Development As Freedom: a Great Book by a Great Indian Economist
Listener 20 November 2000
Keywords Growth & Innovation; History of Ideas, Methodology & Philosophy; Social Policy
Nineteenth century economists tended to focus on material output, assessing how well off someone was by the amount they could consume. That notion dominates today’s economics. Pushed, an economist might say it is better to have more material goods than less or, perhaps more humbly, that economics was only good at analyzing materialism, so all the other things which make up human happiness are assumed as given, or that they correlate with material consumption. To acknowledge so would, of course, downgrade the importance of economics, and of economists, which might be no bad thing.