Volume 42, Number 8 · May 11, 1995
The Women in the Cowshed
By Alan Ryan
An Inquiry into Well-Being and Destitution
by Partha Dasgupta
Oxford University Press/Clarendon Press, 661 pp., $55.00; $24.00 (paper)
Had I not met Professor Dasgupta, I might have wondered from reading his book whether 'Dasgupta' was the name of a large committee or a small research institution. An Inquiry into Well-Being and Destitution is a work of encyclopedic learning and matching ambition. It is not just the title of this book that recalls the beginnings of the modern discipline of economics in Adam Smith's Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Smith was a moral philosopher, a historian, and a political theorist; The Wealth of Nations is among other things a tract on moral philosophy, social change, and the duties of government as well as what we now call economics. An Inquiry into Well-Being and Destitution, as well as being a contribution to development economics, is among other things a tract on moral philosophy and political theory, on the duties of government in developing countries, and on the connections between economic analysis and such disciplines as the science of nutrition. The bibliography runs to eighty densely packed pages, and anyone who had mastered even a small part of that literature would be a distinguished practitioner of modern economics and well informed about a great deal else.
Review, 3809 words
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