Annie Lowrey: In your speech, you said something provocative: That you think you might be better off living below the World Bank’s extreme poverty line in a country like Bangladesh rather than here. I wouldn’t think that would be true.

Angus Deaton: I’ve been struggling with it. There’s this terrific book by Kathy Edin called $2.00 a Day, with Luke Shaefer. Then there’s Matthew Desmond’s book, Evicted, which I was very impressed by. I was trying to think: The World Bank does collect these income numbers—now, they’ve started doing this for the whole world because the [sustainable development goals] are supposed to cover everything—and in the United States, unlike other western countries, there are 3 million people who are under this limit.

Lowrey: I figure the infrastructure—having access to hospitals and roads, having access to education for your kids, to programs like S-CHIP, again for your kids, to clean water…

Deaton: A lot of these programs have been turned into block grants, like [the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or welfare, program], and it’s very hard for people to get them. And life expectancy in much of Appalachia is below life expectancy in Bangladesh.

That’s not quite an answer to your question. The trouble is, I don’t know how to value these things. The people on the right consistently value them at what they cost. They say: These poor people are not poor at all because they get all these millions of dollars of Medicaid! But you can’t feed your kids with that. You can’t find a place to live with that.

Part of it is you throw up your hands and say poverty is very complicated and you can’t make these international comparisons! But if you had to choose between living in a poor village in India and living in the Mississippi Delta or in a suburb of Milwaukee in a trailer park, I’m not sure who would have the better life. That’s the point I’ve been pushing.

Lowrey: Have you spent a lot of time in Kentucky or West Virginia or rural Nebraska?

Deaton: No, but I spent five weeks every summer in Montana. And that’s been an eye-opener.

You get these people who are really quite poor, in many cases, who are very right-wing. They’re very anti-government and if you talk to them about why they’re anti-government, you get pretty persuaded pretty quickly. That wolf is eating my cow and I need to get a bureaucrat on the line before I’m allowed to shoot it! And that’s my year’s income! The history of Montana has been of the government giving land grants to people that could not possibly turn it into decent farms. And that destroying their lives. So they don’t see the government as something that’s out there to help them.

Someone asked me the other day when I was giving a talk a really interesting question. They said, “If you abolished the government, would America be more or less equal?” Because there’s all the equality that comes from redistribution but there’s all the inequality that comes from rent-seeking. And it’s not clear to me which one.