Having never lunched with a Nobel laureate before, I land early and prepared in the parking lot outside Mistral. The sleek Princeton eatery, whose chefs playfully blend local produce and global inspiration and describe themselves as “food activists”, is Angus Deaton’s favourite place to eat in town. Yet things quickly start to go awry when I find myself standing in the cold rain trying to wrestle my credit card out of a parking meter that is not just refusing to recognise it but seems to want to confiscate it. Getting increasingly wet, I am also caught in a logistical bind. The clock is ticking. Do I keep the laureate waiting or risk having to explain a parking ticket to the editor? I finally extract the card and decide to risk the fine. My boss will understand. My guest might not. 我从来没有跟诺贝尔奖(Nobel)得主一起吃过午饭，于是早早到了Mistral外面的停车场做准备。Mistral是普林斯顿一家新潮餐馆，这儿的大厨们像做游戏一样将本地食材和全球灵感融合到一起，他们自诩“食品积极分子”——Mistral是安格斯?迪顿(Angus Deaton)在城里最喜欢的餐馆。但是情况很快就出了岔子，咪表不仅拒绝识别我的信用卡，似乎还想吞掉它，我站在寒雨中，奋力从咪表里扯我的信用卡。我身上渐渐淋湿了，而且陷入了一个逻辑困境。时间一分一秒过去，我是让这位诺贝尔奖得主等着，还是冒要向编辑解释停车罚单的风险？最后我抽出信用卡，决定冒险挨罚。我的老板会理解的，我的客人可未必。
By the time I make it inside, I am a few minutes late and Deaton, winner of the Nobel Prize for economics in 2015 and optimistic defender of globalisation, is installed already at a small table on the far side of the room. I shake his hand and offer my apologies. 我走进餐厅时已经迟了几分钟，迪顿——2015年诺贝尔经济学奖获得者，全球化的乐观捍卫者——已被安顿到靠里那头的一张小桌子旁。我边跟他握手边向他道歉。
Deaton is gracious about my bind and offers some advice. It helps that he looks like he has been plucked from central casting for emeritus professors: requisite tweed jacket, jumper and wire-rimmed glasses; white hair just unkempt enough to give a flicker of Ivy League eccentricity. He is also wearing a blue bow tie with vivid red stars that once belonged to one of his mentors, the late Richard Stone, fellow Nobel Prizewinner and the godfather of British national accounts. 迪顿对我刚才的窘境表示体谅，还提供了些建议。他看起来像典型的荣誉退休教授：标配的花呢夹克，套头针织衫，丝框眼镜；一头白发略有些凌乱，正好显露出一丝常春藤盟校(Ivy League)人的特立独行。他还戴着一枚蓝底红星图案的领结，这枚领结曾属于他的导师，已故的理查德?斯通(Richard Stone)——同样是诺贝尔奖得主，还是英国国民经济核算体系的创立人。
Mistral is bright and airy despite the rain outside, and filled with music, cheer and the clanging of cutlery and plates. The noise forces us — two slightly rumpled large men — to lean across the small table to hear each other. I can’t help thinking that we are also, in the parlance of 2016, two “metropolitan elites”, sipping a smooth Oregon pinot noir and pondering death, pain and Donald Trump. 外面下着雨，Mistral餐厅里却明亮通风，充满了音乐声、欢呼声、杯盘刀叉的碰撞声。噪音使得我们两个脸上略有些皱纹的大男人互相凑近听对方说话。我不禁想到，我们两个用2016年的话来说，也是“大都会精英”，啜饮着一杯口感细腻的俄勒冈黑皮诺，思考着死亡、痛苦以及唐纳德?特朗普(Donald Trump)。
The president-elect is one reason I am here, of course. At the close of a year that has upended western politics, Deaton is among those best placed to explain the populist earthquakes. 当然，这位当选总统正是我此时坐在这里的原因之一。今年是西方政治颠覆的一年，在这一年接近终点时分，迪顿是解释这些民粹主义地震的最佳人选之一。
