Why do we tolerate poverty? The answer is that if we tolerate poor people and let poor people marry each other so as to bring more poor people into the world then we are obliged to tolerate poverty. I suppose, if we confined the poor in 'Poor Houses' or 'Work Houses' and segregated them by sex, then we would not be forced to tolerate poverty. The problem is that out population might grow more slowly than that of our rivals. There may be 'demographic replacement' or defeat in war. In any case, if everybody were rich, who would do the dirty jobs?
Amartya Sen takes a different view. In an essay for Prospect magazine written a decade ago the suggested that 'It’s bad reasoning, not human nature, that blinds us to the predicament of the poor'. This is foolish. Actually being blind and deaf may cause you not to notice that a guy is loudly lamenting the fact that he is starving to death but 'bad reasoning' can't have any such effect. Poverty is defined as the predicament of having little money. Everybody can reason that out for themselves.
For a person born in India, persistent encounters with poverty are inescapable.
Sen was born in 1933. In which country at that time would he have failed to see poverty? There was a little something called the 'Great Depression' back then. During the Second World War plenty of Europeans died of hunger. Still, there have always been people who were born in India who didn't see poverty because their parents moved to somewhere rich and with strong immigration controls when they were little babies.
By the time I was nine, I had come to see poverty as a fact of life, even though I had not yet fully grasped how appallingly nasty extreme poverty could be.
The British had put an end to big Famines but, in 1937, surrendered control over Food to elected Bengali politicians. Their corruption and callousness compounded a problem of War-time scarcity and this led to excess mortality on a large scale.
It was in my 10th year that the Bengal famine of 1943 erupted—four years before the end of the Raj—
but six years after elected Bengali politicians had taken charge of Food.
and the streets were suddenly full of dying people. Along with that came the inhumanity to which the famished destitute tends to descend.
It is perfectly human to scream loudly that you are as hungry as fuck. It isn't very humane to promise to spend public money feeding the starving and then steal it. Still, money talks. Bullshit walks- or, in Sen's case, takes a Jet plane to an Ivy League Campus where bullshitting is richly rewarded.
I came from a middle-class, academic family; we were stretched but not endangered.
His family was Hindu and from East Bengal. They were endangered. Many had to run away to West Bengal because the Brits left.
I was allowed to give a small amount of rice to anyone who came to our door,
there was religious merit in making such donations.
but felt very sad that we could not give more.
Sen was saddened by 'scarcity'. That is why, like his father- a soil scientist- he devoted himself to agronomy. He discovered ways to greatly boost agricultural productivity. I'm kidding. He devoted himself to a mathsy type of masturbation.
Seeing the starving men and women quarrelling with each other for their own share was as demeaning as it was disturbing. I remember an occasion when I was able to give a banana to an extremely emaciated woman with a severely skinny child on her lap. After peeling the banana, she instinctively put it into her own mouth, and then immediately pulled it out, and burst into a piercing cry, bathing her emaciated face in tears, as she gave the banana to her child. She looked at me, confused and lost, and said, “We are no longer human beings—our instincts are now worse than those of animals.”
She also quoted Goethe and delivered a scathing critique of Neo-Liberal Political Economy. Still, for Sen who read in Adam Smith about savage peoples- like the Bengalis- this particular sentence had resonance. I'm not saying any woman actually said this. It is likely a Smithian confabulation on the part of Sen. Still, during a famine, it is smart to pick up a starving kid so as to make more as a beggar.
If poverty is intolerable, it is not just because serious deprivation makes our lives precarious and dreadful, but also because extreme poverty can rob us of the normal human feelings that we tend to have.
Sen was virtuous. He fed starving women. They, sadly, were worse than animals probably because they read Adam Smith's 'theory of moral sentiments'.
Given the nastiness of extreme deprivation, and the wealth of the world, there is some difficulty in explaining how poverty is an accepted predicament of so many people across the world.
Virtue signallers like Sen can gain fame and wealth by telling everybody about their virtuous actions. Did Sen travel to Bangladesh when the democratically elected Government there presided over a famine? Of course! He was handing out bananas in Dacca. He wasn't lecturing on Social Choice theory in London.
While the incidence of poverty varies from country to country, there is no country that is free from it: the question of why we tolerate the intolerable has relevance for every country in the world.
Why did Mujib preside over a famine? The answer is that he was a Socialist who liked nationalizing everything. Stalin's Russia and Mao's China had huge 'man-made' famines. Bangladesh could have outdone before. Sadly, Mujib and his family were killed before this could happen.
