Princeton economics professor emeritus and Nobel laureate Angus Deaton has been running around making an extraordinary claim: “Being really poor in America is in some ways worse than being really poor in India or Africa,” he recently told the National Association for Business Economics. Asked about those comments in an interview with the Atlantic, Deaton doubled down: “If you had to choose between living in a poor village in India and living in the Mississippi Delta or in a suburb of Milwaukee in a trailer park, I’m not sure who would have the better life.”
This claim was qualified—Deaton is referring to those who live in extreme poverty. But The Scrapbook did once spend two months following around economists from the U.S. Agency for International Development in the slums of Asia, and we can say with near-scientific certitude that Deaton’s claim is so idiotic it could only have been uttered by a Nobel Prize winner.
When it’s pointed out that America has a generous welfare state where Bangladesh does not, Deaton waves the point away, saying, “A lot of these programs have been turned into block grants,” he said, making it “very hard for people to get them.” This, though as of last year, 45 million people—one in seven Americans—were receiving food stamps.
But statistics aside, if Deaton is going to denounce as dismal the existence of rural Americans, one may ask what he actually knows about life on the Mississippi. To her credit, the Atlantic‘s Annie Lowrey asked him just that: “Have you spent a lot of time in Kentucky or West Virginia or rural Nebraska?” Deaton’s reply is priceless: “No, but I spent five weeks every summer in Montana. And that’s been an eye-opener.” Yes, nothing introduces you to the desperate lives of impoverished Americans like high-season fly-fishing in Big Sky Country.
“You get these people who are really quite poor, in many cases, who are very right-wing,” Deaton says of the unfortunates he has met in Montana. As an example of these impoverished, rural, anti-government types, he tells the Atlantic of the angry Montanan he knows who chafes at having to get permission from the feds to protect his livestock from predators: “That wolf is eating my cow and I need to get a bureaucrat on the line before I’m allowed to shoot it! And that’s my year’s income!” Deaton recalls the poor, hardscrabble fellow saying.
Interestingly, Deaton has told of this wolf-hating right-winger before. In a 2012 article for the Royal Economic Society newsletter, he recounted the same story but with a little more detail: The man with a cow in harm’s way was his friend who “raises Black Angus cattle on a ranch in Montana.” This is the guy Deaton now puts forward as an example of his contact with “people who are really quite poor,” a rancher who raises luxury cattle in one of the most beautiful landscapes on earth. If you have any doubts about the general affluence of such ranchers, check out the Montana Angus Association website. Let’s put it this way: The Joads they ain’t.
And if you’re still confused about how Donald Trump got elected, the patronizing ignorance of Ivy League professors about life between the coasts offers a clue.
