IT is surely past time, in the wearisome crisis of the coronavirus, to hear from the greatest living Scotsman, Angus Deaton, winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2015. Born in Edinburgh 75 years ago, the son of a civil engineer and grandson of a miner, the brilliant youngster went to the University of Cambridge and at length to Princeton in the US, where he has held a professorial chair through four decades. During his mellow old age, Deaton has voiced frequent homage to his homeland and to his early education, which he believes still owed much to the legacy of the Scottish Enlightenment.

With regard to economics, there had been in Scotland an intellectual movement that always paid heed to the impact on essentially sociable and benevolent human beings of impersonal processes beyond their control. What better basis for a look at the coronavirus and its possible permanent effects?

This was what Deaton gave us last week in an online seminar organised by the UK’s Royal Economic Society, available at its website. The subject was Inequalities and the Covid-19 Crisis, ambitiously linking the two greatest problems we are likely to face in the period ahead.

The connection arises because pandemic health catastrophes can exert big economic effects long after the infection itself has died away or been eradicated. In the Middle Ages, the Black Death eventually brought about the end of the feudal system and formed the basis for the open, trading societies of early capitalism.

As this developed into the Industrial Revolution, the horrible sufferings of factory workers led to the creation of the kind of modern welfare state that could deal with them. What interests Deaton is that these transformations are never, in any final sense, equal in their results, however benign the intentions. In reality, one class tends to do better out of them, at the expense of other groups. How is it likely to be in the case of the coronavirus?

The news is not good for a country with a government like Scotland’s, aiming to cure coronavirus now while pursuing a long-term aim of greater equality. On the contrary, the pandemic is causing greater inequality. It kills more poor people than rich people. It kills more men than women. It has especially lethal effects among ethnic minorities. Mostly we see these differences only when we set out to control the outbreak, or once the deaths have diminished. They are not usually obvious from the start, so cannot be planned for.

Yet, a month into the present lockdown and already more far-reaching trends begin to emerge, startling ones too. The labour market is being rapidly reshaped. The artistic and hospitality sectors do not appear to have much of a future because they need people to gather together in spaces where they can infect one another. On the other hand, an enormous expansion of all kinds of e-commerce is to be expected just because they avoid that risk.

Our politics will similarly be redirected to the management of risk, which will soon loom larger than more traditional governmental aims such as the redistribution of income and wealth. When citizens have to worry about personal survival, and re-organise their lives in order to be sure of it, they are less likely to probe into their fellows’ material standards.

Save yourself, all will cry. We will then move to greater inequality, this inequality being dictated by a virus and by its biological evolution rather than by any laws we make for a fairer society.

Not a pleasant prospect, then, but how does Deaton think we can respond to it? He starts from a position that is fairly left-wing in economists’ terms. Most of those active today have favoured the emergence of the global economy.

The steady dismantling of trading barriers among nations appeared to offer the perfect scenario for the optimal distribution of resources propounded by classical theory – except that the whole structure crashed in 2008. The economics profession has in general failed as yet to come to terms with the fiasco.

BUT Deaton was never much impressed by the most radical exponents of neo-classicism, such as Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek. It is not that he has ever rejected the capitalist system altogether: there is no socialism in the professor from Princeton. For him, capitalism is just the way the world works, and must always work.

But human history sometimes goes wrong, with the repeated collapse of traditional social structures and the emergence of harrowing new ones. Economics sometimes goes wrong, too. For example, in recent times the discipline has been much concerned with the management of risk, as in corporate lending during times of technical advance – at least up to the point where its practitioners discovered they were after all really not that good at managing risk.

They forgot what Deaton calls the “social portfolio”, the idea that human existence will benefit less from unfettered individual enterprise than from conscious action to counter the damage to the unsuccessful, as a certain number of us always must turn out to be.

The focus shifts from exploiting windfall gains on free markets to countering the effects of lower incomes.

One immediate result of this shift is in the way we think about public goods, the commodities or services provided to all citizens without profit to any one of them (usually by government, sometimes by private benevolence). In future, Deaton believes, public goods will no longer be regarded as a “gift to indolents”. They could rather become the basis of a new social order.

Even in its idealism this all sounds eminently sensible, yet Deaton is not really much of an optimist in the present circumstances: “Perhaps the coronavirus today is like smallpox or the bubonic plague in Europe before those diseases were well understood and treatable. This virus is new, no one has immunity, and apart from self-isolation, we are helpless.”

The social portfolio could therefore go wrong too: “The odds are that once we know how to control the virus, not everyone will benefit equally. I am perhaps too cynical, but I suspect that once the pandemic is over, US drugmakers and hospitals will be more powerful and wealthier than ever … In the UK, outrage over the damage done to the NHS by years of paring down services to boost efficiency will make it harder to underfund the service – at least for a while.”

Although I am personally well to the right of Deaton, I find much of what he says convincing. It is at least good to hear practical opinions from somebody of his intellectual calibre when too many Nobel Prize winners are still lost in their abstract speculations.

To Nick Cole of Meigle and Elizabeth Coe of Edinburgh, among other readers who lambasted my column last week, I say take a look at Deaton, the finest leftist brain at work since the collapse of socialism in 1989.

Does he advocate its revival? No, he does not, but he exhibits a habit of mind and breadth of outlook that may still make persuasive particular criticisms of capitalism, ready to be realised, rather than naively counting the days to its downfall.