Angus Deaton, por que o premio Nobel de economia - Justin Wolfers (NYT)

Um depoimento sobre a importância do trabalho acadêmico do premiado economista do momento, nos vários campos nos quais ele contribuiu, sobretudo ao corrigir manias macroeconômicas e focar no empírico, no observável em nível micro, em buscar os dados corretos. Só discordo dessa "obrigação moral de economistas de países avançados em ajudar os pobres dos países pobres" - mas isso pode ser de Justin Wolfers, o autor do artigo, não de Angus Deaton -- bem como daquela coisa de Deaton de achar que os ricos podem estar "chutando a escada" para impedir outros -- pessoas ou países -- de os seguirem. Ninguém tem obrigação moral para nada: as pessoas devem conduzir seus cargos e obrigações segundo suas convicções e as normas sob as quais trabalham, e apenas mostrar aos demais o que funciona e o que não funciona, e todo mundo ser livre para aplicar esses ensinamentos ou não. O problema é que certas coisas funcionam num determinado país e não em outro, por isso a regra também deve ser: um MÍNIMO de regulação estatal, de obrigações universais, as pessoas e empresas devem ser livres para fazer os seus próprios experimentos.

Paulo Roberto de Almeida 

Hartford, 18/10/2015

EMPIRICAL FOCUS

Why Angus Deaton Deserved the Economics Nobel Prize

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Justin Wolfers

@JustinWolfers

The New York Times, October 12, 2015

 

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 empiricalnature 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.

Angus Deaton was greeted by his colleagues at Princeton University in Princeton, N.J., after he was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science.CreditPeter Foley/European Pressphoto Agency 

His method of careful analysis of data from household surveys has transformed four large swaths of the dismal science: microeconomics, econometrics, macroeconomics and development economics.

He has brought microeconomics — traditionally a field populated by theorists — into closer connection with the data. Partly because of his influence, modern microeconomists are more likely to spend their days knee-deep in large-scale data sets describing the real-world decisions made by millions of people, and less likely to be mired in Greek-letter abstractions.

Much of the empirical revolution in economics has been enabled by the tools that Mr. Deaton developed. These tools reimagine the role of economic theory, using it to organize and interpret the tidal wave of data coming from the hundreds of household surveys conducted around the world each year.

This focus on empirics has been a boon for the field of econometrics, which is the application of statistical methods to economic problems. Mr. Deaton’s signature achievement in this area has been in forcing empirical researchers to pay closer attention to questions of measurement. For too long, econometric analysis had proceeded as if data were simply handed down from a statistician-loving higher power. The reality is far uglier: Data are imperfect, surveys can be unrepresentative, people misreport, and attempts to recontact survey participants often fail. Mr. Deaton confronts these issues head-on, and he has taught economists how to extract meaning from imperfect data.

For an economist focused on big-picture questions — issues of global poverty — Mr. Deaton remains remarkably grounded in these smaller details. As the Nobel committee put it, Mr. Deaton’s “work covers a wide spectrum, from the deepest implications of theory to the grittiest detail of measurement.”

More than any other economist I know, he understands that to get the big picture right, you’ve got to get all the small details right, too.

This is a lesson that I learned firsthand, as my co-author (and significant other) Betsey Stevenson and I were puzzling over some data that appeared to show that people in certain low-income countries nonetheless reported high levels of life satisfaction. Mr. Deaton, who was equally perplexed, suggested that we dig a little deeper, as he recalled that some of the surveys were not representative samples of the entire population. Sure enough, several weeks of digging through the archives and sifting through the appendices to old codebooks revealed Mr. Deaton to be correct, and those puzzling observations to be simply the result of pollsters surveying only richer (and therefore probably happier) people in those poor countries. These statistical anomalies had partly hidden the strong link between life satisfaction and average incomes.

Mr. Deaton has also made important contributions to macroeconomics, which is the study of the economy as a whole. An earlier generation of macroeconomists had focused on aggregate measures, such as the total levels of consumption or income in the economy. Mr. Deaton turned instead to the behavior of individual households. He was a leader among those rejecting the prevailing fiction that the behavior of the whole economy could be treated as if it were the result of choices made by a single representative consumer.

This distinction between individual and aggregate behavior is particularly important to the study of consumption. While macroeconomists had been satisfied that their theories could explain the relationship between the total level of consumption and total income in the economy, Mr. Deaton showed that those same theories struggled to explain what individual households were doing. This has spawned a large and productive continuing research program trying to understand the spending patterns of actual households.

In 1992, Mr. Deaton argued that further progress on difficult economic questions would be likely “when macroeconomic questions are addressed in a way that uses the increasingly plentiful and informative microeconomic data.” He was right, and newly available “big data” describing the individual saving, spending and investment decisions of thousands and sometimes millions of people are fueling some of the most important work in macroeconomics today.

But perhaps Mr. Deaton’s most important effect has been within the field of development economics, which focuses on the economies of poor countries. This is a research program born of deep personal conviction. As he recently wrote, “Those of us who were lucky enough to be born in the right countries have a moral obligation to reduce poverty and ill health in the world.”

A generation ago, development economics was a field populated by “country doctors” — globe-trotting macroeconomists willing to make house calls to any country willing to provide them with a first-class ticket, so that they could proffer their preferred prescription, be it a more muscular industrial policy, a big push of infrastructure development, increased national savings or a faster shift to a market economy. The countries varied, but the prescriptions rarely did.

Today, development economics is a far more interesting and nuanced field, with practitioners focused on understanding the lives of the poor, and in uncovering the subtle ways in which immature economic institutions hinder their development. Rather than studying a few dozen countries, modern development economists are likely to pore over data describing the economic lives of thousands of families within each country. And much of that data comes from his decades-long collaboration with the World Bank, as his work has inspired much of its recent work on measuring and assessing poverty. The result is a sharper picture of the incidence and causes of global poverty.

More recently, Mr. Deaton has turned his attention to measures of subjective well-being, including happiness. In his 2010 Presidential address to the American Economic Association, Mr. Deaton highlighted the problems in constructing coherent measures of global poverty. Measures of income don’t offer much insight unless they can be thought of in terms of differences in purchasing power. But it is impossible to assess who has more or less purchasing power when people in different countries face different prices and choose to buy different goods. Given this problem, Mr. Deaton makes the radical suggestion that economists just ask people about their well-being instead.

Many of the most important findings on subjective well-being reflect new sources of data that Mr. Deaton — together with the psychologists Ed Diener, Arthur Stone and Daniel Kahneman, a fellow Nobel laureate — have helped create through their role as a senior scientists at Gallup. (Disclosure: I also serve as a senior scientist there.)

The award for Mr. Deaton continues an extraordinary run for Princeton, whose other recent winners include the game theorist John Nash; Mr. Kahneman; the economic theorist Eric Maskin; the trade economist Paul Krugman, who is also a New York Times columnist; and the macroeconomist Chris Sims. Mr. Krugman has since moved to the City University of New York, while Mr. Maskin has returned to Harvard. Even with these departures, Princeton is close to drawing even with the University of Chicago, which still lists five economics laureates on its faculty. There’s a pretty good chance that may happen, as several of Mr. Deaton’s colleagues often feature on Nobel shortlists.

I spent a lovely year at Princeton as a visiting professor in 2012 and can attest that no one commands greater respect among his colleagues than Mr. Deaton. He’s an imposing presence, a man with a giant intellect and an extraordinary breadth of knowledge, who holds all economists to his exacting — indeed, intimidating — standards.

More than that, he’s motivated by the questions that really matter, he is intellectually relentless, he has enormous integrity and he has devoted his life to understanding and improving the lot of the poor. He’s the perfect role model for any young economist.

Justin Wolfers is a professor of economics and public policy at the University of Michigan. Follow him on Twitter at @justinwolfers.

The Upshot provides news, analysis and graphics about politics, policy and everyday life. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter. Sign up for our newsletter.
 
