Partha Dasgupta To Speak At Institute For Advanced Study

Partha S. Dasgupta, who chairs the Faculty of Economics and Politics at Cambridge University, will speak on "Wealth and Well-Being" on April 16 at the Institute for Advanced Study. The talk, which is co-sponsored by the School of Social Science and the Program in Theoretical Biology, will take place at 4:30 p.m. in Wolfensohn Hall on the Institute Campus.

"Is our use of Earth's resources endangering the economic possibilities open to our descendents?" Dasgupta asks. While some believe contemporary economic development is sustainable, others do not, but "These conflicting intuitions can be reconciled," Dasgupta believes. "What matters for a society's prospects is its 'productive base,' something not captured by such welfare indicators as GNP per head and the UN Human Development Index." Dasgupta plans to argue that "The productive base of a society is reflected in its 'wealth,' which is the value of the society's capital assets, including manufactured, human, and environmental capital." He plans to "offer some rough and ready estimates of trends in wealth in various regions of the world, which will be contrasted with trends in GNP per head and in the Human Development Index."

Dasgupta stated, "The poorest regions of the world appear to have become poorer in terms of wealth per head, while rich countries have become richer." He plans to "speculate on whether there could have been an unwitting transfer of resources from the poor to the rich world." Dasgupta's findings "suggest that the poor world has been both consuming and investing too little."

Dasgupta is Frank Ramsey Professor of Economics and Fellow of St. John's College at Cambridge. He has also taught at the London School of Economics; Harvard and Princeton Universities; the University of Delhi; and Stanford University, where he was professor of economics, professor of philosophy, and director of the Programme in Ethics in Society.

Dasgupta's research interests include welfare and development economics; the economics of technological change; population, environmental, and resource economics; the theory of games; and the economics of undernutrition.

Author of The Control of Resources (1982) and An Inquiry into Well-Being and Destitution (1993), Dasgupta's most recent book is Human Well-Being and the Natural Environment (2001).

Dasgupta received a bachelor's degree in physics from the University of Delhi, a bachelor's degree in mathematics from Cambridge, and a Ph.D. in economics from Cambridge. He is past president of the Royal Economic Society and the European Economic Association, a member of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, and a Foreign Associate of the [U.S.] National Academy of Sciences.