Just weeks after he won the Nobel Prize, Deaton and his wife, fellow Princeton economist Anne Case, published a paper revealing an alarming trend in US society: a surge in suicides and other “deaths of despair” among high school-educated white men had reached such an alarming level that middle-aged whites collectively had become the only demographic group in America in decades to see rising mortality. By their calculations, between 1999 and 2013 as many as 490,000 extra lives were lost as a result of the shift. 就在赢得诺贝尔奖几周后，迪顿和妻子——普林斯顿大学(Princeton)经济学家安妮?凯斯(Anne Case)——发表了一篇文章，揭示了美国社会一个令人震惊的趋势：高中毕业白人男性中自杀以及其他“因绝望而死”的人数出现飙升，已达到令人震惊的程度，中年白人群体已成为美国几十年来唯一死亡率上升的人口组。根据他们的计算，1999年至2013年之间这股趋势导致多达49万条生命额外消亡。
The Case/Deaton study was seized on as causal evidence for the rise of Trump and his appeal to disgruntled white voters in the American heartland. When President Obama welcomed Deaton and his fellow 2015 laureates to the White House, he spent most of a 45-minute meeting with the group interrogating the two economists about their findings. “He opened the door himself and shook my hand and I said, ‘I’d like to introduce you to my wife’. And he said ‘Professor Case needs no introduction. I’m a huge admirer of her work’,” Deaton recounts. “She just melted because we’d published the paper like the week before on the dying white people and he said, ‘We’re going to talk about your paper.’ And he’d read it down to the footnotes!” 人们把凯斯和迪顿的研究，当做理解特朗普的崛起以及他对美国心脏地带不满的白人选民的吸引力的解释性证据。奥巴马(Obama)在白宫招待迪顿等2015年诺奖得主时，在45分钟的会面里，他大部分时间都在向这两位经济学家讨教他们的发现。迪顿描述当时的情形：“他亲自应门，我跟他握手，说，‘我想向您介绍我的妻子’。然后他说，‘凯斯教授不需要介绍，我十分仰慕她的研究’。她马上就感动了，因为我们一周前才发表了那篇白人死亡率的文章。然后他说，‘我们来谈谈你们的文章吧’。他连脚注部分都看了！”
Our waitress is full of American efficiency and the first of our food arrives quickly, a trout rillette served with pickled fennel and potato chips that Deaton has nominated as a favourite. An avid fly fisherman, he spends his summers stalking trout in Montana. “After a day’s fishing I’ll know the solution to something or have good ideas that were not accessible before,” he tells me later. 我们的女服务员十足美国效率，第一道菜很快上来了，是迪顿点的鳟鱼酱配腌茴香和薯片，这是他的最爱。他是一个飞钓狂，夏天都在蒙大拿州追踪鳟鱼。他后来告诉我：“钓完一天鱼，我就能想到某些问题的解决方案，或产生以前想不到的好想法。”
Back to Obama. “The man has a lot of class,” says Deaton. “He may not have been a very effective president. But that’s beside the point now I guess.” 谈回奥巴马，迪顿说：“这个人很有风度。他可能不是一个非常有作为的总统，但我想这一点现在无关紧要了。”
In the wake of November’s US presidential election result, the quip is telling. Deaton is among those who sees Trump’s election — and the Brexit vote that shocked the UK earlier in the year — as a consequence of the arrogance of political elites. 考虑到11月美国总统选举结果已经出来，上述打趣很能说明问题。与很多人一样，迪顿也认为特朗普当选——以及今年早些时候震惊英国的脱欧公投——是政治精英傲慢的结果。
He is scathing about the Clintons, and Hillary Clinton in particular, for their links to a broken establishment. “One of the great benefits of the election to me is that I don’t have to pretend that I like her,” he tells me at one point, even as he confesses he reluctantly voted for her. 他毫不留情地批评克林顿夫妇（尤其是希拉里?克林顿(Hillary Clinton)）与失灵的建制派之间的联系。他一度对我说，“对我而言此次选举最大的好处之一就是，我不必假装喜欢她”，尽管他承认他不情愿地把票投给了她。
But his bigger frustration is with what he sees as the detached and technocratic backgrounds of so many people in centrist politics nowadays. 但更让他感到沮丧的，是在他看来，当今的中间派政治人士中，竟有那么多人具有脱离普罗大众的技术官僚背景。
