Angus Deaton was born in Edinburgh, educated at Hawick High School (at the same time as 2017 chemistry Nobel Laureate Richard Henderson), at Fettes, and at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, where he was an Exhibitioner in Mathematics. After a brief and undistinguished career in the Bank of England, he returned to academia, where he has remained. He was a research officer at the Department of Applied Economics in Cambridge, working with Sir Richard Stone on planning for growth. In 1975, he became Professor of Econometrics at the University of Bristol and moved to Princeton as Professor of Economics, Public, and International Affairs in 1983. He became a Senior Scholar and Emeritus Professor in 2016.

He is the author of almost two hundred papers in professional journals, and of six books, including The Great Escape: health, wealth, and the origins of inequality (2013), of Economics in America: an immigrant economist explores the land of inequality, (2023) and, with Anne Case, of Deaths of despair and the future of capitalism (2020), a New York Times best-seller.

His interests include health, happiness, development, poverty, inequality, and how best to collect and interpret evidence for policy. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, of the American Philosophical Society and, in Britain, a Fellow of the British Academy and an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He is a past President of the American Economic Association. He holds several honorary doctorates from universities in Europe and the US including Cambridge, Edinburgh, and St Andrews. In 2015, he received the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel “for his analysis of consumption, poverty, and welfare.” He was made a Knight Bachelor in 2016.