Mahbub ul Haq
Mahbub ul Haq, a heretic among economists, died on July 16th, aged 64
WHEN Mahbub ul Haq was in what he called the “western citadels of learning” of Cambridge, Yale and Harvard in the 1950s, there was, he said, a “tacit assumption” in economics that the real purpose of development was to increase national income. To say otherwise was “heresy”. For the next 40 or so years Mr Haq was happy to be a heretic. A guidebook for economic heretics is the “Human Development Report”, started by him in 1990 and published each year since.
This article appeared in the Obituary section of the print edition under the headline “Mahbub ul Haq”
From the July 25th 1998 edition
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