Blaming the victim is as common today as it was in the days when very mild attempts at poverty relief, such as the English Poor Laws,
Which were about getting the poor to work in Work Houses- preferably segregated by sex.
had their staunch opponents. It is not, however, easy to see how the army of the unemployed and the destitute can readily reverse their own predicament, without extensive social and economic change.
Extensive social and political changes can cause the destitute to die in great numbers. Fazl ul Haq and Mujib's pro-poor, poor-tenant, policies worsened the resulting food availability deficit famines.
But what about people who are not severely deprived? How do so many reasonably secure people come to terms with the gruesome suffering around them?
They emigrate to UK or US- if they are Bengali economists. It is more convenient to signal your compassion for the poor from a place ruled by industrious White folk who don't have babies like crazy.
There is something here that surely demands an explanation.
If you see starving people you think these are guys who might do something you find useful or pleasing in return for food. The problem is that nutters like Sen will want you to agree to the programmatic fucking up of the economy as the price for helping the poor or the unemployed or whoever. So you then say you don't give a fuck about them.
We can consider three possible explanations that might have some plausibility. There is, first of all, the hypothesis of ignorance—the possibility that we do not really know with adequate clarity what poverty is like and how prevalent it is around us.
In which case, there is nothing to explain. The fact is we don't know how terrible it is to be an Iyer in a world where Iyengars refuse to rebut the allegation that they say we put garlic in the sambar. If everybody did have this knowledge surely Society as a whole would recognize my reparative claim to the title of Miss Teen Tamil Nadu? After that, I will do a movie with Rajnikanth before becoming CM as the second Jayalalitha.
In this line of explanation, we tolerate the terrible states of affairs unknowingly—at least without adequate understanding.
No. We tolerate people who do stupid shit and thus fuck themselves up. Why? The alternative is to beat them and chase them away if they start doing stupid shit anywhere in our vicinity. Beating people, however, has 'disutility'. We may pay a few people a little money to do it for us but don't want to have to get our own hands dirty.
A second line of explanation focuses not on ignorance, but on a possible belief that poverty cannot, in fact, be removed or substantially reduced—no matter how hard we try.
This is Malthusianism as justified by Christ saying 'the poor ye shall always have with you'. The fact is, when poor people have lots of kids, there is a 'discovery process'. Some of those kids may find a way to flourish and thus end up having a lot of descendants though some of their siblings quietly starve to death. It is a 'scatter gun' approach but is 'evolutionarily stable'.
Along with this line of reasoning there can be some diagnosis of what is seen as “realism” about the impossibility of curing—or even substantially reducing—poverty.
It is easy enough to do. Kill the poor. They will run away or figure out a way to be less poor- or, at least, appear to be so.
Actually, there is a 'regret minimizing' reason we should keep some poor people around and mendaciously promise to feed them in bad times. This is because, when the shit hits the fan, we can enjoy watching them starve while making a profit on diverting Charitable Aid to the Black Market.
The so-called realists often spend a lot of time on this issue
No they don't. They just quote Malthus and point out that all animal populations expand quickly to exhaust available resources unless there are predators or parasites. Then they do stuff which is genuinely utile because Realism involves living in the real world.
—not in trying to remedy poverty (a hopeless task, in their view),
hire poor people to do stuff and make a profit for yourself
but in criticising those whom the self-identified realists see as hopelessly “romantic,”
wankers. Romantics might get their leg over.
who attempt to do what cannot be done, and in the process (the “realists” argue) often make the world actually worse.
The thing can be done but nutters like Sen have no interest in actually doing it.
A third line of explanation takes the very different route of postulating that human beings are basically self-centered creatures who do not worry about others.
But poverty is a business opportunity! Poor peeps will work for peanuts. That's why a lot of Indian entrepreneurs set up factories in Bangladesh. Five pounds a day isn't a lot of money but that's the going rate for a female garment factory employee in Dacca. But only around 15 per cent of the population get that munificent sum. Still, Bangladeshis are now better off than Pakistanis and many Indians. They have had demographic transition.
Going further, some argue that there is, in fact, no compelling reason why others should have any moral obligation to help remove deprivation unless they are themselves responsible for the condition of the deprived.
Sen had a moral obligation not to run off with the wife of his best friend. Hopefully, he reduced his friend's deprivation by offering him a substitute spouse.
In discussing the arguments involved, I shall use the example of India,
from which Sen ran away with his friend's Italian wife. His current wife is a Rothschild.
focusing particularly on the slow removal of poverty and deprivation in that rapidly growing economy. India provides a good illustration of a country with much poverty but also a numerically large middle class whose tolerance of poverty is a big factor behind the amazingly slow progress in reducing poverty levels.
