Poverty and Inequality and Capabilities Equality: Basic Issues and Problems

Extract

Poverty and Inequality. Edited by David B. Grusky and Ravi Kanbur. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006. 200p. $55.00 cloth, $21.95 paper.

Capabilities Equality: Basic Issues and Problems. Edited by Alexander Kaufman. New York: Routledge, 2005. 224p. $125.00.

Two trends, each a generation in the making, have affected the recent study of poverty and inequality. In 1979, Amartya Sen asked “Equality of What?” in his Tanner Lecture at Stanford University. There, and in numerous articles and books since, Sen and his collaborators developed a rich account of poverty, inequality, and of human well-being more generally considered. This work, though its original basis was in the classical political economy of subsistence and human freedom, grew to be buttressed by a wide range of ethical, social, and other economic matters. In so doing, it encouraged the development of the second trend, the greater interweaving of developments in the different social sciences and in political and philosophical theory that might be brought to bear on the consideration of poverty and inequality. There has come to be a greater understanding by economists, sociologists, political theorists, and philosophers of what they might learn from one another.