Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Here Partha Dasgupta, an internationally recognized authority in economics, presents readers with a solid introduction to its basic concepts, including efficiency, equity, sustainability, dynamic equilibrium, property rights, markets, and public goods. Throughout, he highlights the relevance of economics to everyday life, providing a very human exploration of a technical subject. Dasgupta covers enduring issues such as population growth, the environment, and poverty. For example, he explores how the world's looming population problems affect us at the local, national, and international level.

Economics has the capacity to offer us deep insights into some of the most formidable problems of life. Here, Dasgupta goes beyond the basics to show it's innate effects on our history, culture, and lifestyles.

About the Series: Combining authority with wit, accessibility, and style, Very Short Introductions offer an introduction to some of life's most interesting topics. Written by experts for the newcomer, they demonstrate the finest contemporary thinking about the central problems and issues in hundreds of key topics, from philosophy to Freud, quantum theory to Islam.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Preface (p. x)
• 6 Households and firms (p. 100)
• 7 Sustainable economic development (p. 117)
• 8 Social well-being and democratic government (p. 139)
• Epilogue (p. 158)
• Further reading (p. 161)
• Index (p. 163)
• List of illustrations (p. xiii)
• List of tables (p. xiv)
• Prologue (p. 1)
• 1 Macroeconomic history (p. 14)
• 2 Trust (p. 30)
• 3 Communities (p. 64)
• 4 Markets (p. 72)
• 5 Science and Technology as institutions (p. 90)

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

This book is not a compact version of the conventional economics principles text. More modestly, Dasgupta (Univ. of Cambridge) attempts to convey an understanding of the reasoning used by economists to interpret the world and influence public policy. Explanations and forecasts, crafted with the aid of models and statistics, illustrate economists' methods in analyzing economic growth and development over the broad sweep of macroeconomic history. The author presents microeconomic analysis, in game theoretic terms, as an effort by individuals and communities to engage in mutually beneficial transactions. Some of these transactions occur in markets, to which a brief chapter is devoted. Others are enabled by an array of social institutions, including governmental institutions, which often resolve market failures or provide alternatives to market outcomes. The final third of the book covers bits of finance economics, social choice theory, and a relatively lengthy, speculative interpretation of sustainable economic development. Overall, this is an engaging, idiosyncratic introduction to economics as it perhaps should be practiced, but largely at variance with economics as served up in most introductory academic courses. Summing Up: Recommended. General readers; all levels of students; faculty and practitioners. R. S. Hewett Drake University

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Partha Dasgupta is Frank Ramsey Professor of Economics, University of Cambridge and Fellow of St John's College. His book, An Inquiry into Well-Being and Destitution (OUP, 1993) was praised as 'a tour de force... a model of good economics' (Joseph Stiglitz) and 'philosophically sophisticated,empirically well-informed, ambitious and lively' (James Griffin).