Angus Deaton

Deaton was born in Edinburgh, Scotland. He attended Hawick High School and then Fettes College as a foundation scholar, working at Portmeirion hotel in the summer of 1964. He earned his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees at the University of Cambridge, the last with a 1975 thesis entitled Models of Consumer Demand and Their Application to the United Kingdom under the supervision of Richard Stone. At Cambridge, he was later a fellow at Fitzwilliam College and a research officer working with Richard Stone and Terry Barker in the Department of Applied Economics.

In 1976 Deaton took up a post at the University of Bristol as a Professor of Econometrics. During this period, he completed a significant portion of his most influential work. In 1978, he became the first-ever recipient of the Frisch Medal, an award given by the Econometric Society every two years to an applied paper published within the past five years in Econometrica. In 1980, his paper on how demand for various consumption goods depends on prices and income was published in The American Economic Review. This paper has since been hailed as one of the twenty most influential articles published in the journal in its first hundred years.

In 1983, he left the University of Bristol for Princeton University. He is currently the Dwight D. Eisenhower Professor of International Affairs and Professor of Economics and International Affairs at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs and the Department of Economics at Princeton. Since 2017, he has held a joint appointment with the University of Southern California, where he is the Presidential Professor of Economics. He holds both British and American citizenship.

In 2015, Deaton won that year's Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. Deaton was "delighted" and described himself as "someone who's concerned with the poor of the world and how people behave, and what gives them a good life." The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said that economic policy intended to reduce poverty could only be designed once individuals' consumption choices were understood, saying, "More than anyone else, Angus Deaton has enhanced this understanding. By linking detailed individual choices and aggregate outcomes, his research has helped transform the fields of microeconomics, macroeconomics, and development economics". Deaton is also the author of "Letters from America," a popular semi-annual feature in the Royal Economic Society Newsletter.