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The winner of the Economic Nobel Prize 2015: “The world is on the wrong way of giving aid”

30/10/15
                                                             Professor Angus Deanton,


Angus Deaton, the Professor from Princeton University and the owner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences 2015, believes that the foreign aid brings more negative impacts than the positive ones. This conflicting view has turned him into “the enemy” of many people from the United Nations to Bill Gates.
Deaton is now 69 years old and he has been thought to be the winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for a long time. However, the professor has been criticized strongly for his theory. “I feel like being crashed by a “memory train””, he said. The security unit of Princeton university had to give him a “burner phone” (kind of a cheap phone, equipped with a SIM card to use in a short time). Deaton has always been strictly protected.
It has been 12 years since the last time a British economist was awarded the Nobel Prize. The Nobel committee awarded him the honor “for his analysis of consumption, poverty, and welfare”. His work “linking detailed individual choices and aggregate outcomes” was praised for having helped to “transform the fields of microeconomics, macroeconomics, and development economics”. Nevertheless, the aspects that close to the normal life, are important to Deaton’s success.
For example, in Deaton’s theory, the answer of the question “how do people spend their money?” is to use a questionnaire to ask everyone rather than finding a theoretical question from dozens of data of Government statistics. This approach is considered a revolution.
He also found mistakes in definition of the poor. There a simple truth that a poor person in the US could be a rich one living in the rural area of India.
In recent years, these controversial views have attracted the public attention and turned Deaton into “the enemy” of many people such as the UN, Bill Gates or Bono the singer of U2 band.
In 2013, Deaton published the book named “the Great Escape” which pointed out that the foreign aid is worthless. The donation of giving money and food for poor people even hurts them.
After two year of protecting the book from the strong public criticism, Deaton has always affirmed his rightness. And now with the honor of the winner of the Nobel Prize, Deaton will have more basics to defend his viewpoint.
“The problem is out of the prediction. Pouring money into poor countries will negatively affect the political system in those countries. On the other hand, people will stop paying the taxes if the basic services are provided by the foreign aid”.
Deaton said that there are two effective ways to help the poor countries’ people. First, moving to the country that needs help and living and working there for advocating. Second, trying to persuade the Western countries to change their commercial policies, to pay more for medicine and strictly control the global trade of weapons.
"There are beautiful girls come here and say 'I want to help the people of Rwanda’. I told them that just marrying a coffee-raising farmer in Rwanda and moving to live here. Then they said that they were unlikely to be able to do so ".
Deaton is a big guy, he has to use a walking stick. His wife, Mrs. Anne Case, is a colleague at Princeton university. She said that everyone hardly saw him smile because there had been a matrix of ideas “dancing” in his brain.
Long before the French economist, Thomas Piketty published his book about the gap between the rich and poor, named “The imperialism in the 21st century”, Deaton had studied about this aspect.
The Deaton’s viewpoint might make people to the simplest measure of solving the global poverty is to send the British army to conquer the undeveloped countries. Explaining this point, Deaton said: “The poverty is not only about money, but also the social position. The measure that I suggested is not to send the foreign army to conquer any country. This is the thinking of the Scottish about the Britain for a long time. I myself can realize it clearly because I had lived in this process.”
“When you get older and live in a world that has no definitions of the social welfare for the old, you would realize that 1 million of dollars are not that much. When I were a boy and study at Cambridge, if someone told me that I got a prize of 1 million of dollars, I would think I will never have to work. However 1 million doesn’t make me happy”, he said.
Reading and understanding about the Deaton’s analysis of consumption, poverty, and welfare will help us more understand about the ways that capitalism are using to control the world. The ways that make the world turn to bring benefits, special rights, privileges for the rich and the poor will live in hardship and deprivation./.


 

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