11
" The effects of migration on poverty reduction dwarf those of free trade. Migrants who succeed in moving from poor countries to rich countries become better off than they were at home, and their remittances help their families do better at home. Remittances have very different effects than aid, and they can empower recipients to demand more from their governments, improving governance rather than undermining it. Of course, the politics of migration is even tougher than the politics of free trade, even in countries where the urge to help is most strongly developed. A helpful type of temporary migration is to provide undergraduate and graduate scholarships to the West, especially for Africans. With luck, these students will develop in a way that is independent of aid agencies or of their domestic regimes. Even if they do not return home, at least at once, the African diaspora is a fertile (and internal) source of development projects at home. "
― Angus Deaton , The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality
12
" Material wellbeing, and measures of it—GDP, personal income, and consumption—have recently received a bad press. Spending more, we are often told, does not bring us better lives, and religious authorities regularly warn against materialism. Even among those of us who endorse economic growth, there are many critics of GDP as it is currently defined and measured. GDP excludes important activities, such as services by homemakers; it takes no account of leisure; and it often does a poor job of measuring those things that are included. It also includes things that arguably should be excluded, like the cost of cleaning up pollution or building prisons or commuting. These “defensive” expenditures are not good in and of themselves but are regrettably necessary to enable things that are good.4 If crime goes up, and we spend more on prisons, GDP will be higher. If we neglect climate change, and spend more and more on cleaning up and repairing after storms, GDP will go up, not down; we count the repairs but ignore the destruction. "
― Angus Deaton , The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality
14
" Economic growth requires investment in things—more machines, more basic facilities like highways or broadband—and in people, who need more and better education. Knowledge needs to be acquired and extended. Some of that extension is the product of new basic science, and some of it comes from the engineering that turns science into goods and services, and from the endless tweaking and improvement of design that, over time, turned a Model-T Ford into a Toyota Camry, or my clunky personal computer of 1983 into the sleek, almost weightless, and infinitely more powerful laptop on which I am writing this book. Investment in research and development enhances the flow of innovation, but new ideas can come from anywhere; the stock of knowledge is international, not national, and new ideas disperse quickly from the places where they are created. Innovation also needs entrepreneurs and risk-taking managers to find profitable ways of turning science and engineering into new products and services. This will be difficult without the right institutions. Innovators need to be free from the risk of expropriation, functioning law courts are needed to settle disputes and protect patents, and tax rates cannot be too high. When all of these conditions come together—as they have in the United States for a century and a half—we get sustained economic growth and higher living standards. "
― Angus Deaton , The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality
17
" The spread is often measured by the Gini coefficient, named after Corrado Gini, an Italian economist who worked in the first half of the twentieth century. Gini’s coefficient, or simply the Gini, is a number that lies between 0 (perfect equality—everyone has the same) and 1 (perfect inequality, with one person having everything). It measures how far people are apart on average. (If you really want know the details, it is the average difference in income between all pairs of people divided by twice the average income. If there are two of us, and you have everything, the difference between us is twice the mean, and the Gini is 1. If we both have the same, the difference between us is 0, and so is the Gini.) "
― Angus Deaton , The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality
18
" As we already know from the poverty numbers, the bottom fifth of families gained very little. The growth in their average incomes was less than 0.2 percent a year over the past forty-four years and, even before the recession, their real incomes were no higher than they had been in the late 1970s. Average incomes of the top fifth, by contrast, grew more quickly, at 1.6 percent a year, though not as quickly as those of the top 5 percent, whose average incomes grew at 2.1 percent a year. Once "
― Angus Deaton , The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality
20
" One key to African growth is what happens to commodity prices. Many African countries have long been and are still dependent on exports of “primary” commodities, mostly unprocessed minerals or agricultural crops. Botswana exports diamonds; South Africa, gold and diamonds; Nigeria and Angola, oil; Niger, uranium; Kenya, coffee; Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana, cocoa; Senegal, groundnuts; and so on. The world prices of primary commodities are notoriously volatile, with huge price increases in response to crop failures or increases in world demand and equally dramatic price collapses, none of which are easily predictable. "
― Angus Deaton , The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality
