S. Subramanian – författare

This volume is an overview of, and commentary on, aspects of contemporary India and its socio-economic policies. It focuses on India’s economy and society in recent years, and in the process it addresses structural issues of development such as those of population, poverty, inequality, health, and social exclusion. It reviews the adequacy and appropriateness of governmental response to these problems, in terms of public policy, narrowly conceived, and philosophical orientation, more broadly conceived. The concern is not only with economic achievement and human development but also with the framework of civic rights, personal liberty, and institutional autonomy within which the exercise of governance is perceived to be carried out.

The essays in this volume were originally written with the general-reader-as-involved-citizen very much in mind as the intended target. However, it should also be of interest to scholars of economics, political science, development studies, and South Asian studies.

This volume is an overview of, and commentary on, aspects of contemporary India and its socio-economic policies. It focuses on India’s economy and society in recent years, and in the process it addresses structural issues of development such as those of population, poverty, inequality, health, and social exclusion. It reviews the adequacy and appropriateness of governmental response to these problems, in terms of public policy, narrowly conceived, and philosophical orientation, more broadly conceived. The concern is not only with economic achievement and human development but also with the framework of civic rights, personal liberty, and institutional autonomy within which the exercise of governance is perceived to be carried out.

The essays in this volume were originally written with the general-reader-as-involved-citizen very much in mind as the intended target. However, it should also be of interest to scholars of economics, political science, development studies, and South Asian studies.

This volume is about economists, economics, and issues of concern to Indian society. Some essays are expository, and some satirical. Together, they offer a commentary on the state of the discipline of economics today and on aspects of contemporary India’s society and polity.

The volume affords insights into, among other things,

- the pervasive influence of economists such as Kenneth Arrow and Anthony Atkinson, and thinkers such as Tom Paine, Jonathan Swift, and Dadabhai Naoroji;

- the place of markets and game theory (and even crime fiction!) in present-day economics;

- the affectations and convoluted mathematisation of a good deal of ‘mainstream’ economics; and

- India’s recent political climate, and the conduct of various arms of the legislature, the executive, and the judiciary in the country.

Engaging and lucidly written, this volume should be of interest to scholars of economics, political science, development studies, South Asian studies, and, above all, the general reader.

This volume is about economists, economics, and issues of concern to Indian society. Some essays are expository, and some satirical. Together, they offer a commentary on the state of the discipline of economics today and on aspects of contemporary India’s society and polity.

The volume affords insights into, among other things,

- the pervasive influence of economists such as Kenneth Arrow and Anthony Atkinson, and thinkers such as Tom Paine, Jonathan Swift, and Dadabhai Naoroji;

- the place of markets and game theory (and even crime fiction!) in present-day economics;

- the affectations and convoluted mathematisation of a good deal of ‘mainstream’ economics; and

- India’s recent political climate, and the conduct of various arms of the legislature, the executive, and the judiciary in the country.

Engaging and lucidly written, this volume should be of interest to scholars of economics, political science, development studies, South Asian studies, and, above all, the general reader.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 51st Annual Convention of the Computer Society of India, CSI 2016, held in Coimbatore, India, in December 2016.

The 23 revised papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 74 submissions. The theme of CSI 2016, Digital Connectivity - Social Impact, has been selected to highlight the importance of technology in solving social problems and thereby creating a long term impact on society. The papers are organized in topical sections on information science; computational intelligence; network computing; IT for society.

This book provides an entry into the subjects of disparity and deprivation, by attending to issues that have a bearing on certain salient  philosophical and conceptual aspects of these subjects. The student doing a graduate course in the measurement of inequality and poverty is all too often plunged directly into the complexities of Schur-convex functions, dominance conditions, partial orders and the axiomatics of characterization theorems. Inequality and poverty as phenomena with profound social and moral implications for the world we live in tend to get submerged in a treatment of the subject that is more suggestive of applied mathematics than of the material conditions of life. This is in no way to deny that measurement must deal uncompromisingly with measurement, and therefore with the protocols of formal logic and technical rigour. Having said this, it seems fair to suggest that one’s appreciation of the formalities – as well as of the limitations and ambiguities -of measurement is only aided by a relatively gentle introduction to the subject. This would call for a prior, or accompanying, engagement with the underlying concepts, the philosophical bases, the political salience, the normative values, and the critical facts of the subjects under investigation. It is this necessary background that is emphasized in this book, which is a collection of articles published earlier in the popular press, and intended for consumption by any curious general reader or student with a taste for critical enquiry. The contents of the book will be useful as much for the aspiring scholar as for the interested lay reader looking for a gateway into the subject.

The book is a collection of essays written since 2010, and dealing, in one way or another, with the place of values in economic analysis. The centrality of values in the collection is not surprising, given that the thematic concerns informing the essays in the book relate principally to methodological issues in economic enquiry, to the normatively constrained aggregation of personal preferences into collective choice, and to problems of logical coherence and ethical appeal in the axiom systems underlying the measurement of economic and social phenomena such as poverty, inequality and literacy. While many of the essays are more or less technical in nature, they are all explicitly motivated by considerations that go beyond the formalisms of presentation to an involvement with the role of moral reasoning in economic analysis. In particular, the essays emphasize the importance of ‘ought propositions’ in a science which is all too often regarded as being wholly and exclusively ‘positive’ in its orientation. The book should be of particular interest to researchers, students, and public policy makers.