No. The slow progress has to do with Labour and Land laws which prevent the creation of giant factories in which rural girls can be put to work. India's female participation rate is falling. Bangladesh's is still rising. Some parts of India- e.g. Tamil Nadu- do have rising participation and hence are seeing big poverty reduction.
I begin with the explanation of tolerance through ignorance. India’s poverty is no secret—indeed very few social facts have been as much discussed as poverty in India. That was not always the case: the founder of modern economics, Adam Smith, included India in general and Bengal in particular as being among the richest countries in the world.
Because it was previously ruled by Muslims who enjoyed the good things in life and were willing to protect an industrious population. Sadly, the Brits had Hindu compradors who wanted to get rich and didn't care how they did it.
He even attempted to give, in The Wealth of Nations, an explanation of the prosperity of this part of the world by invoking its abundant use of trade and exchange (partly connected with its well-developed river navigation, in addition to sea trade), and referred to its “exportation of a great variety of manufactures” (paying particular attention to its flourishing textile industry).
Bengal wasn't over-populated at that time. But its people were not rich and perished by the million in periodic famines.
India may well have been a relatively rich country in Smith’s time. Some recent empirical studies, for example by Prasannan Parthasarathi (Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not: Global Economic Divergence 1600-1850), tend to confirm that view. However, there can be little doubt that the proportion of the poor in India grew quite steadily during the period of British rule.
Because the severity of Famine diminished and Pax Britannica reduced internal disorder thus permitting the transport of food across vast distances.
Indeed, during those centuries, when much of the rest of the world, particularly the west, was rapidly progressing, GDP in India seemed to move hardly at all.
But landlords were able to squeeze money out of their estates with little risk or effort.
During the last half century of British rule, when there was some expansion, India’s GDP per capita grew at the amazingly low rate of 0.01 per cent per year.
It didn't greatly improve once Bengali mathematical economists were in the driving seat.
As Angus Deaton, a leading econometrician and development economist, has argued in his recently published and authoritative book, The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality: “It is possible that the deprivation in childhood of Indians born around midcentury [at the time the Raj ended, in 1947] was as severe as that of any large group in history, all the way back to the Neolithic revolution and the hunter-gatherers that preceded them.”
In which case, Indians are a shitty people. Their consolation was to point at China which had worse famines.
Things have moved on since then (as Deaton has noted),
thanks to Punjabi economists like Manmohan and Montek
and India’s income today, even after correcting for inflation, is about five times what it was per head when India became independent. However, its income level is still very low in absolute terms.
Because demographic transition has not occurred in many parts of the country.
Furthermore, there are huge numbers of people among the Indian population who not only have very low income, but whose opportunities for healthcare, education and social security are dreadfully inadequate.
See above.
Yet the Indian middle class, with comparatively comfortable lives, is quite large, consisting of 200m (according to some criteria, perhaps even 300m) relatively well-off people. They may not be very rich by western standards, but do all right in terms of modern facilities as well as traditional comforts.
This is what sticks in Sen's craw. Why can't all Indians come to him for a banana or a handful of rice?
One result of having such a large—and dynamic—middle class is that their dominance has had a huge impact over the priorities and coverage of the Indian media, both print media and broadcast channels.
If there was no middle class, TV channels would be competing for the eyeballs of starving lepers- right? However, this problem also exists in America. Newspapers only seek subscriptions from literate people. Illiterates are not catered for. Even in Scandinavia, Cinema Halls refuse to admit dead people.
This may have made Indian newspapers, television and radio remarkably lively, but one consequence of the glitzy focus is the crowding out of the ugly facts about India’s extensive poverty from media coverage and public reasoning.
This is why Sen left India. BBC and Fox News have much better coverage of starving Indian lepers.
As it happens, India has taken a huge stride forward in terms of the availability of information through its remarkably extensive Right to Information Act, giving anyone access to a huge variety of information involving public affairs,
especially starving lepers who are able to satisfy their curiosity about arcane aspects of fiscal policy for a nominal fee.
if and when any such data are formally requested. But this has not brought the unusual severity of the deprivation of India’s vast army of the poor into the political consciousness of the vocal and influential public.
Worse yet, living people are ignoring the deprivations of the dead even in so called 'enlightened' countries in Yurop/Amrika.
Having knowledge is not merely a matter of unrestricted availability of information when sought.
It also has nothing to do with anything Sen has.
