Short answers, pulled from the story.
Angus Deaton won the 2015 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his analysis of consumption, poverty, and welfare. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences credited him with linking detailed individual consumption choices to aggregate economic outcomes, transforming microeconomics, macroeconomics, and development economics.
The Almost Ideal Demand System (AIDS) is a consumer demand model that Deaton developed with John Muellbauer, published in The American Economic Review in 1980. It explains how demand for goods changes with prices and income, and the American Economic Review later ranked it among the top 20 papers published in the journal across its first hundred years.
In a 2015 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Case and Deaton documented a rising mortality rate among middle-aged white non-Hispanic Americans unique among wealthy nations. The deaths clustered around drug and alcohol poisonings, suicide, and chronic liver diseases, which they labeled deaths of despair. A 2017 follow-up found the trend was driven by worsening labor market opportunities for less-educated white non-Hispanics.
Deaton earned his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge, completing his doctorate in 1975 under the supervision of Nobel laureate Richard Stone. He was a student and later a fellow at Fitzwilliam College.
The Frisch Medal is awarded by the Econometric Society every two years to an outstanding applied paper published in Econometrica within the previous five years. Deaton received it in 1978, becoming the first-ever recipient of the award.
In 2024, Deaton wrote that he had changed his mind on a large part of the mainstream economics he had previously supported. He concluded that economists could benefit from greater engagement with philosophers, historians, and sociologists, citing Adam Smith as a model for that kind of intellectual breadth.