Angus Deaton, the Scottish-born, Cambridge-trained Princeton economist, best known for his careful work on measuring the changes in wellbeing of the world’s poor, has won the 2015 Nobel Prize in economics. His data collection is fairly easy to understand, so I will leave larger discussion of exactly what he has found to the general news media; Deaton’s book “The Great Escape” provides a very nice summary of what he has found as well, and I think a fair reading of his development preferences are that he much prefers the currently en vogue idea of just giving cash to the poor and letting them spend it as they wish.
Essentially, when one carefully measures consumption, health, or generic characteristics of wellbeing, there has been tremendous improvement indeed in the state of the world’s poor. National statistics do not measure these ideas well, because developing countries do not tend to track data…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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