See also: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/13/business/angus-deaton-nobel-economics.html 

Past prizes in economics: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/13/business/economy/past-winners-of-the-nobel-memorial-prize-in-economic-science.html?_r=1 

O novo premiado em economia e a bobagem de chutar a escada - Angus Deaton (Leandro Narloch)

Meu comentário à matéria abaixo:

Leandro Narloch apresenta este texto como um bom resumo das ideias do ganhador do Prêmio Nobel. Não acho. Ou o resumo, ou o economista possuem um problema de conceitualização do papel daqueles que ficaram na frente dos demais: a tal de história de "chutar a escada" para impedir outros de alcançar os vanguardeiros. Desafio o Leandro Narloch, o autor do resumo, ou o próprio Angus Deaton a provar, empiricamente, que um fenômeno desse tipo -- ou seja, um complô, ou conspiração, entre os que estão na frente para impedir que outros os sigam -- já ocorreu na história da humanidade. Quando, exatamente? A Inglaterra impediu a Alemanha e os EUA de a superarem no final do século 19? Os três impediram o Japão de igualmente galgar a escada do desenvolvimento? O Japão impediu a Coreia de segui-lo na capacitação tecnológica? Alguém está impedindo a China de alcançar seus objetivos de upgrade industrial e científico? Algum país, senão nós mesmos, estaria dificultando o processo brasileiro de desenvolvimento?
Essa história da escada é uma imensa bobagem...
Paulo Roberto de Almeida
Hartford, 12/10/2015

PS: Acabo de comprar o livro de Angus Deaton em Kindle Edition, e verifiquei que ele realmente diz essa bobagem em sua introdução:
"This book is about the endless dance between progress and inequality, about how progress creates inequality, and how inequality can sometimes be helpful -- showing others the way, or providing incentives for catching up -- and sometimes unhelpful -- when those who have escaped protect their positions by destroying the escape routes behind them."
Ou seja, Angus Deaton realmente disse isso, e deve pensar assim, portanto. Agora vou ler o seu livro para que ele demonstre casos dessa teoria conspiratória do "chutando a escada" e o papel desse ato, ou atitude, no impedimento fundamental a que outros povos ou países também galgassem a escada do desenvolvimento, ou seja, fizessem a grande escapada feita pelos retardatários de sucesso, e quais seriam os retardatários impedidos de fazê-lo.

O que pensa Angus Deaton, o Nobel de Economia de 2015

"Boas notícias às vezes geram desigualdade" e outras ideias do novo Nobel

Por: Leandro Narloch 12/10/2015 às 13:15

1. Desigualdade é uma consequência inevitável da prosperidade
No filme A Grande Fuga, 250 prisioneiros da Segunda Guerra Mundial escapam de um campo nazista. A fuga foi uma excelente notícia para os que conseguiram escapar, mas provocou uma desigualdade entre os prisioneiros. Se antes estavam todos igualmente presos, com o episódio alguns conquistaram a liberdade, enquanto outros foram deixados para trás. Na soma geral, porém, nenhum prisioneiro ficou numa situação pior.
Angus Deaton, economista que ganhou o Nobel de Economia esta semana, se inspirou nesse filme para dar o título do seu livro mais famoso – A Grande Fuga: saúde, riqueza e as origens de desigualdade. Até a Revolução Industrial, o mundo todo era igualmente miserável. A prosperidade que surgiu a partir de então tirou alguns países da miséria, enquanto outros seguiram pobres. A desigualdade aumentou, ainda que ninguém tenha piorado de situação. Diz ele:
Desigualdade é frequentemente uma consequência do progresso. Nem todos enriquecem ao mesmo tempo, e nem todos tem acesso imediato às medidas profiláticas mais recentes, seja o acesso a água limpa, vacinas ou a novas drogas de prevenção a doenças. Desigualdade, por sua vez, afeta o progresso. Ela pode ser boa; crianças indianas percebem o que a educação pode fazer e também vão para a escola. E pode ser má se os vencedores tentam impedir os outros de segui-los, puxando para cima as escadas atrás deles.
*
A Revolução Industrial, começando na Inglaterra nos séculos 18 e 19, iniciou o crescimento econômico que tem sido responsável por centenas de milhões de pessoas escapando da privação material. O outro lado da mesma Revolução Industrial é o que os historiadores chamam de ‘Grande Divergência’, quando a Inglaterra, seguida um pouco depois pelo noroeste da Europa e pelos Estados Unidos, se afastou do resto do mundo, criando um enorme golfo entre o Ocidente e o resto.
2. Mais que a riqueza, foi o conhecimento que nos tornou mais saudáveis
Uma ideia bem aceita entre demógrafos e economistas é que o aumento da renda a partir da Revolução Industrial causou a enorme melhoria da saúde e da expectativa de vida nos últimos três séculos. Com mais comida na mesa e dinheiro para bancar descobertas médicas, as pessoas viveram mais e melhor. Um europeu médio hoje é 11 centímetros mais alto e vive quatro décadas mais que no século 18. Angus Deaton concorda que a renda contribui para a saúde, mas dá pouca importância a essa relação. Mostra, por exemplo, que em 1750 famílias ricas e bem alimentadas tinham a mesma expectativa de vida que os pobres. Para ele, o que nos tornou mais saudáveis não foi tanto o crescimento econômico, mas o maior conhecimento sobre germes e doenças.
3. A ajuda à África atrapalha
Angus Deaton abraça a ideia de que a maior parte da ajuda humanitária mais prejudica que contribui com o desenvolvimento da África. Para ele, o que os países mais pobres precisam é de instituições que propiciem o crescimento econômico, e muitas vezes a ajuda humanitária enfraquece ainda mais as instituições:
A ajuda estrangeira mina o desenvolvimento da capacidade do estado. Isso é mais óbvio nos países onde o governo recebe grandes quantias de ajuda direta. Esses governos não precisam de contato com os seus cidadãos, nem parlamento e nem sistema de coleta de impostos.
@lnarloch