Income data do, of course, bring out how poor most Indians still are, but to add to the complication in informational reach, the poverty of most Indians relates also to meagre and bad healthcare, limited and low-quality schooling, and other deficiencies of public services in a way that is far more intense than in many other developing countries—from China and Brazil to Thailand and Indonesia.
Sen is saying that teachers in Government schools and Doctors and Nurses in Government hospitals are worse than they should be.
An exclusive concentration on private incomes misses the role of public services in education, healthcare, social facilities and environmental support, which can make a big difference in protecting people from deprivation and expanding their freedoms.
So what? If people buy superior medical and educational services in the private sector, the fact that the Government supply is shite does not matter.
Elementary facilities such as a decent school, an accessible hospital, a toilet at home or two square meals a day are missing for a huge proportion of the Indian population in a way they are not in, say, China or Thailand.
Which are a lot richer than many parts of India because of higher female participation.
Yet there is very little general understanding of how out of line India is in international terms in having such meagre public facilities for poverty removal, even compared with other poor countries (as the empirical analysis presented in the book I wrote last year with Jean Drèze, An Uncertain Glory: India and Its Contradictions, shows).
India is not out of line with its neighbours. That is the only international comparison that matters. Some Indian states have high female participation and have undergone demographic transition. Others are more like Pakistan.
If India is out of line compared with other countries in its neglect of the persistently deprived, it is worth recalling that it is also out of line with the rest of the world in having a longstanding and pernicious caste system.
Japan had untouchability but no Brahmins. Bali had Brahmins but no untouchables. So what? The thing made no difference whatsoever. India could have done what China did in the Eighties. Sen-tentious cretins prevented this happening.
It is hard to think that these two phenomena are not connected, particularly since a huge proportion of the disadvantaged families in contemporary India come from low castes.
Unless they come from high castes but haven't been able to emigrate.
Yet the temptation to find an adequate explanation of the persistence of disadvantage solely in terms of the history of the caste system would be an error.
A temptation is not an error. Sen means 'the history of the caste system can't explain 'disadvantage''. But it can explain some disadvantage. It is obvious that if a particular group is stigmatized, denied ownership of land or opportunities to rise in business or in paid employment then it will be disadvantaged.
For one thing, there are other disadvantaged social groups, such as poorer Muslims,
and poorer Brahmins
and much more severely, the tribal groups.
some tribal groups. Others may have more land per capita and thus be better off.
But no less importantly, the Indian state that has done most for sharing the benefits of schooling and health care for all is Kerala,
because it is a remittance economy. People send money back for their families' medical and school bills.
which had an unusually strong form of caste system—perhaps the strongest in India—with the severest practice of untouchability.
Geographical mobility makes 'untouchability' irrelevant. All lose caste by 'crossing the Black Water'.
The socially radical movement that began transforming Kerala in the 19th century originated as an anti upper-caste initiative, with a particular focus on providing the benefits of education to the lower castes.
They obtained equally in Bengal- though nobody told Sen about this.
Even the powerful Communist Party, which won the state elections in 1957 and proceeded to try to complete the social transformations initiated in the previous century, was largely an off-shoot of that anti upper-caste movement.
Whereas Bengal's 'Left Front' was an almost wholly upper-caste movement. As in Kerala, the result was that industry fled. This was cool if, like Sen, you worked abroad and only visited from time to time.
Something similar happened in the state of Tamil Nadu, with its history of strong caste barriers and anti upper-caste movements, and its relative success in the achievement of schooling and healthcare today. It is interesting that the states with the strongest forms of caste division have led the country in egalitarian sharing of education and health.
You can have good education and health because relatives working abroad are sending money while remaining as poor as shit because there are no jobs or ways to make money in business.
Which country had something worse than Caste- viz. 'one drop' Jim Crow? America where Sen now resides.
So the impact of the traditional caste system on inequality in modern India is, to a great extent, contingent on the nature of the political developments in different parts of India.
But, Sen has just said that 'political development' is contingent on the caste system! Which State in India has the highest Dalit population? Punjab. Yet because of influx of refugees and the ejection of Muslims, it became much more prosperous than Bengal. Why? The people worked hard. Agricultural productivity rose.
More sociological research is needed into these regional variations,
No. Sociological research was useless. India is currently paying homage to 'Green Revolution' M.S Swaminathan who passed away at the age of 98. Nobody gives a tinker's fart when a Sociologist kicks the bucket.
but for India as a whole the barriers of the caste system have made it harder to turn the predicament of the disadvantaged into a focus of public reasoning in general,
Nonsense! There are plenty of caste-based Parties which gain advantages for 'backward' and 'Dalit' communities.
and of the mainstream national media in particular.