“If you think about the first leaders of the UK’s Labour party, they were singing hymns on the train platform as they went off to work. And they were of ‘those people’,” he says. “If you think of someone like Gordon Brown, who I have immense admiration for, and Obama — and the high point of my year this year was my meeting with Obama — he’s not one of ‘those people’ any more. He’s an intellectual with progressive views who is making policy in a way that he judges is good for those people.” 他说：“想想英国工党最初的那些领导人，他们是在火车站台上哼唱着圣歌去上班的。而且他们属于‘那些人’。再想想戈登?布朗(Gordon Brown)和奥巴马这些人——声明一下，我非常钦佩戈登?布朗，而与奥巴马会面是我今年最值得一提的事情——他们不再属于‘那些人’。他们是持进步观点的知识分子，按照他们认为有利于‘那些人’的方式制定政策。”
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Deaton’s view is derived from his own background. Born in Edinburgh in 1945, he is the grandson of a Yorkshire coal miner, and the son of a civil engineer whose own battles to get an education drove him to push young Angus into a rigorous study routine that eventually led to a scholarship to Fettes, Scotland’s Eton, then Cambridge. 迪顿的观点源于他自己的背景。迪顿于1945年出生于爱丁堡，他的爷爷是约克郡的煤矿工人，父亲是土木工程师，他父亲自己的艰难求学经历促使他为年幼的安格斯安排了严格的学习计划，让迪顿最终获得了费蒂斯公学（Fettes，这所学校相当于苏格兰的伊顿公学(Eton)）的奖学金，随后进了剑桥大学(Cambridge)。
“I’ve always — and not always happily — considered myself an outsider,” Deaton tells me. “Certainly at Fettes. And then the Scots are always outsiders in England. They are always putting you in your place in one way or another and there is this pretty rigid class hierarchy. 迪顿告诉我：“我总觉得自己是个局外人，有时候这种感觉并不好。在费蒂斯中学当然是这样。而到了剑桥——苏格兰人在英格兰总是局外人。他们总是用这种或那种方式让你记住自己的身份，还有一套非常严格的等级制度。”
This, he considers, “is a true sympathy that I think I have with these people who support Trump.” 他认为，这是“我对那些支持特朗普的人真正感同身受的地方”。
Fishing in Montana has also contributed to his understanding. “You meet these people who are quite impoverished and they have a different set of values?.?.?.?Fishing guides with health problems, who are veterans and refuse to go to the [Veterans Administration hospital for free care] because they see it as a handout.” 在蒙大拿垂钓也有助于他对那些人的理解。“你遇到的那些人，他们很穷，有一套不同的价值观……有些钓鱼向导身体有毛病，虽然他们是退伍军人，但他们不愿去美国退伍军人管理局(Veterans Administration)医院接受免费治疗，因为他们认为这是施舍。”
Deaton is conscious that there is an irony to his feeling of alienation from the elite. A few days after we meet he is to be knighted by the Queen “for his services to research in economics and international affairs”, capping a remarkable year. While we lunch, Case is in New York picking up a hat to wear to Buckingham Palace. 迪顿明白，他这种自觉不属于精英的感觉具有讽刺意味。在我们见面数天后，他将因“对经济和国际事务研究做出的贡献”获英国女王封爵，为引人瞩目的一年画上圆满的句号。就在我们共进午餐的时候，凯斯正在纽约为白金汉宫之行挑选一顶帽子。
“I’ve always shared the idea of being excluded,” he says. “Maybe I should stop feeling that. I think there’s this sense of not being recognised, which in my case is absurd and it’s just not true.” 他说：“我总是对被排斥感同身受。或许我应该停止这样觉得。我认为这是一种不被认可的感觉，以我的情况来看，有这种感觉很荒谬，并且不符合事实。”
Brexit has only amplified his feelings of detachment, however. He is against both a UK exit from the EU and Scottish independence. Yet 2016 has left him, like many Scots, reconsidering the latter. “I think the dilemma [Brexit] poses for Scotland is pretty intolerable,” he says. “If Scotland has to clean out all its universities of European citizens there are really horrible things that are going to happen.” 然而，英国退欧只是放大了他的疏离感。他对英国退欧和苏格兰独立都持反对立场。然而，与许多苏格兰人一样，2016年让他重新考虑是否还反对苏格兰独立。他说：“我认为（英国退欧）为苏格兰带来的两难局面完全让人无法接受。如果苏格兰不得不清退其所有大学里的欧洲公民，那真的会发生可怕的事情。”
