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'YOU HAVE 45 MINUTES WARNING': This is what happens when they call you at 6 a.m. to say you've won the Nobel Prize
REUTERS/Dominick Reuter
In 2015, Princeton professor Angus Deaton won the Nobel Prize for economics. The prize was awarded for his work on consumption, poverty, and welfare. In particular, Deaton's work explains a concept called "consumption smoothing," the idea that people don't wildly change their spending habits when their pay is raised or cut. They tend to keep their consumption constant.
Deaton met with Business Insider over coffee at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where we had long conversation about inequality, universal basic income, and the legalised theft of wealth. We will publish more of that in the weeks to come.
At the end of our conversation, we asked a much more basic question: What is it like to win a Nobel Prize, an experience that notoriously begins with an early morning phone call?
Turns out, "it's a lot of fun!" Deaton says. You get week-long trip to Sweden with your entire family, where they give you a stretch BMW with a driver, and they treat you like a head of state.
But first, the early morning phonecall ...
ANGUS DEATON: "They call you at 6 o'clock in the morning. A traditional phone call. You have 45 minutes warning before they do the press conference."
BI: Were you asleep?
DEATON: "No I was sitting there waiting for the phone call! It's a big deal!"
BI: Did you think it might be a prank call?
DEATON: "I didn't think it was a prank call until my friend Torsten Persson who is chairman of the committee [Persson is a Swedish economist at the Institute for International Economic Studies in Stockholm] said, 'Angus, this is not a prank call!' I said, 'Torsten, that is the first time it occurred to me that it was a prank call.' They try to have someone call you that you know. So I had known Torsten for 30 years."
"You get swept off your feet. Princeton had a huge team — they were at our house within 10 minutes of the press announcement. It occurred to me maybe they had gotten advance notice even though I had not, but it turns out not. They said they had done all the preparations for five different people in my department."
BI: At Princeton, they're probably on alert every year for this.
DEATON: "Yes. I had known that for a long time, that I was on that list, which didn't make it not a surprise because there is a lot of people on that list. I could give you 100 names of people who would be worthy. There is no public official list."
BI: What happens next?
DEATON: "It's a lot of fun!"
"The first bit of it that is sort of unimaginable, and you don't know about, and I've been trying to tell people about this, is that you go to Stockholm for a week — not just for a day — and they treat you like a head of state. You don't go through customs, through immigration, for instance. You're met at the door of the plane by the chairman of the Swedish Academy and one of the most beautiful women I've ever seen, who is a foreign service officer who has been assigned to you for the week and is your attache. And underneath the plane there is a stretch BMW with a driver in it, that's yours for the week."
"They have you so tightly scheduled [but] you get to bring — this is another part of it that I didn't imagine at all — you get to invite 14 people in addition to your spouse. Fourteen! And so about half of those are automatic family slots. And you know, 14 is a really hard thing. Because people have to be left out. You have to send people emails saying 'I'm sorry but they can't get you a ticket'!"
"So the others are mostly long-term collaborators, or people who played a big part in what I was getting the medal for. But the fact that it was sort of a family reunion, I spent a lot of time with my kids and grandkids, for my grandchildren they're just old enough to really remember it and there's lots of photographs, and my grandson was on Swedish TV and he became a sort of national superstar. So that part of it was just terrific."
BI: Are there downsides?
DEATON: "It changes your life in ways that you really have to handle, and it's not entirely obvious how to do that. Like, I wouldn't be talking to you if that hadn't happened."
BI: But you're choosing to be here surely?
DEATON: "Yeah though with some ambivalence. You get roped into a lot of things and some of them of them are fun. And some of them are lucrative, and some of the ones that are lucrative are fun too. Which is nice. Some of them are not fun at all. Some of them you think will be fun and they are not."
BI: This, talking to me, is not lucrative.
DEATON: "No but one of the good things about being here is that I can talk to you and a bunch of other people at relatively little cost whereas at home it's always a pain one way or another because I'm supposed to go down to the station or the studio."
At that point, someone rang a loud bell and we ended our talk in order to listen to a speech by Xi Jinping, the general secretary of the Communist Party of China — which is another weird thing that happens to you when you win the Nobel for Economics.
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