The Miracle of Growth and ‘The Great Escape’

In “The Great Escape: Health, Wealth and the Origins of Inequality,” Angus Deaton sets out to tell a familiar story -- that of the long arc of global economic advance -- in a fresh way. The author is an economics professor at Princeton University, a renowned development economist and an exceptionally gifted teacher. Even those familiar with his accomplishments might be surprised by how brilliantly his book succeeds.

The world, he emphasizes, is a vastly better place than it was, and he shows that the usual preoccupation with growth in measured output understates this astounding transformation. Unusually, “The Great Escape” gives the same weight to progress in health as it does to other measures of material well-being. Health is where the changes wrought by economic progress (especially in rich countries, but by no means confined to them) have been most startling.