He has ordered a roasted pepper and broccoli rabe flatbread pizza with pine nuts, feta cheese, pickled raisins and a fried egg on top. I dig into a plate of creamy burrata served with beets, pear and hazelnuts. We toast. “So are you happy with this the way it is?” Deaton asks. I nod enthusiastically, confessing that if he has an obsession with data then I have one with burrata. 他要了烤甜椒和芸薹薄底比萨，配有松仁、菲达奶酪和腌葡萄干，最上面还有一个煎蛋。我点了一盘浓稠的burrata奶酪，配有甜菜、梨和榛子。我们举杯共饮。迪顿问道：“你对这盘菜满意吗？”我用力点头，坦承如果他迷恋数据，我则迷恋burrata奶酪。
Deaton retired from his position at Princeton in the spring but he and Case are continuing to dig into the data. Since the election others have seized on the correlation between places with high white mortality rates and votes for Trump. But the link to those who report suffering from physical pain is even greater, Deaton says. He sees an epidemic of pain and a related flood of opioids into communities over the past decade as being, more than globalisation or economic dislocation, the real cause of rising mortality among middle-aged white Americans. 迪顿在今年春季从普林斯顿退休，但他和凯斯还在继续挖掘数据。自美国大选以来，其他人也开始研究白人高死亡率地区与投给特朗普的选票之间的关联，但迪顿表示，它与那些报告身体疼痛的人之间的关联度甚至更高。他认为，美国中年白人死亡率上升的真正原因，是过去十年疼痛病流行和阿片类镇痛药物涌入社区，而不是全球化或经济失调。
With Gallup’s help he has been collecting data on how many people report having felt physical pain in the past 24 hours and says the numbers are staggering in the US. What is causing that epidemic — and its links to Trump’s rise — remains unclear, he says. He seems more willing to blame pharmaceutical companies and doctors for overprescribing opioids. A surge in addiction (drug overdoses caused more deaths in the US last year than auto accidents) has, he argues, proved far more fatal than globalisation. 在盖洛普(Gallup)的帮助下，他一直在收集多少人在过去24小时内报告身体疼痛，他说，美国的相关数字令人震惊。他说，这种疼痛病流行的原因（以及其与特朗普崛起的关联）依然尚不清楚，他似乎更愿意指责制药公司和医生过度开具阿片类镇痛药物。他认为，上瘾人数飙升其实比全球化致命得多——去年美国死于药物过量的人比车祸死亡人数还多。
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Deaton’s 2013 book The Great Escape argued that the world we live in today is healthier and wealthier than it would otherwise have been, thanks to centuries of economic integration. He sees efforts to blame globalisation for woes in the US Rust Belt or Britain’s beleaguered industrial areas as a mistake. 迪顿在2013年出版的《逃离不平等》(The Great Escape)一书中主张，如果没有数个世纪的经济一体化，当今世界不会像现在这样健康和富裕。他认为，指责全球化造成了美国锈带或英国工业地区的困境，是错误的。
“Globalisation for me seems to be not first-order harm and I find it very hard not to think about the billion people who have been dragged out of poverty as a result,” he says. “I don’t think that globalisation is anywhere near the threat that robots are.” 他说：“在我看来，全球化似乎并非伤害的直接制造者，我也觉得很难不考虑受益于全球化摆脱了贫困的那数十亿人。我认为全球化对人类的威胁跟机器人不可同日而语。”
Our next course has landed. Deaton has a grilled shrimp Caesar salad placed before him while I have Weisswurst served in a hotdog bun with apple kraut. 我们的下一道菜上来了。迪顿面前是烤虾凯撒沙拉，而我面前是热狗面包配巴伐利亚白香肠和苹果泡菜。
In his book, Deaton argues there is an inextricable link between progress and inequality and his views on wealth and innovation are complicated by that. “It’s hard to think that Mark Zuckerberg is actually impoverishing anyone by getting rich with Facebook,” he tells me. “But driverless cars are another matter entirely,” with millions of truck and other drivers likely to lose jobs. 迪顿在书中主张，进步与不平等之间有着密不可分的联系，他对财富和创新的看法因此有些复杂。他告诉我：“很难认为，马克?扎克伯格(Mark Zuckerberg)通过Facebook发家致富事实上让任何人变穷了。但无人驾驶汽车完全是另一回事，”无数卡车司机以及其他司机可能失业。
