Description: How should economic and social theory accommodate empirical facts about physical destitution, and how should governments respond to famines and hunger? This interdisciplinary book focuses on these and other questions about physical well-being. Partha Dasgupta begins his approach from the perspective of development economics. He then broadens his discussion to include philosophical work and empirical data on resource allocation, nutrition science, and anthropology. Comprehensive in its coverage of poverty, its causes, and remedies, this seminal work is essential to scholars and professionals in moral and political philosophy, anthropology, nutrition science, economic theory, and welfare economics.
Review Quotes: "A work of encyclopedic learning and matching ambition....an unusual combination of boldness and subtlety....His passing remarks on how many recalcitrant facts a theory can decently leave unexplained would provoke a class in the philosophy of science. His discussion of recent ideas about the duties one generation owes to the next would provoke another. I suspect that there are more economists who can appreciate Dasgupta's moral philosophy than philosophers who can appreciate his economics, but both will surely benefit from reading his arguments. In spite of the grimness of much of his subject matter, the book yields the pleasure that only a very clever thinker can give his readers."--New York Review of Books
"There is much in the book that readers from different disciplines, including anthropology, sociology, and political science, will find informative, insightful, and instructive....Dasgupta's excursion into moral philosophy is illuminating and informative."--Journal of Economic Literature"The book is of considerable value for anyone involved in research on economics and public policy, theoretical or empirical. The more theoretical sections are applicable to a much wider range of issues, and the presentations in general are sufficiently compartmentalized that the work can be treated almost as a kind of encyclopedia of philosophical, statistical, economic and policy issues....The book is perhaps even more important, however, from the perspective of political theory and political science, for what it offers by way of philosophical foundations for making the elimination of destitution a priority, and how such a concern translates into policy recommendations for reducing the incidence of destitution in the world."--American Political Science Review"An Inquiry into Well-Being and Destitution is in many ways as impressive as Hume, Smith and Marx themselves."--London Review of Books"What makes this book of special interest to physicians with broad social concerns is the meticulous and penetrating examination of the economic consequences and costs of malnutrition and ill health and of the obligations of society, and government, in the face of such costs....A serious and important book."--New England Journal of Medicine