year — and gives a full readout of everybody's names<span>.</span></p>
<p></p>
<div class="chorus-snippet s-related" data-analytics-action="link:related" data-analytics-category="article">
<span class="s-related__title">Related</span> <a target="_blank" href="http://www.vox.com/2014/10/6/6895363/nobel-prizes-winners-controversies-explained/in/9247322">How the Nobel Prize became the most controversial award on Earth</a>
</div>
<p><span>But is birth country the most important thing? What if some candidates moved across the world to find a position where they could do their best work? <br></span></p>
<p><span>A few years ago, </span>Jon Bruner at Forbes made a fascinating <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/jonbruner/2011/10/05/nobel-prizes-and-american-leadership-in-science-infographic/" target="_blank">chart</a> <span>showing country at time of award. The general pattern is quite similar. And since he arranged it as a timeline, you get to see interesting trends, such as the </span><span>decline of German dominance and rise of American dominance after World War II.</span></p>
<hr>
<p><b>Correction:</b> A previous version of this map mistakenly didn't depict the Nobel Prizes of the Netherlands, Belgium, and Denmark.</p>
https://www.vox.com/2015/10/9/9483287/nobel-prizes-2015-country-nationalitySusannah Locke2015-10-12T11:40:01-04:002015-10-12T11:40:01-04:00Read 2015 Nobel Economics Prize winner Angus Deaton's amazing take on inequality
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<figcaption>Jonathan Nackstrand/AFP via Getty Images</figcaption>
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<p><a href="http://www.vox.com/2015/10/12/9505213/angus-deaton-nobel-prize">Angus Deaton</a>, who won the Nobel Prize for Economics today, is best known for his detailed work on consumption and poverty for individuals. But in his 2013 book <em><a href="http://press.princeton.edu/titles/10054.html">The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality</a></em>, Deaton made a short, compelling, and clear case for why income inequality in society as a whole is a threat to democracy — and why worrying about it isn't just class warfare or resentment:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The political equality that is required by democracy is always under threat from economic inequality, and the more extreme the economic inequality, the greater the threat to democracy. If democracy is compromised, there is a direct loss of wellbeing because people have good reason to value their ability to participate in political life, and the loss of that ability is instrumental in threatening other harm.</p>
<p>The very wealthy have little need for state-provided education or health care… They have even less reason to support health insurance for everyone, or to worry about the low quality of public schools that plagues much of the country. They will oppose any regulation of banks that restricts profits, even if it helps those who cannot cover their mortgages or protects the public against predatory lending, deceptive advertising, or even a repetition of the financial crash. To worry about these consequences of extreme inequality has nothing to do with being envious of the rich and everything to do with the fear that rapidly growing top incomes are a threat to the wellbeing of everyone else.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In other words, worrying about income inequality doesn't mean being jealous of wealth. It's about the effect on the rest of society when the wealthy are rich enough that they can effectively drive political outcomes so they line up with their unusual policy preferences.</p>
<p>(via <a href="https://twitter.com/kelleher_/status/653570475927273472">Paul Kelleher</a>)</p>
https://www.vox.com/2015/10/12/9508423/angus-deaton-income-inequalityLibby Nelson2015-10-12T11:28:00-04:002015-10-12T11:28:00-04:00Angus Deaton's badly misunderstood paper on whether happiness peaks at $75,000, explained
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<figcaption>Netflix</figcaption>
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<p>Angus Deaton is many things: a celebrated Princeton economist, an expert on measuring well-being and poverty, and, as of Monday morning, the <a target="_blank" href="http://www.vox.com/2015/10/12/9505213/angus-deaton-nobel-prize">2015 Nobel laureate in economics</a>. Deaton has an unusually high public profile for an economist — to the point that his research was once cited on <i>Orange is the New Black</i>.</p>
<p>In season three, episode seven, about 36 minutes and 30 seconds in, Piper Chapman (Taylor Schilling) cited <a href="http://www.pnas.org/content/107/38/16489.full">a 2010 study</a> by Deaton and Princeton<span> psychologist Daniel Kahneman (who also won a Nobel in economics in 2002).</span><span> This being Piper, she's less citing it than she is condescendingly richsplaining it to Daya (Dascha Polanco). Appropriately, given her character, Piper takes exactly the wrong lesson from it.</span></p>
<p>"There was this study that said that money does buy happiness, up to $75,000 a year," Chapman says. "But after that, increasing your income doesn't make you any happier." You can watch the video above.</p>
