User:Dipakkgupta/sandbox

Dipak K. Gupta is an American Political Economist, born October 9, 1948, in Kolkata, India, and immigrated to the United States of America in 1970. He is currently a Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the political science department at San Diego State University, where he held the Fred J. Hansen Chair of Peace Studies and served as the Founder-Director of the multidisciplinary undergraduate program, International Security and Conflict Resolution. Gupta contributed to the studies of development economics and collective action problems, including terrorism, and genocide. Gupta is among the first scholars to include sociopolitical instability within the standard economic growth and development models. Using econometric analyses, Gupta demonstrated that extreme income inequality and political instability cause a nation’s economic development to slow down or even reverse i . He constructed an economic growth model based on his early findings, where he introduced political instability as an endogenous variable ii . That is, when a nation, through its policies, creates more poverty and unemployment and widens the gap between the rich and the poor, it incites political violence. Political violence thwarts development as private savings and investment drop, creating frustration and anger among its citizens, which finds its expression through politically motivated violence. This circular process explains why certain nations fail to develop while others manage to come out of the so-called poverty trap. The question of political violence brought Gupta to the question of rationality. He argued that in contrast to the economic assumption of a self-utility maximizing “rational” actor, our decisions involve a tradeoff between selfish utility and a perceived welfare of the group in which we claim our membership. By combining contributions by social psychologists with economic rationality, Gupta developed an expanded theoretical structure which can explain genocide and terrorism. iii Gupta is also an award-winning artist and published a fiction, Lonesome Flight, iv based on his experience as a participant in the Naxalite movement during his youth. i D. K. Gupta & Y. P. Venieris, “Introducing New Dimensions in Macro Models: The Sociolopolitical Instability and Institutional Environment.” Economic Development and Cultural Change. Vol. 30, No. 1, 1981, pp: 31- 58. Y. P. Venieris and D. K. Gupta, “Sociopolitical and Economic Dimensions of Development,” Economic Development and Cultural Change, Vol. 31, No. 4, 1983, pp: 395-408. Y. P. Venieris and D. K. Gupta, “Income Distribution and Sociopolitical Instability as Determinants of Savings: A Cross-National Study,” Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 94, No. 4, 1986, pp ii D. K.Gupta, The Economics of Political Violence: The Effects of Political Instability on Economic Growth. New York: Praeger, 1990. iii D. K. Gupta, Path to Collective Madness: A Study in Social Order and Political Pathology. New York: Praeger, 2001. D. K. Gupta, Understanding Terrorism and Political Violence: The Lifecycle of Birth, Growth, Transformation, and Demise. London: Routledge, first edition, 2008, second edition, 2021. K. Housken, S. Banuri, D. K. Gupta, K. Abhink, ”Al-Qaeda at the Bar: Coordinating Ideologues and Mercenaries in Terrorist Organizations, Public Choice, Volume, 164, No. 1, 2015, pp. 57-73. iv D. K. Gupta, Lonesome Flight, PublishNation, 2022.