Professors Anne Case and Sir Angus Deaton are recognized as Prospect magazine’s 2019 “World’s Top 50 Thinkers.”

As the only double-headed entry, Case and Deaton received this award for their work in U.S. mortality data. Case and Deaton’s landmark 2015 study was the first to detect the rise in mortality rates from “deaths of despair” — drugs, alcohol, and suicide — among middle-aged white Americans.

Deaton is the Dwight D. Eisenhower Professor of International Affairs, Emeritus, and professor of economics and international affairs, emeritus, at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Now a senior scholar at Princeton, Deaton is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy and an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He was the 2009 president of the American Economic Association and first recipient of the Econometric Society’s Frisch Medal for Applied Econometrics.

Case is the Alexander Stewart 1886 Professor of Economics and Public Affairs, Emeritus, at the Woodrow Wilson School and director of the Research Program in Development Studies. She has received the Kenneth J. Arrow Prize in Health Economics from the International Health Economics Association and the Cozzarelli Prize from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Case also serves on the President’s Committee on the National Medal of Science and the Committee on National Statistics.

Prospect magazine is a monthly British magazine created in 1995 to address current events internationally in politics, policymaking, and business. Given to scientists, philosophers, and writers, the annual “World’s Top 50 Thinkers” recognition honors “the minds engaging most fruitfully with the questions of the moment.”