Progressos economicos e sociais: um livro para os pessimistas - Angus Deaton

A Cockeyed Optimist

Angus Deaton’s ‘Great Escape’

By DAVID LEONHARDT

The New York Times Books Review: December 19, 2013

Economic nostalgia can have a strong appeal, especially following more than five years of a financial crisis and its aftermath. In the United States, people talk longingly of the mid-20th century, when the middle class was growing and upward mobility was the norm. In Europe and Japan, many hark back to the 1980s, before the euro was born and the Japanese bubble burst. Even in China and India, two of the world’s more dynamic economies, some like to celebrate a time when life did not revolve around breakneck growth.

Enlarge This Image

Matt Dorfman

THE GREAT ESCAPE

Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality

By Angus Deaton

Illustrated. 360 pp. Princeton University Press. $29.95.

The biggest accomplishment of Angus Deaton’s “Great Escape” is to bring perspective to all this wistfulness. Deaton, a respected professor of economics at Princeton, does not stint on describing the world’s problems, be they income inequality in rich countries, health problems in China and the United States or H.I.V. in Africa. Large sections of the book revolve around such troubles and potential solutions. Yet Deaton’s central message is deeply positive, almost gloriously so. By the most meaningful measures — how long we live, how healthy and happy we are, how much we know — life has never been better. Just as important, it is continuing to improve.

Deaton is surely aware that many readers will view these claims with skepticism, especially coming from someone whose discipline often seems to elevate money over basic human needs. He addresses this skepticism with both sweeping and granular descriptions of how life has improved. Life expectancy has risen a stunning 50 percent since 1900 and is still rising. Despite the resulting population explosion, the average quality of life has surged. The share of people living on less than $1 a day (in inflation-adjusted terms) has dropped to 14 percent, from 42 percent as recently as 1981. Even as inequality has surged within many countries, global inequality has very likely fallen, thanks largely to the rise of Asia. “Things are getting better,” he writes, “and hugely so.”

Much of the most rapid change, of course, occurred long ago or — for Deaton’s readers in the United States and Europe — is happening far away. In the industrialized world, it can be easy to focus on bad news (like slow-growing wages and rising obesity) and dismiss the latest innovations (say, the newest iPhone) as materialist distractions. But this, too, would be a mistake. The pace of progress may have slowed in the West. For selected groups, on selected measures, progress may even have stalled. For most people, however, it has not stopped.

The digital revolution has allowed people to remain in touch with friends and family who once would have grown distant. The democratization of air travel, for all its indignities, has helped, too. The greatest progress against cancer and heart disease has come in the last 20 to 30 years. And although Deaton does not emphasize it, nearly every form of discrimination has become less common. When people talk gauzily of life in postwar America, they presumably are not referring to the lives of women, African-Americans, gays, lesbians, Catholics, Jews, Mormons, Latinos, Asian-Americans or the disabled.

