‘If you want to help Africa, go marry a coffee farmer’

It is 12 years since a British economist was last honoured by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. While the Nobel panel spoke of his grand achievements related to measuring poverty and calculating economic consumption, plain common sense seems to have played a large role in his success.

He suggested, for example, that if you wanted to know how people were spending their money you should ask them via a questionnaire rather than attempt to fabricate a theoretical answer from stacks of government data. This was considered revolutionary.

He also exposed some significant problems with the definition of who qualifies to be labelled “poor” — some statistical, others related to the simple fact that a poor person in America would be a rich man in rural India.

Yet in recent years, it is a much more contentious belief that has won public attention and made him an intellectual enemy of everyone from the United Nations to Microsoft’s Bill Gates, and Bono, the U2 singer turned global activist.

Deaton’s 2013 book The Great Escape argued that foreign aid was often pointless. In fact, taken in aggregate, sending cash or food to people in struggling countries did more harm than good, he said.

After two years of defending the book in the face of hostile criticism from some quarters of the left he is more convinced than ever that he was right. Now that he can call himself a Nobel laureate, Deaton plans to make those arguments more forcibly.

“The issue is the unintended consequences,” he says. “This idea of just giving people something helps perpetuate bad rule. Mugabe is still getting enormous amounts of money in foreign aid in Zimbabwe. I looked up the numbers recently and was stunned.”

Dropping bags of cash into a troubled country undermines local politics, Deaton argues. People stop paying taxes if basic services are being provided by foreigners in helicopters. Governments often give up any pretence at deciding how to run their country and just follow the lead of aid agencies, the Chinese state, or whoever it is that is providing the money.

“It’s powerlessness that’s the problem, not really the lack of money. If people are powerless, then giving them money isn’t going to solve that problem.”

Solving the problem is complicated. He sees two ways people can help: by moving to a poor country and doing real work on the ground, or by lobbying western governments to change their trade policies, spend more on malaria drugs and curb the global arms business.

“These pretty girls who come in here, who say ‘I want to go help in Rwanda’,” continues Deaton, “I say to them, ‘Go marry a Rwandan coffee farmer, get in there, pitch in and help.’ They then say, ‘Oh, I, I’m not sure.’”

He has no personal animosity for Gates, Bono, Bob Geldof or even his rival in the field, the bestselling development economist Jeffrey Sachs.

“I like Jeff,” he says. “It’s hard not to like Jeff and he’s one of the best orators on the planet. But for about 40 seconds after I hear him speaking I am ready to go to the barricades. He thinks development is an engineering problem. I think it’s a political problem. It’s a big intellectual difference.”

Deaton is a large man, who walks with the aid of a stick. His wife Anne Case, a fellow Princeton academic whose office is two doors down the hall, tells him he does not smile enough in public. Yet as his brain hops lithely through the complex maze of his ideas, he bubbles with an impish enthusiasm.

Long before the French economist Thomas Piketty wrote his headline-grabbing bestseller on inequality, Deaton had discussed the subject extensively — and written papers with the academic Sir Anthony Atkinson “who has been working on this his whole life and nobody was paying much attention”.

“There’s certainly some fashion in these things,” he says. “It was clearly fashionable before Piketty’s book otherwise it wouldn’t have sold as many copies as it did.”

I put it to him that his views on foreign aid lead me to think that the natural solution to the problem of global poverty would be to send in the British Army to impose order on struggling countries. Is that how you change the power structure of a country?

He chuckles that Sir Paul Collier, one of his peers at Oxford, has “come close to arguing this”.

“Poverty is not just about money, it’s about having a role in civil society,” he continues. “If somebody else’s army is marching around telling you what to do, that’s not exactly . . .” he tails off. “That’s how we Scots felt about the English for a long time. I did feel that, growing up.”

Deaton was raised in a village near Melrose, an hour’s drive south of Edinburgh. His father was from Yorkshire and went to work in the mines after leaving school aged 12. He contracted tuberculosis while serving in the Second World War and was sent to Scotland to recuperate. After struggling through night school for years, he worked his way up to became the chief water engineer for the south of Scotland.

Deaton’s mother, a carpenter’s daughter, used to tell him off for reading books around the house. His father, however, was hellbent on getting young Angus a scholarship to Fettes, the prestigious Edinburgh private school, and succeeded.

Even when Deaton was mingling with Scotland’s upper crust, he still had a chip on his shoulder about the aristocracy. All the land around Melrose was owned by the Duke of Buccleuch, who remains one of Britain’s largest landowners. “I was an amateur fisherman as a kid. You weren’t allowed to fish on Sundays. But that was still the time of the six-day week so the ordinary working men did not get a whole lot of access [to the fishing lakes].

“It was a conspiracy between the church and the aristocracy — who always seemed to me English. They didn’t speak like us. That was the big deal — the people with the money didn’t sound like us. It always seemed that there was an occupying power there.”

Nonetheless, Deaton believes that Scottish independence would be “very dangerous”, not least because of the persistent unanswered questions about what currency Scotland would use. Paraphrasing the author Ian McEwan, he says that a break in the Union would feel like being “physically dismembered” to him, as the son of an English father and a Scottish mother.

Deaton, who has been at Princeton since 1983, still enjoys fly-fishing. He and his wife spend five weeks on the Madison river in Montana each summer, where he gets to meet some “very different people — right-wing people, Christian fundamentalists”.

Deaton is perhaps best known for a paper he co-authored with Daniel Kahneman which argued that, in America, the point at which people are “happy” is when their annual earnings hit $75,000. Given that a Nobel prize comes with a cheque for $1m, does that equate to 13 years of happiness?

“When you get to my age and you live in a non-British world in which there are no defined benefit pension schemes, it doesn’t seem that much,” he says. “Not when you are thinking ‘do I have enough to live for however many years I am going to live for?’ I think of that quite often.

“When I was a kid, starting out at Cambridge, and someone had said to me I would win $1m I would have assumed I would never work again. But it’s not the $1m that makes me happy.”

@iaindey