<p>This statistic gets tossed around a lot. Most notably, <a href="http://www.vox.com/2015/4/15/8420203/dan-price">CEO Dan Price</a> raised the salary of all 120 people at his company, Gravity Payments, to $70,000 and cut his own salary to that level, because of<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/14/business/owner-of-gravity-payments-a-credit-card-processor-is-setting-a-new-minimum-wage-70000-a-year.html?smprod=nytcore-iphone&smid=nytcore-iphone-share&_r=0"> Deaton and Kahneman's research</a> (why he didn't bump it to their actual figure of $75,000, I dunno).</p>
<p>But the factoid is wrong. It's based on a cursory, wrongheaded reading of the study, and it ignores tons of evidence suggesting that there is no such tipping point. Having more money is correlated with having a better, more satisfying life, no matter how high up the income ladder you go. Don't believe anyone who tells you otherwise. Even Piper.</p>
<h3>What the study actually says</h3>
<p>Deaton and Kahneman's <a href="http://www.pnas.org/content/107/38/16489.full">study</a> estimates how Americans' happiness levels change with income. They use a big data set: 450,000 responses to daily Gallup polls conducted in 2008 and 2009. The polls don't track the same people over time, so they can't show whether individual people get happier when their incomes go up, but they can determine how much happier rich people are, on average, than poorer people.</p>
<p>They did, indeed, find that emotional well-being taps out at $75,000. But "emotional well-being" is a very specific thing. It's an indicator about people's moods, measured by asking people about their emotions the day before. In the case of this study, respondents were asked questions of the form, "Did you experience the following feelings during a lot of the day yesterday? How about _____?" with emotions like "stress," "happiness," "enjoyment," "worry," and "sadness" filling in the blank. These kind of questions tell you what people's mood was the day before. But they don't tell you if those people like their lives overall.</p>
<h3>The best moods, or the best life?</h3>
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<img alt="dragon v2 musk" data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/Rmzvk2cktGO-YYiC-ZlRSQnIA-Q=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/674614/494548335.0.jpg">
<cite><p>(Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images)</p></cite>
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<p>What is best in life? Building frickin' rockets for a living, that's what.</p>
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<p>There's another, more holistic way to measure happiness, often known as <a href="http://www.vox.com/xpress/2014/10/31/7132465/2-charts-that-show-money-really-does-buy-happiness">"life satisfaction" or "subjective well-being."</a> That's not tracked by asking about feelings. In the case of the Deaton-Kahneman study, it's tracked by asking respondents to imagine the best possible life for themselves and then rank their current lives on a 0-to-10 scale, relative to that best life. This question is known as <a href="http://www.gallup.com/poll/122453/understanding-gallup-uses-cantril-scale.aspx">"Cantril's ladder."</a> This doesn't tell you how people are feeling on a day-to-day level. But it tells you how satisfied they are with their lives as a whole, how well they think they're doing overall.</p>
<p>I think it's fair to say that this metric — life satisfaction — is a better gauge for what people actually want for themselves than emotional well-being is. I don't want to be perpetually giddy and worry-free; I do want to have a life that I'm, on the whole, happy with. Think about it this way. <a href="http://www.vox.com/2015/4/27/8489479/how-to-be-successful">Elon Musk</a>'s life is much more stressful than mine. After all, he has to run two major companies — <a href="http://www.vox.com/2015/5/6/8556401/spacex-pad-abort-test-watch-live">SpaceX</a> and <a href="http://www.vox.com/2014/10/10/6955739/tesla-d-elon-musk-AWD-autonomous-parking">Tesla Motors</a> — among numerous other responsibilities. That's an incredibly stressful schedule. But his life is still way, way better than mine. He launches rockets to space for a living! He builds sleek, amazing electric cars that can park themselves! He gets to draw up plans for a <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/08/12/a-hyperloop-might-be-far-more-expensive-than-elon-musk-thinks/">wacky vacuum train</a> that could go <a href="http://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/Energy-Voices/2013/0717/NYC-to-LA-in-45-minutes-Tesla-Motors-CEO-says-Hyperloop-could-do-it.">from LA to New York in 45 minutes</a>, and have people take the idea <em>very seriously</em>! He's worth <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/billionaires/2015-06-18/aaa">$13.3 billion</a>! By any reasonable standard, he lives a fantastic life. But that wouldn't necessarily show up if you polled him about if he felt stressed or worried or sad the previous day.</p>
<p>This mood versus life satisfaction distinction really makes a difference when you're looking at income. While people's day-to-day moods stop getting better after $75,000 in household income, Deaton and Kahneman find there's absolutely no drop-off point for life satisfaction. It's not linear; $10,000 does more for you if you're making $50,000 than if you're making $1 million. But the effect is there, constantly, no matter how much you earn.</p>
