Reading Partha Dasgupta, Time and the Generations, 2019 Columbia University Press
Planning an experience report and a discussion
I was asked to read and discuss this book by Jacob for which I already am immensly grateful.
I have long wanted to have a place in the ether where I could just write as long about media I consumed as I wanted and without time pressure like social media.
Those two facts combined into the substack you are currently visiting.
What I want to communicate here are my thought processes while reading the book. The axe I am grinding is that most book discussions take place at a point in time when the author of the discussion read the whole book and in the best case was able to judge it in its entirety.
I think the thoughts, difficulties, associations, and questions in the moment of first encounter with a sentence are also of considerable value to others. Thus, I will try to document those as best I can. If I have prejudices, priors or similar about the author or content of a book, I plan to lay those out at the start. While in the review process, I will strive to suspend my judgement until the end when I judge the book. Reading a book precludes the rapport with the author that the topic be valuable and their treatment of it productive. As this is the first instance of me doing so, some things will not work well. I hope to iterate and learn and for you to bear with me through this process. I Currently my plan is to read the entry para-text of the text itself containing of
Eulogy by Dasgupta for Kenneth Arrow
Foreword by Robert Solow
Preface
Random Thoughts on “Birth and Death” by Kennet Arrow
and discuss those in posts here as a starting point. I will try to create a parent post on here where I link to all other posts to keep the work, I did accessible organized.
The associated code can be found in this repository.