There is plenty of media coverage of atrocities against Dalits etc.
The silence of the Indian media on the subject has been deafening,
No. Atrocity stories sell newspapers and attract eyeballs to ranting TV talking heads.
and that has played a gigantic role in keeping the population grossly uninformed
If 'mainstream media' won't tell Indians they live in a poor country, Indians will come to believe they are actually Norwegian.
and oddly complacent about the extreme nature of social inequality in India.
No greater complacency can be shown than pretending poverty will go away if only it gets more TV coverage. Sen believed that Bengal had plenty of food in 1943 and 1974. Yet people starved because TV and Radio and the newspapers weren't informing the people that they should give bananas to starving ladies.
I turn now to the second line of explanation: belief in the unremediability of poverty.
Sen-tentious shite can't remedy shit.
Many people take the existence and high incidence of poverty as a fact about which little can be done.
No. They take the fact that Bengal produces shit economists to indicate Bengalis can't do shit about poverty. Bangladesh, on the other hand, allowed poor women to work in factories rather than wander around trying to find a kid who might offer them a banana.
However, the hypothesis of inescapability is very difficult to defend on empirical grounds, since major reductions in poverty have been accomplished across the world—from Europe and the USA to east Asia and Latin America—through determined human
as opposed to simian
efforts (Angus Deaton’s book provides a good understanding of how “the great escape” has been achieved).
Deaton says working class White Americans- like Scottish folk of the same description- are dying deaths of despair. That's a great escape right there. Why are more dead people not being hired by Economics Departments? Even if death is not inescapable, it should be no bar to academic employment. The mainstream Media should do more to remind people not to fucking die. That way they will live forever.
A weaker version of this scepticism takes the form of arguing in favour of single-minded concentration on high economic growth, without having to do anything directly about poverty reduction.
That works very well as the Chinese demonstrated because they also stopped poor people from having babies like crazy.
Underlying this attitude is the increasingly popular belief that rapid income growth, even without anything else, is the quickest and most effective way of cutting down the incidence of poverty and deprivation.
This is because guys who earn a lot aint poor or deprived.
How sound is this rather comfortable view that absolves society from doing things directly for the poor?
Society doesn't need to be absolved of anything. If God exists, sinners may need to be absolved so as to avoid Hell Fire. But we can abolish death- right?
It is correct to argue that an important part of any serious and large-scale programme of poverty removal must include the cultivation and sustaining of economic growth.
No. Poverty removal can be done by removing poor people. The Brits used to pack them off to Australia at ten pounds a pop.
It is also right to expect that some improvements in the lives of the disadvantaged would tend to occur almost invariably with economic growth, as employment and entrepreneurial opportunities expand, particularly for those who are not prevented from seizing these opportunities by ill health, lack of schooling, social barriers or other disadvantages.
e.g. being dead.
However, public support for the underprivileged is extremely important in helping them to overcome disadvantage and in ensuring that the fruits of economic growth are shared widely.
Till the money runs out and there is entitlement collapse. Sharing fruit may result in the abandonment of orchards.
Without it, a great many lives will continue to be tormented by hunger, poverty, illness and other deprivations, despite spurts in aggregate economic growth, from which the neglected groups could, in many circumstances, get very little help.
But hunger ends with death. Malthusian famines raised real wages for those who survived till the next famine.
This has indeed been happening spectacularly over the recent past in India, with its falling behind—in many cases much further behind—a number of developing countries in terms of living conditions, even as it has overtaken them in economic growth.
Which is why those developing countries will have or have had an entitlement collapse before India. Look at Sri Lanka.
An important understanding that has emerged quite powerfully from studies of international experiences is the recognition that the constructive use of public resources generated by economic growth to enhance human capabilities contributes not only to the quality of life but also to higher productivity, and further economic growth.
There was no need for any such 'studies'. Private resources are used by entrepreneurs to expand health and education coverage in areas they control so as to bring in higher and higher profits as they move into higher and higher value adding activities. Sen-tentious fools thought the same thing would happen if you just improve schools and health provision and give out doles without any entrepreneurs doing value addition. This was foolish. A 'remittance economy' might limp along in this manner but no very large geographical area could depend solely on remittances.
In fact, the so-called “Asian experience,” beginning with Japan in the late 19th century, then South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and eventually all of China, has been based on
fighting wars or preparing to fight wars. Conscription itself raised productivity because Armies needed recruits who could read and write.
exploiting the relationship between economic expansion and growth on the one hand, and human advancement through education, healthcare, better nutrition, and other determinants of human capability on the other.
You need soldiers who can kick ass. But 'human advancement' may mean ethnic cleansing or mass 're-education'.
This is a two-way relationship, of which relatively little use has been made by India,
East Punjab did ethnic cleansing, grew a lot of food and sent its young men into the Army where they displayed valour. West Bengal did nothing of the sort.
thereby ensuring not only that the country has fallen behind in terms of quality of life and living standards, but also making its long-run growth more fragile and less widely shared than it would have otherwise been.
Why? Because India has too many Bengali economists. Still, it did have a few Punjabis like Minhas, Montek and Manmohan.
There is some tragic irony here.
No. Bengali buddhijivis are boring shitheads who think their job is to scold people.
Insights about the intimate connections between health, education and productivity were not at all absent from the visions of the pioneers of economic and industrial development in India, such as Jamsetji Tata.
A merchant who became very fucking rich. Bengalis thought becoming rich was very naughty. First you must give banana to starving lady and then do mathsy masturbation in Cambridge. After that, by all means run off with your best friend's wife and pose as the Mother Theresa of Economics.
As Tata’s biographer, FR Harris, describes his conception of industrialisation, “from the time of driving in the first stake, the Iron and Steel Company assumes the function of a municipality”—focusing on free healthcare, decent schooling, provision of safe water and basic sanitation for all, among Tata’s other industrial and social initiatives.
Nehru explains that the Tatas gave Congress a lot of money and they in turn got Tata a goodly sum to tide them over when they hit a snag in the Twenties. It must be said, Jamshedpur was highly racist. Whites were paid much more than Indians. A Parsi with a metallurgy degree from Pittsburgh protested and set up a Union with the help of the Bengali clerical staff. The Tatas enlisted Netaji Bose to stomp that Union. The Parsi Trade Unionist was sent to do hard labour in prison. Even after Independence, when he was rehabilitated, he had to keep very quiet.
A clear understanding of the complementarity between production and productivity,
existed everywhere. Industrialists wanted to create factory towns where they were in charge and politicians and Trade Unionists could be told to fuck the fuck off.
on the one hand, and human well-being and capability-formation, on the other, was also powerfully articulated in the famous report of the Bhore Committee on health policy
Bhore was an ICS man. He began working on this in 1943. However, it was a mistake to abolish the lower qualification to practice Medicine. People who could pay to do the whole MBBS course could also fuck off to Yukay, Amrika where they could get a better return on their investment.
that nationalist leaders commissioned for the future independent India, as the Raj was coming to an end in 1946: “If it were possible to evaluate the loss, which this country annually suffers through the avoidable waste of valuable human material and the lowering of human efficiency through malnutrition and preventable morbidity, we feel that the result would be so startling that the whole country would be aroused and would not rest until a radical change had been brought about.”
India should have let ICS officers and big industrialists set up more and more 'Marshallian industrial districts' which the burgeoning middle class could relocate to so as to educate and supervise the 'Lewisian' surplus labour released by the agricultural sector. Sadly, Brahmin and Bengali soft-headed Socialists weren't keen on such Capitalist atrocities as the establishment of a well paid industrial proletariat.
Alas, the country has not been “aroused” by the continued neglect of health and education and other public services;
Sen was aroused by his best friend's wife.
on the contrary, this neglect and its far-reaching consequences have received little attention in public discussions over more than six decades of the functioning of independent and democratic India.
Sen prefers to conduct his public discussion in Yukay or Amrika.
The media coverage of how much the government spends on enhancing the lives of the Indian poor has been extraordinarily distorted.
The media is owned by rich peeps. They point out that buying votes is no panacea. Sooner or later the country goes off a fiscal cliff. There is entitlement collapse.
Reading the constant repetition in the press of critcism of the government for its “fiscal irresponsibility” in introducing some minimal employment guarantees in rural areas and some food subsidies for the poor, one would not guess how much larger is the amount spent by the same government on subsidising the good lives of the relatively prosperous classes.
But the relatively prosperous are net contributors to the Exchequer. Also the most prosperous of them can just fuck off to greener pastures- as Sen himself has done.
In terms of the latest available figures, India spends at least 1 per cent of GDP subsidising electricity for those who have power connections (nearly 400m people do not have any),
so, the median beneficiary of the subsidy is still very poor.
0.66 per cent of GDP on fertiliser subsidy that mainly benefits the rich farmers
who produce food for the public distribution system which feeds the very poor
and 0.97 per cent of GDP on providing subsidised diesel, cooking gas and other petroleum products for those who have equipment for their use (not excluding luxury sedans driven by the very rich).
but the median beneficiary is still very poor. It is a different matter that, because of the black economy, some rich people aren't paying Income tax.