<h3>Other research finds no tipping point</h3>
<p>This idea — that there's no tipping point beyond which money doesn't increase life satisfaction — is backed up by other research, as well. Work by economists <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/04/29/yes-money-really-can-buy-happiness/">Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers</a> comparing happiness across countries, across several different surveys, has found that there's no satiation point. For developing and developed countries alike, being richer is correlated with higher life satisfaction. Here, for example, is the income versus life satisfaction graph using Gallup's ladder question:</p>
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<img alt=" " data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/28qOOIQsEwmlL0sk73xo_eaTEfw=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/3807996/Screenshot%202015-06-19%2014.45.13.png">
<cite><p><a href="http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/research/files/papers/2013/04/subjective%20well%20being%20income/subjective%20well%20being%20income.pdf">Stevenson and Wolfers</a></p></cite>
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<p>Here are some plots using responses to the World Values Survey, which <a href="http://www-bcf.usc.edu/~easterl/papers/Happiness_and_Growth_Appendix.pdf">asks</a>, "All things considered, how satisfied are you with your life as a whole these days?"</p>
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<cite><p><a href="http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/research/files/papers/2013/04/subjective%20well%20being%20income/subjective%20well%20being%20income.pdf">Stevenson and Wolfers</a></p></cite>
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<p>They get the same result with questions that ask people, directly, if they're happy. This is a quite different from questions like, "Did you experience stress yesterday?" that Deaton and Kahneman used, but it also measures emotional well-being, rather than life satisfaction. Here are results for the World Values Survey question, "Taking all things together, would you say you are very happy, quite happy, not very happy, or not at all happy?" Again, richer countries are happier, and there's no drop-off point:</p>
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<img alt=" " data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/0uaDsRADoENQ3fUuWDPvHa96Tvs=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/3808052/Screenshot%202015-06-19%2015.23.49.png">
<cite><p><a href="http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/research/files/papers/2013/04/subjective%20well%20being%20income/subjective%20well%20being%20income.pdf">Stevenson and Wolfers</a></p></cite>
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<p>Stevenson and Wolfers found this was true within the US, as well. They find that responses to the General Social Survey question, "Taken all together, how would you say things are these days — would you say that you are very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy?" improve with income, with no drop-off point:</p>
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<cite><p><a href="http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/research/files/papers/2013/04/subjective%20well%20being%20income/subjective%20well%20being%20income.pdf">Stevenson and Wolfers</a></p></cite>
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<p>Same goes for a <a href="http://www.gallup.com/poll/103483/most-americans-very-satisfied-their-personal-lives.aspx">Gallup poll question</a> asking Americans, "Generally speaking, how happy would you say you are — very happy, fairly happy, or not too happy?" Only 35 percent of people in households making under $10,000 a year reported being very happy. Eighty-three percent of people in households making $250,000 to $500,000 did. And 100 percent of people making more than $500,000 did. There was no point at which more money didn't correlate with more happiness.</p>
<p>"While the idea that there is some critical level of income beyond which income no longer impacts well-being is intuitively appealing, it is at odds with the data," Stevenson and Wolfers conclude. "As we have shown, there is no major well-being dataset that supports this commonly made claim." They note the Deaton-Kahneman study doesn't contradict this finding at all, because it uses very different questions more explicitly focused on people's transient moods.</p>
<p>So don't home in on that one number, in one study. Focus on the huge amount of evidence suggesting that money always makes you happier.</p>
https://www.vox.com/2015/6/20/8815813/orange-is-the-new-black-piper-chapman-happiness-studyDylan Matthews2015-10-12T09:20:02-04:002015-10-12T09:20:02-04:00The 2015 Nobel Prize for Economics winner, Angus Deaton, explained
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<figcaption>Angus Deaton | <a href='http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic-sciences/laureates/2015/deaton-facts.html'>Nobel Prize Committee</a></figcaption>
