“Life is better now than at almost any time in history”, Angus Deaton writes in The Great Escape. The Princeton economist’s account of health and wealth is a fundamentally positive story. Lives are longer, healthier, richer and more satisfying than ever before. To take one statistic from this compendium of progress: in every country in the world, infant and child mortality is lower than it was in 1950. On average, humankind is having a pretty good run.
Our incomplete flight from deprivation and early death is, however, more than a story of averages. Deaton’s lucid book celebrates the riches brought by growth while judiciously explaining why some people are always “left behind”. He draws a distinction between the inequalities that are opened up by advances in knowledge and those caused by flawed political systems. For it is humanity’s lot that, ultimately, “inequality is the handmaiden of progress”.