In memory of Alfred Nobel to Angus Deaton for his analysis of consumption, poverty, and welfare.

授與安格斯迪頓，基於他對消費、貧窮以及社會福利的分析。

Science often faces the question, "Can we understand large scale patterns without detailed information about small scale processes?".

科學常常面臨一個問題：「如果沒有關於小型進程的詳細資訊，我們是否能夠理解龐大的格局？」

In Economic science, we used to hope that the answer was, "Yes we can!".

在經濟科學，我們以往都會希望答案是：「是的，我們可以！」

Historically, we lacked data about choices at the level of the individual and the household.

但就歷史來看，我們總缺乏在個人和家戶的層面關於選擇上的數據。

In order to make senses of our micro-level data, we therefore conducted our analysis under presumption

為了使我們微觀層面的數據變得有意義，我們因此在假設底下進行了分析。

that all people are essentially alike and face the same kind of constraints.

那就是：所有的人本質上是一樣的，而且面臨著相同類型的限制。

For example, poor households were presumed to behave in roughly the same way as rich households, only with less money at their disposal.

舉例來說，貧困家庭被假定表現與富裕家庭大致相同的方式，只是他們的運用的錢比較少而已。

Today, in large part due to the work of Angus Deaton and his collaborators,

今日，歸功於迪頓和他的合作夥伴，

we not only understand the limitation of that approach,

我們不只了解那個方法的限制，

we also have the data and the skills that are required to do better.

我們也掌握了所需的數據和技術讓我們能做得更好。