Asking whether inequality is bad for economic growth is, Deaton says, a “simple-minded question”. Yet inequality manifested in wealthy people or corporations buying control of government is a different matter. “That surely is a catastrophe. So I have come to think that it’s the inequality that comes through rent-seeking [the use of wealth to influence politics for selfish gain] that is the crux of the matter.” 迪顿表示，问不平等是否对经济发展有害是一个“愚蠢的问题”。然而，富人或者企业收买政府所体现的不平等是另一回事。“那无疑是一场灾难。因此我认为，源于寻租（使用财富来影响政治以牟取私利）的不平等是问题的症结所在。”
I ask him what we should make of president-elect Trump’s installation of fellow billionaires in his first cabinet? 我问他，我们应该如何理解候任总统特朗普任命其他亿万富翁进入他的首届内阁？
He shrugs. “I know. But then the Obama administration was elected on that platform [of change] and tried and didn’t succeed very well. And the Clintons just seem like the opposite of the way you want to do this stuff.” 他耸了耸肩。“我明白。但话说回来，奥巴马政府当初是基于那套（主张改变）的政纲选出来的，他们尝试过了，但不是很成功。而克林顿夫妇看起来则处于你想要看到的执政方式的反面。”
Deaton’s work on wellbeing is among his best-known and he once argued that happiness effectively peaked once a person was earning the equivalent of $75,000 a year. Would Trump be happy on $75,000 a year? Would Deaton? 迪顿对幸福的研究是他最为人所知的研究之一，他曾主张，幸福在你的收入达到每年7.5万美元的时候达到顶峰。那么如果每年挣7.5万美元，特朗普会幸福吗？迪顿自己呢？
Deaton points out the paper’s conclusion was actually that gains in happiness flattened out once you rose out of poverty. “And I’ve been there where your life is really, really shadowed by not knowing where the money is going to come from?.?.?.?It’s a misery.” 迪顿指出，那篇论文的结论实际是，一旦你脱离贫困，幸福感曲线就会趋于水平。“而且我真正经历过那种处境——不知道钱会从哪里来，这种感觉使你的生活真正蒙上阴影……那种处境很痛苦。”
“I doubt that Donald Trump would be happier?.?.?.?if he was a different person. But Trump is always telling people how great his life is and about all the great things that he’s done and that’s also all about his income. And that’s also what we found. If you ask people how their lives are going, as a whole, it seems they tend to point to income,” regardless of the diminishing gains in happiness. “如果唐纳德?特朗普(Donald Trump)是另一个人……我不敢肯定他会不会更幸福。但特朗普总在告诉人们他过得多好，做过哪些棒极了的事情，而且那全都是因为他有钱。这也与我们发现的情况相符。如果你问人们他们过得怎么样，整体上，他们似乎还是倾向于说到收入”——尽管幸福的增长是递减的。
He pauses. “I certainly have had more income in the last year.” 他停顿了一下。“去年我肯定是有了更多的收入。”
What have you done with the [Nobel] prize money? I ask. 你的（诺贝尔）奖金用来做什么了？我问。
“Well, I retired from Princeton,” he says, smiling. “嗯，我从普林斯顿退休了，”他微笑道。
Our dessert arrives. Deaton has recommended what turns out to be a delicious brown butter cake with crispy slices of fried fig and lemon poppy seed ice cream. 我们的甜点上来了。迪顿推荐的原来是焦化黄油蛋糕配炸无花果脆片和柠檬罂粟籽冰激凌。
It feels like time to ask about the future. What of all those who see — in Brexit, Trump and the rise of populism in Europe — a looming end to the postwar liberal economic order? 感觉是时候问问有关未来的事情了。许多人认为，英国退欧、特朗普和民粹主义在欧洲的兴起，预示着战后自由主义经济秩序即将终结，我问迪顿如何看待这种观点。
“Let’s hope not,” he answers. “You can certainly draw a picture of 2016 which makes it look like the 1930s, which of course is what everyone is doing.” Deaton takes the long view and is convinced of the durability of progress, partly because he is also a product of globalisation and views things more broadly. “惟愿不会如此，”他回答，“你当然可以将2016年描绘得好像上世纪30年代，显然这是每个人都正在做的事情。”迪顿的眼光更长远，他也相信进步的持久性，部分原因是他本人也是全球化的产物，以一种更宽广的视角看待事物。