These items together, even ignoring other forms of subsidy for the rich, come to a total of 2.63 per cent of GDP.
That's not much.
Compared with that, the government spent 0.85 per cent of GDP in providing food subsidy
this figure would be greater if fertilizer and diesel for trucks weren't subsidized
and 0.29 per cent on employment supplementation, totalling 1.14 per cent of GDP.
But those figures will keep growing till there is entitlement collapse.
Indeed, even if we add to those pro-poor spending programmes the entire governmental expenditure on healthcare of all types to all the people of India (1.2 per cent of GDP), we get a grand total of 2.34 per cent of GDP, which is still less than what the government directly spends in subsidies that mainly benefit the relatively rich.
Why stop there? Why not say GoI is entering the shanties of starving lepers and draining them of their jizz through aggravated acts of fellatio?
If the thundering of the media denouncing the subsidies for the poor on grounds of “fiscal soundness” is fed by the priorities of India’s stratified society, so is the comparative silence on the much larger sum spent by the government directly in the interests of the dominant groups of relatively prosperous Indians.
Sen's thundering in the media has been wholly useless. People make fun of the little Bengali monkey who is married to a Rothschild. What is hilarious is that he has a Belgian nut-case, who actually lives in India, do all the hard work for the books he co-authors with him.
India has missed out pretty comprehensively on many of the lessons of the Asian economic development that has rapidly enhanced human well-being and capability as a part of pursuing fast economic growth in much of east Asia.
That lesson was beat Trade Unionists and kill or chase away Commie nutters.
While the inefficiency and inequity of an over-extended “license Raj” that plagued India needed to be removed
something Sen never said should happen till Manmohan did it.
(as India has been doing, and there is a strong case for speeding up that still incomplete process),
There was a strong case for Sen to run off with his best friend's wife because she was related to both Gramsci and Sraffa.
it is also extremely important for the government to
ignore Sen completely. Modi has done so and gained by it.
do those positive things that it should be able to bring about, including much faster expansion of public education and public health care. Indeed, those few states in India—in particular Kerala,
remittance economy. Also it exports Doctors and Nurses and so defeats Baumol cost disease in Health.
Tamil Nadu
oligarchy where wealthy people from the film industry took over politics and allowed their relatives to get rich through manufacturing and service industries. High female participation rate was the key
and Himachal Pradesh—
big investment in transport and cheap and plentiful electricity
that provided comparatively more schooling and healthcare for all, have over the decades climbed, from lowly positions, to be near the top of the comparative table of per-capita GDP in India.
Not really. Goa, Sikkim, Delhi, Chandigarh, Haryana etc. all do better.
There is perhaps nothing as important for durable and shared economic growth as the enhancement of an educated and healthy labour force.
Which depends on either urbanization or remittances. But remittances may collapse for exogenous reasons.
Even in comparative terms today, China’s experience shows that devoting much more public revenue than India does to the education, healthcare and nutrition of the people is compatible with—and can indeed be very helpful for—high and sustained economic growth.
No. Indians won't pay for Government health or education because it is shit. The Chinese had population control and an internal passport system of a draconian type. Education is a tool for the Party to control the masses. In India, it is useless shite of the sort Sen spouts.
Comparing India’s miserable overall allocation of 1.2 per cent of GDP to government expenditure on health with China’s much higher figure of 2.7 per cent, one is struck by two things: the poor appreciation of the demands of public health in India;
No. One remembers that our rustic folk have the habit of beating Doctors and tying them to a tree so they can watch their wives and doctors being raped. Doctors and teachers pay a little money to keep getting paid but are careful to stay the fuck away from the rural Schools or Hospitals were they are supposed to be working.
and the failure of many champions of economic growth to grasp the precise requirements for fast and sustained economic expansion.
Those requirements have nothing to do with health or education. Illiterate people can be supervised by barely literate people. The sick can be sacked. Having a huge population means not having to worry about running out of workers.
How has China been able to do something that India has failed to do?
By beating, killing and 're-educating' lots of people.
It seems plausible to argue that given the nature of the political systems of the two countries, the vulnerabilities from which they respectively suffer are radically different.
No shit, Sherlock! Chairman Xi's 'vulnerabilities' have to do with his colleagues. They keep disappearing so he seems safe enough. In India you never know the result of the next election or the next Supreme Court case. The safer thing is to off-shore your assets and ensure your family members have the passports of different countries.
With India’s open and multi-party democratic system, deprivations that are easy to see and politicise get immediate attention in governance through a process that is by no means guaranteed in China.