Most of us can find miniature versions of this tale in our families. Deaton’s grandfather returned from World War I to a Scottish mine and rose to become a supervisor. Deaton’s father, despite not graduating from high school, became a civil engineer and lived twice as long as his own father. My own grandfather escaped the Nazis, to New York, but succumbed to cancer as a fairly young man in 1950. Had modern medicine advanced only a few decades more rapidly, my father may well have grown up with a father. In the starkest terms, most of us today have at least one family member or friend who would not be alive absent the innovations of the last several decades.

Perhaps most impressive — and, at the same time, most worrisome — is that progress is by no means inevitable. Humanity has spent most of its history not making progress, with neither life spans nor incomes rising. “For thousands of years,” Deaton writes, “those who were lucky enough to escape death in childhood faced years of grinding poverty.”

“The Great Escape” of Deaton’s title refers to the process that began during the Enlightenment and made progress the norm. Scientists, doctors, businessmen and government officials began to seek truth, rather than obediently accept dogma, and they began to experiment. In Immanuel Kant’s definition of the Enlightenment: “Dare to know! Have the courage to use your own understanding!” The germ theory of disease, public sanitation, the Industrial Revolution and modern democracy soon followed.

Deaton’s writing is unfailingly accessible to the lay reader. At times, he repeats himself (he is definitely not a fan of foreign aid) or delves into technical subjects that will not interest everyone, like the calculation of exchange rates. But readers looking to learn some economics without picking up a textbook may enjoy these tangents. All in all, “The Great Escape” joins “Getting Better” — a 2011 book by Charles Kenny that concentrated on poor countries (and was more positive about foreign aid) — as one of the most succinct guides to conditions in today’s world.

The great, unanswered question is how rapidly the progress will continue. Deaton pronounces himself cautiously optimistic. But he also acknowledges rising threats, global warming being the most obvious of them. Beyond climate change, economic growth has slowed and inequality has risen in most rich countries, leaving the middle class and poor with only modest gains. The skew is so severe in the United States that a vast majority of Americans — the bottom 99 percent, he calculates — have done worse than a vast majority of French in recent decades, despite our reputation for economic dynamism. In China, meanwhile, a growth slowdown may just be beginning, and it could bring true political tumult, including war.

From a historical perspective, the most worrisome development may be the tendency not to heed the central lesson of the Enlightenment and, by extension, of Deaton’s Great Escape: Facts matter, especially when they conflict with dogma and preconceived notions. Pretending otherwise has consequences.

Knowledge — which is to say education — is humanity’s most important engine of improvement. Deaton concludes, based on the data, that rising education is the most powerful cause of the recent longevity boom in most poor countries, even more powerful than high incomes. A typical resident of India is only as rich as a typical Briton in 1860, for example, but has a life expectancy more typical of a European in the mid-20th century. The spread of knowledge, about public health, medicine and diet, explains the difference.

Unfortunately, knowledge and facts are often on the defensive today. Fundamentalists of various stripes keep many countries from completing their own great escape. In the West, science still sometimes yields to dogma, on climate change, on evolution and on economic policy. Elites on both the right and left question the value of education for the masses and oppose attempts to improve schools even as they spend countless hours and dollars pursuing the finest possible education for their own children.

It is true that many of today’s biggest problems, including economic growth, education and climate, defy easy solutions. But the same was true, and much more so, about escaping centuries of poverty and early death. It was hard, and it involved a lot of failure along the way. The story Deaton tells — the most inspiring human story of all — should give all of us reason for optimism, so long as we are willing to listen to its moral.

David Leonhardt, a former economics columnist and Washington bureau chief for The New York Times, is leading a new project for the paper that will focus on politics and policy.

Ajuda ao desenvolvimento costuma atrapalhar o desenvolvimento - Angus Deaton (Book review)

O resenhista não cita William Easterly, ou Peter Bauer, que já tinham alertado CONTRA a assistência ao desenvolvimento. Esperemos que o autor do livro o tenha feito.

Paulo R Almeida

OFF THE SHELF

A Surprising Case Against Foreign Aid

By FRED ANDREWS

The New York Times, October 12, 2013

IN his new book, Angus Deaton, an expert’s expert on global poverty and foreign aid, puts his considerable reputation on the line and declares that foreign aid does more harm than good. It corrupts governments and rarely reaches the poor, he argues, and it is high time for the paternalistic West to step away and allow the developing world to solve its own problems.

