Princeton economics professor emeritus and Nobel laureate Angus Deaton has been running around making an extraordinary claim: “Being really poor in America is in some ways worse than being really poor in India or Africa," he recently told the National Association for Business Economics.
Asked about those comments in an interview with the Atlantic, Deaton doubled down: "If you had to choose between living in a poor village in India and living in the Mississippi Delta or in a suburb of Milwaukee in a trailer park, I'm not sure who would have the better life."
This claim was qualified—Deaton is referring to those who live in extreme poverty. But The Scrapbook did once spend two months following around economists from the U.S. Agency for International Development in the slums of Asia, and we can say with near-scientific certitude that Deaton's claim is so idiotic it could only have been uttered by a Nobel Prize winner.
More @ The Weekly Standard
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