{"componentChunkName":"component---src-templates-post-query-tsx","path":"/blog-post/a-nobel-prize-for-measurement-congratulating-angus-in-the-indian-express/","result":{"pageContext":{"post":{"slug":"/blog-post/a-nobel-prize-for-measurement-congratulating-angus-in-the-indian-express/","title":"A Nobel Prize for measurement: Congratulating Angus in the Indian Express","date":"Oct 14, 2015","timeToRead":4,"description":"Diane and I congratulate our teacher Angus Deaton in the Indian Express. In the preface to his magisterial 2013 book The Great Escape, Angus Deaton thanks his teachers. 'Richard Stone was perhaps my most profound influence,' Deaton writes, 'from him I learned about measurement – how little we can say without it and how important it is to get it right'.","body":"function _extends() { _extends = Object.assign || function (target) { for (var i = 1; i < arguments.length; i++) { var source = arguments[i]; for (var key in source) { if (Object.prototype.hasOwnProperty.call(source, key)) { target[key] = source[key]; } } } return target; }; return _extends.apply(this, arguments); }\n\nfunction _objectWithoutProperties(source, excluded) { if (source == null) return {}; var target = _objectWithoutPropertiesLoose(source, excluded); var key, i; if (Object.getOwnPropertySymbols) { var sourceSymbolKeys = Object.getOwnPropertySymbols(source); for (i = 0; i < sourceSymbolKeys.length; i++) { key = sourceSymbolKeys[i]; if (excluded.indexOf(key) >= 0) continue; if (!Object.prototype.propertyIsEnumerable.call(source, key)) continue; target[key] = source[key]; } } return target; }\n\nfunction _objectWithoutPropertiesLoose(source, excluded) { if (source == null) return {}; var target = {}; var sourceKeys = Object.keys(source); var key, i; for (i = 0; i < sourceKeys.length; i++) { key = sourceKeys[i]; if (excluded.indexOf(key) >= 0) continue; target[key] = source[key]; } return target; }\n\n/* @jsxRuntime classic */\n\n/* @jsx mdx */\nvar _frontmatter = {\n  \"title\": \"A Nobel Prize for measurement: Congratulating Angus in the Indian Express\",\n  \"date\": \"2015-10-14\",\n  \"template\": \"post\",\n  \"slug\": \"a-nobel-prize-for-measurement-congratulating-angus-in-the-indian-express\",\n  \"postedLink\": \"https://riceinstitute.org/blog/a-nobel-prize-for-measurement-congratulating-angus-in-the-indian-express/\",\n  \"description\": \"Diane and I congratulate our teacher Angus Deaton in the Indian Express. In the preface to his magisterial 2013 book The Great Escape, Angus Deaton thanks his teachers. 'Richard Stone was perhaps my most profound influence,' Deaton writes, 'from him I learned about measurement – how little we can say without it and how important it is to get it right'.\",\n  \"tags\": \"Blog Post\",\n  \"banner\": \"angus-article.jpg\"\n};\nvar layoutProps = {\n  _frontmatter: _frontmatter\n};\nvar MDXLayout = \"wrapper\";\nreturn function MDXContent(_ref) {\n  var components = _ref.components,\n      props = _objectWithoutProperties(_ref, [\"components\"]);\n\n  return mdx(MDXLayout, _extends({}, layoutProps, props, {\n    components: components,\n    mdxType: \"MDXLayout\"\n  }), mdx(\"p\", null, mdx(\"a\", {\n    parentName: \"p\",\n    \"href\": \"https://sites.google.com/site/dianelcoffey/\",\n    \"target\": \"_blank\",\n    \"rel\": \"noopener noreferrer\"\n  }, \"Diane\"), \" and I congratulate \", mdx(\"a\", {\n    parentName: \"p\",\n    \"href\": \"http://riceinstitute.org/blog/congratulations-angus/\",\n    \"title\": \"Congratulations, Angus!\",\n    \"target\": \"_blank\",\n    \"rel\": \"noopener noreferrer\"\n  }, \"our teacher\"), \" \", mdx(\"a\", {\n    parentName: \"p\",\n    \"href\": \"http://www.princeton.edu/~deaton/downloads/Deaton_Life_at_the_Top.pdf\",\n    \"target\": \"_blank\",\n    \"rel\": \"noopener noreferrer\"\n  }, \"Angus Deaton\"), \" in the Indian Express:\"), mdx(\"p\", null, mdx(\"a\", {\n    parentName: \"p\",\n    \"href\": \"http://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/measuring-well-being/\",\n    \"target\": \"_blank\",\n    \"rel\": \"noopener noreferrer\"\n  }, mdx(\"strong\", {\n    parentName: \"a\"\n  }, \"Congratulations Angus Deaton, who taught us about measurement\"))), mdx(\"p\", null, \"In the preface to his magisterial 2013 book \", mdx(\"em\", {\n    parentName: \"p\"\n  }, \"The Great Escape\"), \", Angus Deaton thanks his teachers. \\u201CRichard Stone was perhaps my most profound influence,\\u201D Deaton writes, \\u201Cfrom him I learned about measurement \\u2013 how little we can say without it and how important it is to get it right.\\u201D\"), mdx(\"p\", null, \"Important, indeed. And difficult \\u2013 but well worth doing. On Monday afternoon, the Nobel committee recognized the importance of measurement when they awarded Professor Deaton the 2015 Nobel Prize in economics.\"), mdx(\"p\", null, \"We know what it feels like to owe much to a special teacher. Professor Deaton passed Stone\\u2019s lesson on to his own students, including us. Deaton\\u2019s career has been wide ranging. Most recently, he has helped the world understand its ongoing, incomplete, but nonetheless dramatic great escape from poverty and early death. When Angus was born in Scotland, around 6 percent of babies there died before their first birthday; today, this infant mortality is under half of one percent. But over 4 percent of babies born in India still die in their first year, and the infant mortality rate among the many babies born in the northern plains states exceeds that of Scotland 69 years ago. Fully 8 percent of children die in infancy who are born in Sitapur district of Uttar Pradesh, where we have worked since 2011 and where the population is 85 percent as large as Scotland\\u2019s today.