Inequality And Poverty: A Short Critical Introduction
by S. Subramanian /
2019 / English / PDF
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This book addresses contemporary issues of political and economic salience, such as individual vs group inequality, compensatory discrimination, poverty line, and moral implications of inequality and poverty. Students of graduate courses, while studying the measurement of inequality and poverty, are all too often initiated directly into the complexities of Schur-convex functions, dominance conditions, partial orders, and the axiomatics of characterisation theorems. Inequality and poverty, as a phenomenon 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 material conditions of life. While not denying that measurement must deal uncompromisingly with the protocols of formal logic and technical rigour, it seems fair to suggest that an appreciation of the formalities as well as of the limitations and ambiguities of measurement is aided by a relatively gentle introduction to the subject. This calls 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. Highlighting the necessary background, this book presents a collection of articles previously published in the popular press, providing a useful resource for both aspiring scholars and interested general readers looking for a gateway into the subject.
