Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Combining a global approach with examples from everyday life, Partha Dasgupta describes the lives of two children who live very different lives in different parts of the world: in the Mid-West USA and in Ethiopia. He compares the obstacles facing them, and the processes that shape their lives, their families, and their futures. He shows how economics uncovers these processes, finds explanations for them, and how it forms policies and solutions. Along the way, Dasgupta provides an intelligent and accessible introduction to key economic factors and concepts such as individual choices, national policies, efficiency, equity, development, sustainability, dynamic equilibrium, property rights, markets, and public goods.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Preface (p. x)
• 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)
• 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)

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).