by Calculated Risk on 10/12/2015 08:38:00 PM

A couple of excellent articles ...

From Binyamin Appelbaum at the NY Times: Nobel in Economics Given to Angus Deaton for Studies of Consumption

The economist Angus Deaton has devoted his career to improving the data that shape public policy, including measures of wealth and poverty, savings and consumption, health and happiness.
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“To design economic policy that promotes welfare and reduces poverty, we must first understand individual consumption choices,” the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said in announcing the economics prize, the last of this year’s Nobels. “More than anyone else, Angus Deaton has enhanced this understanding.”

From economist Justin Wolfers in the NY Times: Why Angus Deaton Deserved the Economics Nobel Prize

The central contribution of Angus Deaton, the latest winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in economics, has been to shift the gaze of his fellow economists beyond measures of income, to broader measures of well-being.

Much of his research has focused on consumption — measures of the food people eat, the condition of their housing, and the services they consume. And he has been a trailblazer in shifting the attention of economists away from the behavior of economywide aggregates such as gross domestic product, and toward the analysis of individual households.