Description: Time and the Generations blends economics, philosophy, and ecology to offer an original lens on the difficult topic of global population. Partha Dasgupta provides tentative answers to two fundamental questions: What level of economic activity can our planet support over the long run, and what does the answer say about optimum population numbers?
Brief description: Professor Dasgupta is the Frank Ramsey Professor of Economics at the University of Cambridge. He is also the Andrew D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University and is currently President of the European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists. His books include Economics: A Very Short Introduction (OUP, 2017), Human Well-Being and the Natural Environment (OUP, 2004) and An Inquiry into Well-Being and Destitution(OUP, 1993).
Review Quotes: With this wonderfully wide-ranging, brilliant, and generous book, Partha Dasgupta joins his admired mentor, Kenneth Arrow, in the elite band of economists who have appreciated and contributed to the philosophical underpinnings of their subject. The relationship goes both ways, for by bringing in an economist's sense of ecological and biological realities, he is able to modify and transcend the contributions of philosophers such as Mill, Sidgwick, Ramsey, Rawls, and Parfit. The result is an astonishing monument to a lifetime of hard thought about population, sustainability, savings, and human welfare.--Simon Blackburn, Bertrand Russell Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge