The Great Escape

Awarded the 2015 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, The Great Escape (2015) by Angus Deaton examines the roots of the economic inequality perceived across the globe, concluding that it is the result of trends begun centuries before.

In a brief preface, Deaton refers to the film of the same title, noting that while it was a story about men escaping a POW camp in World War II, his book is about humanity’s escape from grinding poverty and early death. People live longer, healthier lives in the modern world—but disproportionately. He examines his own father’s escape from a poor mining town—he ended his life in relative affluence—and his determination that his son do better. Deaton examines the relationship between progress and inequality, how the former creates the latter.

Deaton sets the stage with an analysis of this disproportion. He notes that a girl born in the United States has a life expectancy of eighty years, which is a huge leap forward compared to history. However, at the same time, there is an equally wide gap between that girl and life expectancies found elsewhere in the world. Health is not just a matter of longevity, but also a matter of being healthy during that longevity. Deaton asserts, however, that poverty is not a perfect indicator of life expectancy, as people in China and India often live long lives despite living in crushing poverty. Deaton examines life expectancy compared to income and finds a link—people who have more are healthier. However, it can’t be determined whether this is because money makes people healthier, or because poor health makes people poorer. He observes that the U.S. spends more on health care than most countries without an obvious boost in health. Deaton also points out that disasters such as Mao’s Great Leap Forward and the AIDS crisis affect longevity and health statistics.



Deaton points out the increase in life expectancy in the U.S. from 47.3 years in 1900 to 77.9 years in 2006, while noting the 11.8-year dip in life expectancy during the 1918 flu epidemic. These numbers flatten out the differences in life expectancy between sub-groups in the U.S. Deaton goes on to examine the way the anti-smoking campaign helped to improve life expectancy, commenting that it was more successful among wealthy elites than among the poor. Wealthy people could afford things to help them quit smoking, while poor people could not and often lacked the free time and resources to pursue the goal, thus, a gap opened between the rich and the poor in terms of health.

Deaton argues that these gaps are often codified into near-permanence in the political sphere, because as wealthy people live longer, healthier lives, they see less necessity for programs and tools that help the sick and poor, moving to eliminate them. As a result, the U.S. is in danger of becoming a plutocracy, where only the rich matter and only the rich benefit from improving healthcare and technology.

Deaton turns his attention to the worldwide efforts to close these gaps in the form of aid. He takes a dim view of aid, seeing it as a “hydraulic” approach, pumping aid into a country in the form of medicine, food, and life-saving technologies that simply pass through the country. He notes that the lion’s share of aid actually goes to countries that are not among the world’s poorest, and most aid is distributed without a specific goal, such as inoculating a population against a specific disease. Deaton argues that international aid undermines democracy and civil participation, as the worst consequences of poor policy are addressed and thus the citizens are never motivated to take action and address the problems directly. Deaton argues that the elimination of foreign aid to the world’s poorest countries would actually be a positive step. He contends that even supporters of aid programs agree that it needs to be improved, but disparages the possible solutions that have been suggested.



Deaton concludes adding that people have been trained to expect constant progress because we’ve experienced 250 years of constant progress—however, that is a relatively short period of time, and very likely an anomaly. Economic growth is the engine that drives solutions to our problems, but economic growth is faltering and slowing worldwide. Nevertheless, Deaton is “cautiously optimistic” because he sees the urge to pursue “escape” from these problems as fundamental, a very strong drive. He observes that a vast proportion of the world’s population is experiencing incredible growth and advancement simply because they currently live in comparatively poor conditions. In the final analysis, Deaton expects “those setbacks to be overcome in the future, as they have been in the past.”