When the finance minister of India talks of the gross national contentment rather than the Gross Domestic Product, no eyebrows are raised.
If anything, that reflects the pervasive influence of the Human Development Index, the most famous offspring of the Human Development Report. But it now seems difficult to believe that the concept of putting human beings at the centre of economic activity is just a decade old.
Certainly the germ of the idea permeated the writing of many economists, including those who specialised in what passed for development economics from the fifties onwards. But the credit for bringing it to the mainstream has been the work of the United Nations Development Programme.
Readings in Human Development includes the essays on the subject written by almost all the major contributors in the field
