Angus Deaton — On AI
This page lists every Orange Pill Wiki entry hyperlinked from Angus Deaton — On AI. 14 entries total. Each is a deeper-dive on a person, concept, work, event, or technology that the book treats as a stepping stone for thinking through the AI revolution. Click any card to open the entry; in each entry, words colored in orange link to other Orange Pill Wiki entries, while orange-underlined words with the Wikipedia mark link to Wikipedia.
Conversion Factors
The personal, social, and environmental conditions that determine whether a resource actually translates into a capability — the analytical mechanism that reveals why identical tools produce radically different human outcomes.
Deaths of Despair
The startling rise in mortality among non-college-educated Americans driven by suicide, drug overdose, and alcoholic liver disease — identified and named by Anne Case and Angus Deaton, and already being extended to AI-driven displacement.
Democratization of Capability (Senian Reading)
The Orange Pill claim — that AI tools lower the floor of who can build — submitted to Sen's framework, which asks the harder question: does formal access convert into substantive capability expansion?
Functionings and Capabilities
Sen's foundational distinction between what a person does or is (functioning) and what she is substantively free to do or to be (capability) — the analytical engine of capability theory.
Managed vs. Unmanaged Escape
The distinction between escape facilitated by institutional support (the Trivandrum engineers) and escape achieved through individual initiative without institutional scaffolding (the Lagos developer) — and the very different durability of …
Seventy-to-One
The ratio between per-capita income in the richest and poorest nations at the end of the twentieth century — up from five-to-one before the industrial revolution. The number that, for Segal, broke his confidence about democratization.
The Amplification Paradox
AI tools amplify existing capability — which means they benefit most the populations that already possess the most capability, widening rather than narrowing the gap between the well-prepared and the unprepared.
The Capability Approach
Sen's framework that redefines human welfare as the substantive freedom to achieve functionings one has reason to value — the evaluative instrument this book applies to AI.
The Capability Gap
The divide — sharper and more durable than the gap in tool access — between those who can convert AI tools into human functioning and those who cannot, mediated by education, infrastructure, health, and institutional support.
The Distribution Problem
The uncomfortable fact that AI's benefits and costs do not distribute evenly across the population of affected workers — a Smithian question about institutions, not a technical question about tools.
Software Death Cross
The 2025–2026 phase transition in which AI-assisted software production costs crossed below the costs of maintaining legacy code, triggering a trillion-dollar repricing of the SaaS industry in months.
The Trivandrum Training
The February 2026 week-long training session in which Edo Segal flew to Trivandrum, India, to work alongside twenty of his engineers as they adopted Claude Code — producing the twenty-fold productivity multiplier documented in The Orange Pill…