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<p>Angus Deaton, born in Scotland but a longtime professor at Princeton, has won the <a target="_blank" href="http://www.nobelprize.org/">2015 Nobel Prize for Economics</a> "for his analysis of consumption, poverty, and welfare." Deaton is well-known for a broad body of work rather than for a handful of breakthrough papers. But it is possible to understand his output as falling along a couple of themes. Methodologically, Deaton is about both empiricism and individualism,<i> </i>arguing for a close look at data on how specific human beings and households behave, rather than stylized models or big national-level aggregate data.</p>
<p>Substantively, this is because he's trying to look behind the easiest summary statistics and understand what is actually happening in people's lives — who is better off than whom, and why. That's a subject that has very broad application. We might wonder if the average person in Oslo is better off than the average person in Orlando, and by how much. But it's of particular interest when we're thinking about questions of <i>poverty</i>. If we want to improve the lot of the worst-off people, we need to know who they are and how to measure improvements in their well-being.</p>
<h3>Deaton's early work on two technical problems</h3>
<p>Deaton originally rose to prominence for work on two technical issues. The first of these was the creation of the <a href="https://www.aeaweb.org/aer/top20/70.3.312-326.pdf" target="_blank">Almost Ideal Demand System</a>, AIDS, which was first published in 1980 just before that acronym came to be known for something else entirely.</p>
<p>A very simple demand system says that if the price of apples falls, people will buy more apples. A natural complicating observation is that if the price of apples falls but the price of oranges falls even more, people actually might buy <i>fewer</i> apples because they are gorging on oranges. Comparing apples to oranges is a legendarily difficult problem, but to understand what products people will want to consume, you more or less need to compare everything to everything. AIDS was a promising effort to show how we can do all the aggregations necessary to understand these dynamics, and it's been the subject of a lot of subsequent refinement by various economists.</p>
<p>Deaton also worked on a problem known as the <a href="http://www.jstor.org/stable/2109680?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents" target="_blank">Deaton Paradox</a>, which is a kind of puzzle internal to the widespread economic assumption that people have a more or less rational, forward-looking behavioral pattern.</p>
<p>This kind of work propelled Deaton's career forward but isn't really what he's best known for.</p>
<h3>Comparisons of living standards</h3>
<p>Money is a really convenient way of comparing how people are faring economically. Saying Jose has $1,000 more than Joe but $2,000 less than Giuseppe is very simple and relatively easy to verify.</p>
<p>But whenever you try to take these kind of simple cash comparisons into the real world, immediate problems resolve. If Jose lives in Texas but Joe lives in Toronto, then one of them has US dollars and the other has Canadian dollars. You can convert between the currencies using market exchange rates, but <a href="http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=CADUSD%3DX+Interactive#%7B" target="_blank">exchange rates bounce up and down at the speed of financial markets</a>, and it's not plausible that living standards shift that quickly. We need to start looking at what people are <i>actually consuming</i> — the food, cars, medicine, etc. that make up economic life.</p>
<p>Yet the further afield you go, the harder this kind of problem becomes. The price of an iPhone is very similar around the world, with the difference largely accounted for by taxes and short-term currency fluctuations. But a haircut is cheaper in Hanoi than in Harrisburg, and cheaper in Harrisburg than in Helsinki. So the cost of living varies from place to place. But it also varies according to what you mean by "living" — the extent of the variation depends on what it is you are buying. If people in Hanoi don't get haircuts as often as people in Helsinki, the fact that haircuts are cheaper isn't as big of a benefit.</p>
<h3>Empirical individualism</h3>
<p>Deaton does not have one giant paper that solves this problem. The whole point of his work, rather, is that it's a problem that requires both theoretical sophistication and a lot of piecemeal work. <a href="http://scholar.princeton.edu/deaton/poverty-world-and-india" target="_blank">Here are his papers on poverty in India</a>, for example. It is not a small number of papers.</p>
<p>In a big-picture sense, Deaton is urging both empiricism and individualism. The easiest thing to do in economics is to choose one or the other. The most widely available empirical data is data about big aggregates — how much did Americans as a whole spend on this or that — and there's a long tradition of work grounded in observing the movements of these big aggregates. There is also a counter-tradition that insists on building up our model of how the big picture works from economists' standard model of how rational individual humans behave. This generates elegant but highly stylized takes on what is going on.</p>
