Volume 43, Number 14 · September 19, 1996
In Pursuit of Fairness
By Ian Hacking
Inequality Reexamined
by Amartya Sen
Russell Sage Foundation/Harvard University Press, 207 pp., $15.95 (paper)
Amartya Sen is best known to the general reader for his powerful essays on famine. He is an optimist about some of our gravest economic problems, such as mass starvation in a world that at present can easily produce more food than everyone can eat. Reason and voluntary participation are his watchwords. He shows that some of the nostrums about which we have become complacent or cynical can actually work. Thus with a fallible democracy and a fairly free press, India has not had a famine since independence; during the same period China had one of the worst famines on earth. In Zimbabwe there was food while the Sahel region starved.
Review, 5086 words
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