Articles by Anand Chandavarkar

Economics and Ethics: An Introduction by Amitava Krishna Dutt and Charles K Wilber (Basingstoke, Hampshire, England: Palgrave Macmillan), 2010; pp x + 269, price unstated.

Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World by Liaquat Ahamed

Looking back, the creation and sustenance of the Economic Weekly, in the face of impossible odds is a stirring episode that more than challenges comparison with other founder-editor periodicals of distinction - Gandhi's Harijan, K Natarajan's Indian Social Reformer (Bombay), A D Gorwala's Opinion (Bombay), and I F (Izzy) Stone's Weekly (US) - none of whom survived their founders.

The Political Economy of Aid Anand Chandavarkar This is an exceptional work in its genre, by any criterion, that fills a conspicuous gap in the exponentially voluminous literature on aid, which has been primarily concerned with the economics of aid. It provides a comprehensive and transparent, yet critical and constructive, narrative of the origin, evolution and the politics of aid by the United Nations (UN), the major donor in the international grants economy. The robust scholarly apparatus, well supported by archival research and instructive tabular material, is robed in lean, muscular prose. The author, a well-credentialled economist, writes with hands-on experience having held several senior positions in the UN, including director of development administration programme in the department of technical cooperation. Remarkably for a civil servant, he is clinically objective in his evaluation of UN aid programmes, free of the self-referential institutional pietas, which so often afflicts retired civil servants who venture into print. Invasiveness of Politics The book

The roots of economics go back to philosophy and the great economic thinkers have been rightly acclaimed as worldly philosophers. Yet economists pose the question: should economists pay attention to philosophers? If anything, it is economics that raises serious philosophic issues. Can economics, a subject of cognitive dissonance with no predictive power, claim to be a science? Economic laws are at best statements of tendencies which make it "a discipline, not a science", for it "deals with the ever changing and subtle forces of human nature". But economics does adhere to the scientific method and the criteria of falsifiability. Paradoxically, despite its deficiencies, economics has emerged as the imperial social science and economists function as imperial advisors to government and civil society. Economics and philosophy are both techniques of analysis rather than bodies of doctrine. The most fruitful approach to the interface between economics and philosophy is through the relevant subdisciplines of philosophy, viz, epistemology, religion, ethics, psychology as well as rhetoric.