<p>Deaton's approach emphasizes the use of household surveys and other finer-grained sources of empirical data. And it does so due to an appreciation, on a theoretical level, of the importance of diversity. Economic conditions vary enormously from place to place and from person to person. Poor people consume different sorts of things than do rich people, and these patterns vary across place and time.</p>
<p>This is crucially important when it comes to measuring poverty — you can <a href="http://www.princeton.edu/rpds/papers/pdfs/deaton_povertymeasured.pdf" target="_blank">read a nontechnical account of Deaton's approach</a> here — because it implies that governments and nonprofits interested in combating poverty need a fine-grained understanding of how it varies as a phenomenon from place to place. It's not enough to set the poverty line at $1.90 a day and the see how it's changing around the world. You need to see what $1.90 a day actually <i>means</i> in Nigeria versus Nepal, versus Nanjing.</p>
<h3>Health and well-being</h3>
<p>Deaton's interest in consumption, and peering behind the veil of money, eventually led him into the arenas of health and well-being. For many people, health-care services constitute a large share of their spending and consumption. But while people buy movie tickets because they want to watch a movie, people don't really pay for doctors' visits because they like sitting in doctors' offices. The idea is to <i>get healthier</i>. And yet it's well-known that health is impacted by lots of things (diet, exercise, stress) that aren't health-care services, and also that lots of health-care services don't do much to improve health.</p>
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<blockquote lang="en" class="twitter-tweet">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en">Angus Deaton is the Obi-Wan Kenobi of Economics. Breathtaking range of work in poverty, health, healthcare, wellbeing, methods…</p>
— Amitabh Chandra (@amitabhchandra2) <a href="https://twitter.com/amitabhchandra2/status/653537137384550400">October 12, 2015</a>
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<p>This is a big deal in rich countries where health-care costs are so important, but it's also a big deal in poor countries. Many foreign donors are very interested in improving public health, possibly as a tool for fostering economic growth. At the same time, one of the best things about economic growth is that it might foster better public health. Deaton's inquiries into poverty and consumption fed into this area, and his work is well-known among public health and development specialists.</p>
<h3>Popular writing</h3>
<p>Deaton is very much an economists' economist, but he's also a clear writer who dabbled in more popular fare. His book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Great-Escape-Origins-Inequality/dp/0691165629" target="_blank"><i>The Great Escape</i></a> paints an optimistic picture of modernity and the benefits of economic development.</p>
<p>For a while now he's written a biannual <a href="http://scholar.princeton.edu/deaton/letters-america" target="_blank">"Letter From America"</a> for the Royal Economic Society offering views on <a href="http://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/deaton/files/letterfromamerica_oct2014.pdf" target="_blank">the need for regional price indexes</a>, the benefits of a <a href="http://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/deaton/files/letterfromamerica_oct2009_0.pdf" target="_blank">single-payer health-care system</a> but the unlikeliness of adopting one, the <a href="http://www.res.org.uk/view/article1Apr12Correspondence.html" target="_blank">impact of unemployment and health and happiness</a>, and <a href="http://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/deaton/files/letterfromamerica_oct2010_0.pdf" target="_blank">budget cuts to state university systems</a>.</p>
<h3>Criticisms of foreign aid and RCTs</h3>
<p>Deaton is a very widely admired economist but does stake out two controversial positions in development economics that ruffle some feathers. One is that he is <a href="http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/economic-development-requires-effective-governments-by-angus-deaton" target="_blank">sharply critical of foreign aid</a>, seeing improved state capacity as the key to sustainable economic development in poor countries, and aid as useless to counterproductive in achieving it. Other development economists note that <a target="_blank" href="http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2013/12/books.htm">aid can and has built state capacity</a>, and that Deaton's argument that it's net useless or counterproductive doesn't match the empirical reality.</p>
<p>Deaton sees direct cash grants as superior to conventional foreign aid, but even so deems it "no solution" because "poor people <i>need</i> government to lead better lives; taking government out of the loop might improve things in the short run, but it would leave unsolved the underlying problem."</p>
