Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host Russ Roberts

of Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Our website is econtalk.org or you can subscribe,

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Today is November 8, 2013, and my guest is Angus Deaton, the Dwight D. Eisenhower Professor

of Economics and International Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International

Affairs and the Economics Department at Princeton University. His latest book and the subject

of today's episode is The Great Escape, Health, Wealth and the Origins of Inequality,

Angus Welcome to Econ Talk. I'm delighted to be here. Thank you. Your book focuses on health and

well-being as well as the challenges that come with trying to measure those concepts. Let's start with

health. How is the world doing? The world's doing well better than it ever has in the past,

at least on average. That's the terrific news. The nods are good news is that a lot of people

got left behind and haven't really got there yet. You suggest that a girl today, born, I think,

I think you said in the United States, has a 50-50 chance of reaching 100 years old.

Yeah, that's a guess, but it's not an unreasonable guess. One of the things about projecting

mortality like that is it obviously depends if the girl is born today and she gets sick when she's

50, what sort of medical technology, what sort of things will we know then, which will help her get

through that, and of course we don't know that because it's 50 years down the pike. But there's

been a lot of progress over the last 50 years and if that goes on, that's not an unreasonable

supposition. Of course I'm talking about a white middle class well-heeled girl born in the United

States today. And as a contrast, there's a lot of fascinating statistics and evidence in the

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