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The Great Escape
Deaton's 2013 book documenting the extraordinary improvement in human welfare over two and a half centuries — and the widening of the gap between escapees and left-behind from five-to-one to seventy-to-one.
The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality is Angus Deaton's 2013 synthesis of decades of empirical work on human welfare. The book documents the extraordinary transformation of material conditions since the industrial revolution — life expectancy roughly doubling, extreme poverty falling from near-universal to historically unprecedented lows, infant mortality declining, literacy spreading. It also documents the structural feature that most celebratory accounts of progress omit: the gains reach different populations at radically different times, and the early escapees pull away from the late arrivals with such velocity that the gap between them widens even as absolute conditions improve for both groups. The book's central metaphor — escape — captures both the reality of progress and the moral urgency of the distributional question it raises.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The book takes its title from the 1963 film about prisoners tunneling out of a German POW camp, and the metaphor is deliberate. Some prisoners escape. Others