<p>This is linked to Deaton's criticism of the recently popular trend toward Randomized Controlled Experiments (RCTs) as a key tool of development economics. His <a href="http://www.nyudri.org/events/annual-conference-2012-debates-in-development/deaton-v-banerjee/" target="_blank">2012 debate with Abhijit Banerjee</a> on this subject is fascinating if you're interested in a deep dive, but broadly speaking Deaton thinks RCTs tell us too little about interventions that are too small in scale. A study of the deployment of antimalarial bednets in one village in Kenya tells us a lot about the effect of one specific policy in one specific region of one specific country — but it doesn't tell us much about the overall task of eradicating developing world poverty.</p>
<p>Per the title of his popular book, he is interested in understanding what poor people in poor countries need to achieve a "great escape" from a world of widespread immiseration — changes in political economy and economic development that are far too big to be studied as piecemeal RCTs.</p>
https://www.vox.com/2015/10/12/9505213/angus-deaton-nobel-prizeMatthew Yglesias2015-10-09T10:00:02-04:002015-10-09T10:00:02-04:00The 2015 Nobel Peace Prize winner, explained
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<img alt="Wided Bouchamaoui, president of one of the Tunisian labor unions in the National Dialogue Quartet, talks to reporters on learning the group had won the Nobel Peace Prize. " src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/839P_fiNjv2GYdPsdlU9SWYK5pc=/0x0:4915x3686/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/47372482/GettyImages-491970406.0.0.jpg" />
<figcaption>Wided Bouchamaoui, president of one of the Tunisian labor unions in the National Dialogue Quartet, talks to reporters on learning the group had won the Nobel Peace Prize. | FETHI BELAID/AFP/Getty</figcaption>
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<p>This year's prize, for the Tunisian National Dialogue Quartet, is meant as a lesson to the world on how to resolve conflict and preserve democracy.</p> <p>This year's Nobel Prize for peace has been awarded to the Tunisian National Dialogue Quartet, an alliance of civil society groups that has helped steer Tunisia from its 2011 Arab Spring revolution toward pluralistic democracy.</p>
<p>The group is not particularly famous, but the Nobel Peace Prize does often go to lesser-known groups, an effort by the Nobel Committee to promote and draw attention to their work and to whatever larger forces they represent.</p>
<p>This prize, then, is both in recognition of Tunisia's successful transition to democracy — think of it as a prize for all Tunisians who helped in that — and also an aspirational prize meant to encourage more such work, especially in the Middle East.</p>
<h3>Who is the Tunisian National Dialogue Quartet?</h3>
<p>The Tunisian National Dialogue Quartet is an alliance of four Tunisian civil society groups: the Tunisian General Labor Union, the Tunisian Confederation of Industry, Trade, and Handicrafts, the Tunisian Human Rights League, and the Tunisian Order of Lawyers.</p>
<p>For much of Tunisia's postcolonial history, it was a police state ruled by the dictator Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali. As in other Mideast dictatorships, labor unions in Tunisia had some grassroots organizing power but were still tolerated by the regime. So when the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings (which began in Tunisia) toppled Ben Ali that year, labor unions were one of the few organizing institutions left standing.</p>
<p>Tunisia's transition to democracy did not, at first, go very well. Islamists dominated the first elections and appeared ready to roll back some of the country's newly won freedoms. There were clashes and some extremist violence. Many feared Tunisia would follow Egypt's path to chaos.</p>
<p>In the summer of 2013, when things looked dire for Tunisia, the country's largest labor union and its largest business-owners association, who'd long been <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/09/who-are-the-tunisia-national-dialogue-quartet-nobel-peace-prize-winner" target="_blank">at odds</a>, joined together with a human rights group and a lawyers' group to form the National Dialogue Quartet. The group, largely on its own, designed and negotiated a "road map" for the country to full democracy — one that would require most of the sitting government to resign.</p>
<p>Through tremendous work and lobbying, the quartet got everyone to agree to the road map, including the ruling government at the time. The country had been on the verge of catastrophe, and the quartet played a crucial role in saving it.</p>
<h3>Why did the Tunisian National Dialogue Quartet win the Nobel Peace Prize?</h3>
<p>Partly because the group's accomplishments, on their own merits, deserve this for their 2013 road map. The moment was little noticed outside of the Middle East, but it was critical in saving Tunisia's political process and perhaps the country's nascent democracy.</p>
<p>The quartet's 2013 roadmap was not as exciting or headline-grabbing as the 2011 popular uprising, but this sort of civil society engagement and consensus building is <a href="https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/editorials/2015/02/16/tunisia-becomes-beacon-hope/q4ZJ0VuX6LljqmYXjcj4pK/story.html">just as important</a> when it comes to a new democracy establishing itself. This, too, was a historic and critical moment in Tunisia's revolution.</p>
