Social Values and Social Indicators: Essays in Normative Economics and Measurement

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.

About the Author

​S. Subramanian has served as a Professor at the Madras Institute of Development Studies, Chennai, India. An economist with research interests in poverty, inequality, demography, welfare economics, collective choice theory and development economics, he has published widely in professional journals, and is the author of (among other books) The Poverty Line (2012), and more recently the very successful SpringerBrief Inequality and Poverty: A Short Critical Introduction (2019). He is an elected Fellow of the Human Development and Capabilities Association, and was a member of the Advisory Board of the World Bank’s Commission on Global Poverty.