In memory of Alfred Nobel to Angus Deaton for his analysis of consumption, poverty, and welfare.

Science often faces the question, "Can we understand large scale patterns without detailed information about small scale processes?".

In Economic science, we used to hope that the answer was, "Yes we can!".

Historically, we lacked data about choices at the level of the individual and the household.

In order to make senses of our micro-level data, we therefore conducted our analysis under presumption

that all people are essentially alike and face the same kind of constraints.

For example, poor households were presumed to behave in roughly the same way as rich households, only with less money at their disposal.

Today, in large part due to the work of Angus Deaton and his collaborators,

we not only understand the limitation of that approach,

we also have the data and the skills that are required to do better.