<p>But this is also about the Nobel Committee trying to draw the world's attention to what the quartet represents, to hold it up as a model for the rest of the globe to follow. It's meant as a counterpoint to the standard modes of political conflict resolution in the world: aggression, brinksmanship, intolerance, and a deepening of divisions rather than a bridging of them.</p>
<p>The <a href="http://www.crisisgroup.org/en/publication-type/media-releases/2015/middle-east-north-africa/crisis-group-congratulates-the-tunisian-national-dialogue-quartet.aspx">International Crisis Group</a> put this well, calling the award "an apt recognition of [the quartet's] achievement in allowing the spirit of inclusion and compromise to triumph over the polarisation and violence that has been all too prevalent in the region, and of the central role civil society can play at moments of crisis."</p>
https://www.vox.com/2015/10/9/9486511/nobel-prize-peace-tunisian-national-dialogue-quartetMax Fisher2015-10-09T07:40:00-04:002015-10-09T07:40:00-04:00All the Nobel Peace Prize winners, in one chart
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<img alt="People (and institutions) of peace" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/XeT0_iQfIqBgJL68tqEDNgg_7mM=/0x258:1189x1150/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/47366908/Nobel-peace-prize-winners-Economist.0.png" />
<figcaption>People (and institutions) of peace | <a href='http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2014/12/daily-chart-2'>The Economist</a></figcaption>
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<p>Today, it was announced that the 2015 Nobel Peace Prize will go to the <a target="_blank" href="http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/2015/press.html">Tunisian National Dialogue Quartet</a>, four organizations that helped build democracy in Tunisia after the Arab Spring. It's not the first time that the award has gone to institutions, rather than people.</p>
<p><span>Last year, The Economist published a </span><a href="http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2014/12/daily-chart-2" target="_blank">story</a><span> analyzing trends in the Peace Prize with this</span> <a href="http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2014/12/daily-chart-2" target="_blank">amazing chart</a><span>:</span></p>
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<img alt="Nobel peace prize winners timeline chart" data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/gfMPEC9uB_CPGBkDnfHKG9dAtgs=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/4139548/Nobel-peace-prize-winners-Economist.png">
<cite><p><a href="http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2014/12/daily-chart-2">The Economist</a></p></cite>
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<p class="caption">The periods with an asterisk are years when no one won — check out the big gaps for most of World War I and World War II.</p>
<p>On the chart, The Economist marked institutional winners with a giant letter "I." They include <span>the </span><a href="http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/2013/" style="font-size: 1.3em; line-height: 1.65; background-color: #ffffff;">Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons</a><span> in 2013 and </span><span>the </span><a href="http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/2012/" style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: #ffffff;">European Union</a><span> in 2012 "for over six decades contributed to the advancement of peace and reconciliation, democracy and human rights in Europe."</span></p>
<p>In fact, more institutions have won the Nobel Peace Prize than women have. (Even though the Nobel Peace Prize has the greatest <a href="http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20121008-winning-formula-for-nobel-prizes" style="background-color: #ffffff;">gender diversity</a> of any of the Nobels.)</p>
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<div data-analytics-category="article" data-analytics-action="link:related" class="chorus-snippet s-related">
<span class="s-related__title">Related</span> <a href="http://www.vox.com/2014/10/6/6895363/nobel-prizes-winners-controversies-explained/in/9247322" target="_blank">How the Nobel Prize became the most controversial award on Earth</a>
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<p>Another trend is the diversification in winners' geography — marked by different colors on this chart. There wasn't a single winner outside of North America or Europe for the prize's first 35 years. But in recent decades, winners have hailed from all over the globe. (The new Nobel Prize to four groups from Tunisia follows this trend.)</p>
<p>Maybe that gives us some hope for world peace?</p>
<p>You can see a full list of Nobel Peace Prize winners through 2014 over at <a href="http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2014/12/daily-chart-2" target="_blank">The Economist</a>.</p>
https://www.vox.com/xpress/2014/10/10/6956939/nobel-peace-prize-winners-laureates-graph-chartSusannah Locke