Angus Deaton, winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences 2015
The bestowal of the so-called Nobel Prize in Economics (misnamed because it is not awarded by the Nobel Foundation, but by a Swedish bank) upon Scottish professor at Princeton University, Angus Deaton, for his work on global poverty, has been considered (correctly) to be an indicator of the concern that a large number of international organizations are currently expressing about growing poverty in the world, and their relief, on the basis of Deaton’s optimistic opinion, that not only can this be reversed, but also eliminated even within the current capitalist order of the existing economic system in most of the countries where poverty is concentrated.
According to the new Nobel Prize in Economics winner, a transfer of funds - relatively moderate - from rich to poor countries, along with a number of changes in the latter, such as an increase in educational campaigns, would be enough to stop millions from being poor. Deaton actually considers increased schooling to be the greatest engine of progress over the centuries, and the major single cause for the reduction of poverty and the improvement of the welfare of the population. Increased longevity, which Deaton attributes to the growth of the educated population, is, according to him, the key factor allowing the poor to acquire human capital and thus escape poverty and move up the social ladder.
