In Human Well-Being and the Natural Environment, Partha Dasgupta explores ways to measure the quality of life. In developing quality-of-life indices, he pays particular attention to the natural environment, illustrating how it can be incorporated, more generally, into economic reasoning in a seamless manner. Professor Dasgupta puts the theory that he develops to use in extended commentaries on the economics of population, poverty traps, global warming, structural adjustment programmes, and free trade, particularly in relation to poor countries. The result is (...) a treatise that goes beyond quality-of-life measures and offers a comprehensive account of the newly emergent subject of ecological economics. (shrink)

Social thinkers frequently remind us that people differ in their views on what constitutes personal well-being, but that even when they don't differ, they disagree over the extent to which one person's well-being can be permitted to be traded off against another's. In this paper I show, by offering an account of the development of development economics, that in professional debates on social policy, economists speak or write as though they agree on values but differ on their reading of facts. (...) A number of ethicists have concluded from this near-exclusive interest in facts that modern economics must be an ethical desert. It is shown here that the reason research economists analyze facts rather than values is that modern economics is built on broad ethical foundations, capable of being reduced as special cases to the various ethical theories that are currently on offer. Ethics has taken a back seat in modern economics not because contemporary economists are wedded to a “value-free” enterprise, but because the ethical foundations of the subject were constructed over five decades ago and are now regarded to be a settled matter. (shrink)

Social thinkers frequently remind us that people differ on what constitutes personal well-being, but that even when they don't differ, they disagree over the extent to which one person's well-being can be permitted to be traded off against another's. They tell us that political differences are to be traced to differences in people's conceptions of personal and social well-being. We are given to understand, in other words, that people's ethics differ.

This article reports on a conversation convened by Quentin Skinner at the invitation of the Editors of The Journal of Political Philosophy and held in Cambridge on 13 February 2001.

Combining a global approach with examples from everyday life, Partha Dasgupta describes the lives of two children who live very different lives in different parts of the world: in the Mid-West USA and in Ethiopia. He compares the obstacles facing them, and the processes that shape their lives, their families, and their futures. He shows how economics uncovers these processes, finds explanations for them, and how it forms policies and solutions. Along the way, Dasgupta provides an intelligent and accessible introduction (...) to key economic factors and concepts such as individual choices, national policies, efficiency, equity, development, sustainability, dynamic equilibrium, property rights, markets, and public goods. (shrink)

In developing the basis on which climate change should be priced, I do five things. First, I review the ethical foundations for valuing future consumption relative to present consumption (i.e. social discount rates). Second, I report that the criterion for both assessing and prescribing economic policies should not be an economy's GDP, but an inclusive measure of an economy's wealth adjusted for the distribution of wealth. Third, I apply the resulting analysis to the problem of pricing carbon concentration in the (...) atmosphere. I give prominence to future uncertainties. Fourth, I show that the existing models of human behaviour on the basis of which these questions have been analysed by economists have serious deficiencies, in as much as the idea of personhood embodied in them has been built on the psychology of confirmed egotists. Fifth, I sketch the motivations of a social being and show how the altered specification of the human person affects the social price of climate change. (shrink)

Economists have in recent years found the theory of games to be an attractive route for exploring imperfectly competitive markets. In this collection of articles, some of the best minds in contemporary economics on both sides of the Atlantic explore both the potential and the limitations of this theoretical framework.

Both swaraj and swadeshi emerged in the context of nationalist discourses that set independence as a universal goal. This notion of independence derived its meaning from the empires that co-constituted modernity, and meant decolonization. Despite metaphors and other extensions, the little nationalisms within the Indian trans-nation have proved unable to postulate any sort of semi-sovereignty within the larger republic as a credible goal. This Bengal-focused study argues that sustainable autonomy cannot be promoted if all sub-nations are stampeded into ‘one size (...) fits all’. Any ethnic community must take exonyms like ‘Bong’ on board and learn how to elude ethnographic museumization, how to fashion an explicitly contested interdependence with other stakeholders in a game of history that must go on even after the old nationalisms have crumbled. This paper’s interpretive methodology affirms the idiographic level, resists multiplying nomothetic moves beyond necessity, and targets positivism. (shrink)

This methodological intervention proposes that the typical conversation sets up or modifies Micro Knowledge Profiles by using (partly anaphoric) discourse devices of Thick Cross-referencing; and that a certain type of translation procedure maps from such knowledge on to Macro Acquaintance Profiles. In a typical conversation, partners already acquainted with each other and with various matters renew their acquaintance. This renewal has consequences modifying their knowledge profiles and their action plans. The details that make the conversation flow have to be set (...) aside for the translation procedure to see the consequences of a conversation. The widespread desire to accurately profile the involvement of persons in conversations and the impossibility of telling any conversation-detached truth has been bringing about a mutation in the way we officially share and transmit knowledge; this mutation can be usefully called the Conversational Turn. (shrink)

Black and white photographs explores both the history of Goa's Catholic past and its struggle to deal with its multicultural multireligious present.

In Human Well-Being and the Natural Environment, Partha Dasgupta explores ways to measure the quality of life. In developing quality-of-life indices, he pays particular attention to the natural environment, illustrating how it can be incorporated, more generally, into economic reasoning in a seamless manner. Professor Dasgupta puts the theory that he develops to use in extended commentaries on the economics of population, poverty traps, global warming, structural adjustment programmes, and free trade, particularly in relation to poor countries. The result is (...) a treatise that goes beyond quality-of-life measures and offers a comprehensive account of the newly emergent subject of ecological economics.With the publication of this new paperback edition, Professor Dasgupta has taken the opportunity to update and revise his text in a number of ways, including developments to facilitate its current use on a number of gradate courses in environmental and resource economics. The treatment of the welfare economics of imperfect economies has been developed using new findings, and the Appendix has been expanded to include applications of the theory to a number of institutions, and to develop approximate formulae for estimating the value of environmental natural resources. (shrink)

The transition from the linguistics of codes, associated with structuralism and its neogrammarian ancestry, to a linguistics of discourses capable of seriously contemporary concerns has been a protracted transition. The average linguist has tended to find this transition somewhat confusing.

As part of an article symposium on their “Narrow Identities”, Partha Dasgupta and Sanjeev Goyal respond to commentaries by Jean-Paul Carvalho, John B. Davis, Peter Finke, and Miriam Teschl.

Had I been willing to run the risk of multiplying cuteness beyond necessity, this article would have worn the title “So you are one of those naṭs!.” The Hindi word naṭ, which helpfully sounds like the English nut, represents the way most of us in contemporary India pronounce the Sanskrit word naṭa. When we notice that a nut, in English, is someone crazy, pointing us toward the divine madness that a Dionysian performer might be expected to manifest — while on (...) the other hand no known classical Indian theory essentially associates the theater with madness — the contrast between conceptualizations of the theatrical in classical India and in classical Greece comes into view. Relative to what has come to.. (shrink)