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Patricia Wall/The New York Times

It is a provocative and cogently argued claim. The only odd part is how it is made. It is tacked on as the concluding section of “The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality” (Princeton University Press, 360 pages), an illuminating and inspiring history of how mankind’s longevity and prosperity have soared to breathtaking heights in modern times.

Mr. Deaton is the Eisenhower Professor of Economics and International Affairs at Princeton. He has spent decades working with the World Bank in creating basic yardsticks for measuring global poverty and with the Gallup Organization in creating survey-based measures of well-being.

The “great escape” of the title, he writes, is “the story of mankind’s escaping from deprivation and early death.” His book gives a stirring overview of the economic progress and medical milestones that, starting with the Industrial Revolution and accelerating after World War II, have caused life expectancies to soar.

Professor Deaton is a fluent writer, but his book is a demanding read. Its guts are his statistical comparisons, region by region and country by country, of how things stand today. They show how, when and whether higher incomes have promoted greater life expectancies and higher well-being across the globe. Professor Deaton tells us that a rising tide has lifted almost all the world’s boats — but some far higher than others. Some have scarcely moved; a few have sunk. Obviously, some developing nations have done phenomenally well, yet, on average, the distance between “rich” and “poor” countries remains the same.

China and India continually come to the fore. For all their extraordinary progress in lifting millions of people out of poverty, it is still the case that about half of the world’s poor are Chinese or Indian.

In today’s world, with all we have mastered in medicine, public health and development, Professor Deaton says, it is also still the case that almost a billion people “live in material destitution, millions of children still die through the accident of where they are born, and wasting and wanting still disfigure the bodies of nearly half of India’s children.”

That troubling statement leads to his indictment of foreign aid, which is jarring and odd only in that nowhere in the first 266 pages of his historical analysis has he even mentioned foreign aid, either positively or negatively. A new character joins the play in its final act and becomes the villain of the piece.

In his considered judgment, global poverty today is no longer a result of lack of resources or opportunity, but of poor institutions, poor government and toxic politics. Though about $134 billion in official aid still flows from donor governments to recipient governments, there is no mystery, he says, as to why foreign aid fails to erase poverty. That is not its mission, he asserts: typically it serves commercial interests at home or buys political allies abroad, too often unsavory ones.

All aid is distorted by politics at both ends, he says, citing the example of Mauritania several years back, when aid was in danger of being cut off. The country’s president hatched the brilliant idea of becoming one of the few Arab countries to recognize Israel. The aid taps were reopened and the reforms rescinded.

THE author has found no credible evidence that foreign aid promotes economic growth; indeed, he says, signs show that the relationship is negative. Regretfully, he identifies a “central dilemma”: When the conditions for development are present, aid is not required. When they do not exist, aid is not useful and probably damaging.

Professor Deaton makes the case that foreign aid is antidemocratic because it frees local leaders from having to obtain the consent of the governed. “Western-led population control, often with the assistance of nondemocratic or well-rewarded recipient governments, is the most egregious example of antidemocratic and oppressive aid,” he writes. In its day, it seemed like a no-brainer. Yet the global population grew by four billion in half a century, and the vast majority of the seven billion people now on the planet live longer and more prosperous lives than their parents did. 

So what should the West do instead of providing aid? Well, it can invest in finding a vaccine for malaria, still a mass killer. It can push drug companies to tackle diseases that threaten poorer countries. It can support the free flow of information about inventions and new management techniques. It can relax trade barriers and provide poor countries with expert advice at the bargaining table. It can ease immigration restraints and accept more newcomers.

Many options exist, but Professor Deaton suggests that the question is fundamentally wrong and self-centered. “Why is it we who must do something?” he wonders. “Who putus in charge?” What the West should do, he says, is stand aside and let poorer countries find their own paths, in fits and starts, at their own pace, to development and prosperity, just as the West had to do a century or so earlier.

That is a powerful argument from a scholar who has done his homework, but it is more provocative than ultimately convincing. Defenders of foreign aid would reply that past efforts have contributed greatly to the enormous gains in life expectancy that the professor celebrates. The professor’s maverick views fly in the face of an enormous global effort, and he paints with a very broad brush. The World Bank counts nearly 12,000 projects under way in 172 countries. It’s hard to believe that all are nearly as flawed or misguided as Professor Deaton suggests. Aid is not a door that should slam shut.