Although he holds both US and British citizenship, he identifies most strongly as an expatriate Scot and part of a tradition of ambitious young Scots who have ventured out into the world since 1707, when the union with England opened the British colonies to them. 尽管他同时拥有美国和英国公民身份，他内心认为自己是一个侨居的苏格兰人，承袭了1707年苏格兰和英格兰合并，将英国的殖民地向苏格兰人开放以来，雄心勃勃的年轻苏格兰人闯世界的传统。
“It was that opening which created those opportunities, which those people seized, and prospered. That’s why it’s hard for me to think differently,” he says. In places such as India, where he has worked extensively, the gains from globalisation have also contributed to “a huge decline in social oppression and it has happened worldwide,” he says, pointing to the gains made in women’s rights and gay rights in recent decades. “正是那一合并创造了那些机会，当时的那些人抓住了机会并且成功了。这就是为什么我很难不这样认为，”他说。在印度等他曾详细研究过的地方，全球化带来的好处也促进了“社会压迫的大幅减轻，并且这种情况在世界各地都出现了，”他在提到最近几十年社会在女性和同性恋权益方面取得的进步时说。
In Trump — and those he has appointed to cabinet posts — Deaton actually sees a reversion to the Republican mean, rather than a revolution. A Republican’s win was something that, according to US history, was always a more likely scenario than the election of another Democratic president. 事实上，迪顿认为，特朗普以及他任命的内阁成员是对共和党主政这一常态的回归，而非一场革命。在美国历史上，共和党胜选始终是比又选出一位民主党总统更有可能发生的情况。
He also welcomes the shaking up of liberal institutions and expects an adjustment. “The good story is these will all be warnings to the elites that you can’t go on like this.” 他也乐见自由主义体制被撼动，并且期望会发生调整。“好的一面是这些都会成为对精英的警告——你们不能继续这样下去了。”
As the waitress refills our sparkling water, Deaton returns one last time to “dead white people”. “Despite what I said before, economics is a big part of the story that we haven’t put our fingers on,” he offers. “My guess is that economics and the decline of unions and the sense of not being represented any more prepared the soil for this horrible upheaval. They certainly lost these jobs in manufacturing and those jobs came with unions which provided them with representation. So they are deprived of that and that makes them more susceptible to suicide and depression.” 女侍者给我们添苏打水的时候，迪顿又最后一次说回“死去的白人”的话题。“尽管我之前说过一些事情，经济是一个更大的、我们还没有搞清楚的故事的一部分，”他提出，“我的猜测是，经济状况、工会的衰落和不再被代表的感觉为这种可怕的剧变提供了温床。这些白人显然失去了制造业工作，伴随着这些工作的是代表他们的工会。因此他们被剥夺了这些，这让他们更容易自杀和抑郁。”
Would The Great Escape be less optimistic if he wrote it today? “No. I don’t think so. Because I’m talking about the last 250 years.” 如果他今天来写《逃离不平等》，这本书的论调会不会就没那么乐观了？“不，我不这么认为。因为我谈的是过去的250年。”
A few minutes later we say goodbye and I wander back to my rental car. There is a limp, wet parking ticket stuck to my windscreen, a $40 fine. I smile. I’m also drawn back to the advice Deaton offered when I first sat down and mentioned my fear of a looming ticket. 几分钟后，我们相互道别，我漫步回到我租的车上。车的挡风玻璃上有一张湿软的违章停车罚单，一张40美元的罚单。我微微一笑。我回想起在我最开始坐下，并且提到我担心会被开罚单的时候，迪顿给我的建议。
“I’m sure you can get out of it,” the Nobel laureate told me. “Just tell them the system was broken.” “我相信你能够让他们撤销，”这位诺贝尔奖得主告诉我，“你只用告诉他们，系统坏掉了。”
Shawn Donnan is the FT’s world trade editor 本文作者是英国《金融时报》世界贸易编辑
Illustration by James Ferguson 配图：詹姆斯?弗格森(James Ferguson)
译者/徐行