\"), mdx(\"p\", null, \"One important part of Deaton\\u2019s research over the last decades has focused on poverty and well-being in India. In this work, he has been resolutely empirical: he focuses on what the data can tell us, and what they sometimes cannot. The paradoxes of development in India have been fertile ground for Deaton\\u2019s data-minded approach. India is a place where good things do not always come together, and where conventional development stories are often inverted.\"), mdx(\"p\", null, \"Despite rapid economic growth, and significant but slower improvements in poverty, children in India are shorter, on average, than children in sub-Saharan Africa, who are poorer. As Indian households have become richer over the past decades, they have eaten fewer and fewer calories, on average \\u2013 a puzzle seemingly at odds with the basic rules of household economics. In some of his most recent work, Deaton has shown that poor people in Africa, where health outcomes are very bad, do not tend to see improving health as a policy priority \\u2013 a puzzle that may be reflected in Delhi\\u2019s apathy to its lethal air pollution. Such paradoxes, Deaton taught us, are opportunities to learn something important.\"), mdx(\"p\", null, \"This all adds up to a central message of Deaton\\u2019s work: that becoming richer is not necessarily the same thing as becoming better off. This, too, is an important lesson for India, where infant mortality and other basic measures of human development are considerably worse than what other countries with similar levels of GDP per capita experience. Indeed, India\\u2019s \\u201Cexcess\\u201D neonatal mortality \\u2013 above what its per capita GDP would predict in international comparison \\u2013 is greater than \", mdx(\"em\", {\n    parentName: \"p\"\n  }, \"total\"), \" neonatal mortality in China.\"), mdx(\"p\", null, \"Professor Deaton was working on what is now called \\u201Cevidence-based policy\\u201D before it was a hot topic: in the 1990s he published definitive work helping researchers sort out how to use household surveys to measure consumption in poverty. But notice what he includes in \\u201Cevidence\\u201D: careful, statistical descriptions based on survey data designed to be informative about populations. Angus reminds economists \\u2013 and, still, us \\u2013 that there is no substitute for such careful thinking.\"), mdx(\"p\", null, \"Nor is there a substitute for usefully designed, representative survey data. Perhaps such data were part of what drew Deaton\\u2019s focus to India. India historically had a long tradition of outstanding sample surveys, which Deaton has drawn upon again and again to teach India and the world about the well-being of individuals in the country that represents a large fraction of any international statistic.\"), mdx(\"p\", null, \"Some of our own work built upon Angus\\u2019 surprising observation that GDP is uncorrelated with height across developing countries, in Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) data.But Deaton, the 2015 Nobel laureate, has never written a paper about the height of people in India using data collected since 2005. We are sure that he would love to, and that it would teach the world important things about well-being in India, but no new DHS has been released for India in the past decade. The government has not collected it. Yet, in this same time period, Bangladesh has released two DHSs. The meager data that are eventually released in today\\u2019s India, such as the Rapid Survey of Children, are often made publicly available only as summary statistics of averages, not household level data; Deaton helped economists realize that such aggregated numbers overlook inequality and obscure details of household behavior.\"), mdx(\"p\", null, \"India has slowly transformed from a world leader in the availability of survey data to a place where meaningful statistics simply are not available. These days, nobody really knows the height of India\\u2019s children, or how much weight the average woman gains in pregnancy, or what fraction of people in rural India defecate in the open. The dimming of the historical light of Indian statistics matters for the world: one-fifth of all humans are born here.\"), mdx(\"p\", null, \"As Deaton\\u2019s most recent work in development reminds us, development economics has political implications. Credible, independent data are critical not only for research, but for democracy. As Deaton noted in his Princeton University press conference on Monday afternoon, government choices not to collect or release data often reflect vested interests.\"), mdx(\"p\", null, \"Deaton\\u2019s work shows that useful measurement of well-being in India is not only possible \\u2013 it is practical and informative. It is indispensible. As we congratulate Professor Deaton on this deserved honor, we should remember that somewhere an economics student in India is now beginning a career in which she could make Nobel prize-worthy contributions to the well-being of the next generation of Indians. India should make sure that she has the data she will need to do this work. She, too, can say little without measurement.\"));\n}\n;\nMDXContent.isMDXComponent = true;","tags":[{"name":"Blog Post","slug":"blog-post"}],"banner":{"childImageSharp":{"fluid":{"src":"/static/6476e9cf897894068c1c51ac94266131/29765/angus-article.jpg","srcSet":"/static/6476e9cf897894068c1c51ac94266131/55357/angus-article.jpg 200w,\n/static/6476e9cf897894068c1c51ac94266131/29765/angus-article.jpg 500w,\n/static/6476e9cf897894068c1c51ac94266131/1f218/angus-article.jpg 1000w","aspectRatio":2.5,"sizes":"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px","base64":"data:image/jpeg;base64,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"}}}}}},"staticQueryHashes":["318001574","3787687951","3787687951"]}