Professor Deaton, 69, of Princeton, is best known for his study of the choices of individual consumers.  Angus Deaton, a Princeton economist, was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science on Monday for improving the measurement of basic economic indicators like wealth and consumption, particularly in developing nations.  Professor Deaton, a British and American citizen, is best known among economists for his insight that learning about the specific economic circumstances and choices of individual people, rather than relying on typical measures of larger groups, could produce a better perspective on the workings of the economy as a whole.  “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 a statement announcing the prize, the last of this year’s crop of Nobels. “More than anyone else, Angus Deaton has enhanced this understanding.”  Professor Deaton has been at the forefront of a revolution made possible by computers: the use of detailed economic data to produce more accurate conclusions about broad economic trends. He has worked both to improve measurement techniques and to use those tools to pose basic questions about improving human welfare.  In an interview on Monday, Professor Deaton said he had focused on the developing world because “there’s a real moral urgency to understanding how people behave and what we should or might be able to do about it.”  He said the circumstances of his upbringing also played a role. “I grew up in Edinburgh,” he said. “It was a cold, messy and miserable place to grow up and I dreamed of going to tropical, colorful, hot countries.”  Professor Deaton is best known for refining the tools that economists use, emphasizing the importance of careful statistical analysis of choices by individual households.  “Suppose you wanted to understand the effect of a subsidy on rice on the well-being of farmers,” said Dani Rodrik, a professor of political economy at Harvard. “He has produced an approach that you can actually use with household data to trace through the effect of something like this on the well-being of different farmers.”  Professor Deaton said he hoped “carefulness in measurement” would be his legacy.  He said his mentor, Richard Stone, a Cambridge professor who won the Nobel in economics in 1984, had ingrained in him the importance of measurement. “I’ve always wanted to be like him,” Professor Deaton said. “I think putting numbers together into a coherent framework always seemed to me to be what really matters.”  One consequence of this emphasis on the details is a skepticism about general or universal rules for promoting economic development.  “There’s a fair amount of policy agnosticism that comes from this — it emphasizes more the heterogeneity of outcomes,” Professor Rodrik said of Professor Deaton. “He’s somebody with quite a sharp tongue and he’s often had as his target people who make very strong statements about this policy or that policy.”  Janet M. Currie, a former student of Professor Deaton’s and now his boss as chairwoman of the economics department at Princeton, described the new laureate as “enormously funny and witty and well-read, frighteningly erudite and very good company.”  She said Professor Deaton’s work had shown the danger of simplifications such as measuring poverty by counting how many people live on less than $1 a day.  “Those simple ways of looking at the world are often the basis of policy and if the statements are wrong then the policy may be wrong also,” Professor Currie said. “He’s always had a concern for trying to capture the complexity of the real world.”  Professor Deaton’s studies have shown, for example, that some measures of well-being like calorie consumption or happiness tend to improve among very poor households as incomes rise, but the gains then tend to level off as incomes keep rising.  “What he’s shown is that you do learn a great deal more by looking at the behavior that underlies the aggregates, “ said Duncan Thomas, an economist at Duke University who also numbers among Professor Deaton’s former students.  Professor Thomas said he also admired Professor Deaton’s clarity of thought.  “His capacity to present ideas that are incredibly complicated in a way that mere mortals can understand is truly extraordinary,” Professor Thomas said. “He will bring evidence to the table in a way that makes you say, ‘Well of course that has to be right’ and then you hit your head on the table and say ‘Why didn’t I think of that?’ ”  Professor Deaton, 69, said he was “pretty sleepy” when he got the phone call Monday morning telling him that he had won. He said his wife answered the phone at 6:10 a.m. and then handed it to him, telling him it was an important call from Stockholm.  “I was surprised and delighted,” he said. “It was wonderful to hear the voices of my friends on the committee.”
He is best known for his insight that economic averages such as measures of national income could be misleading, because they concealed important variations.