But ethnic cleansing or extra-judicial killing on an industrial scale can also occur. Deprivation does not matter. Killing terrorists or volatile minorities is how polities survive.
The kind of famine that China had when the disastrous “Great Leap Forward” killed around 30m people—with no criticism in any of the newspapers—could not have occurred in democratic India.
But did happen in democratic Bangladesh.
Similarly, the sudden and unopposed abolition of the entitlement to health insurance that all citizens of China had—albeit at a rather low level—before the economic reforms of 1979 illustrates a kind of reversal of established political guarantees that would be hard to carry out in India.
Bangladesh had to do privatization more particularly under Ershad from 1982 onward. Being as poor as shit means having to do sensible things. Still, Ershad was not assassinated though he did spend some time in jail.
However, India has different handicaps.
Indira faced no great difficulty in jailing her opponents and forcibly sterilizing hundreds of thousands. But her son's cronies might have arranged an 'accident' for her, so she held elections. Still, had Sanjay lived, he might have forced India down the road of Capitalist growth with Trade Unionists being beaten to death and Socialists having their testicles stomped in police cells.
Since its democratic system operates on the basis of a general public understanding of the problems faced by the country, when the problems are harder to focus on and very inadequately discussed in the media, they may get little political attention.
Very true. Indian people may not notice they are starving to death because Media is focussing on education rather than nutrition.
In China, by contrast, when the leaders of the political system determine that something must be done, this can happen with breathtaking rapidity, without any need to bring it about through a democratic process of public reasoning shared by the citizenry.
So can India. The license permit Raj was scrapped with out any 'public reasoning'.
The healthcare setback in 1979, led by the new political convictions of the country’s leaders, was reversed sharply from 2004 onwards, when China’s leadership changed its mind—in this case in favour of very supportive policies.
What happened in China in 2004? The National Reimbursement rate FELL from 98% till it reached about 25 %. Why? The Chinese now had higher disposable income. They could pay much more for health care.
By 2012, China had got back to a near-universal coverage of healthcare and at a much higher level of entitlements.
Because the State was providing a much lower percentage of the outlay.
A reassessment by the leadership alone of what China urgently needed was enough to bring about a radical change in the lives of all people.
No. The Government could cut reimbursement because the people had more money in their pocket. Also, if the people didn't like it, they were welcome to eat a bullet. What was interesting about China's National Reimbursement Drug List was the manner in which the State could force price cuts of up to half in return for a notional seventy percent reimbursement.
The two systems have very different vulnerabilities. While democratic India has never been in danger of going the way of North Korea today, or of Cambodia, or for that matter of China yesterday, India’s ability to march ahead in healthcare like China has always been dependent on the slow process of bringing about a shared public understanding of its ailments.
Shared public understandings don't matter in the slightest. What matters is the budget. If the Government has no money, it stops paying teachers and doctors and so forth. There is entitlement collapse. People are welcome to stage big protests or even, as in Sri Lanka, storm the Presidential palace. But if there is no money, they have to accept their fate.
And this is where the practice of democracy in India has badly failed, with its foggy media coverage and inadequate discussion of the country’s health predicament contributing to persistent deprivations.
Sen has been practicing democracy in Yukay-Amrika. That's why he needs a lot of media coverage. Has it occurred to him that there has been plenty of media coverage of the plight of the Haitians but things only seem to get worse there? What about the brave little women of Afghanistan whom Obama Mama was helping to go to skool and get nice jobs? They got media coverage in plenty but that didn't stop Biden from running away from there. No doubt, it Afghan Media gives plenty of coverage to the plight of transgender bar-maids, the Taliban will be forced to give them lots of money and create safe spaces where they can watch Pussy Riot.
Basic liberties and civic freedoms, including democratic rights, may be much more vulnerable in China than in India, yet India can learn much from what can be seen as the intelligent welfarism of contemporary Chinese policies, without wanting to go over to its more authoritarian system.
Why stop there? Why should India not learn from Norway? True, India is overpopulated and does not have lots of petroleum but still we could dye our hair blonde and say ' Jeg er en ekte nordmann' to each other while eating pickled herring.
(In the absence of democratic guarantees, the Chinese system carries with it the kind of risks—social as well as individual—to which all authoritarian states are exposed.)
But non-authoritarian states can get invaded or go off a fiscal cliff and face entitlement collapse just like a totalitarian state. True the President and his family may run away but the next guy may be equally useless.
Democracy doesn't guarantee shit. Money matters and having a kick ass Army matters. Nothing else will do.
I am singling out India for illustration, but of course the failure to recognise the complementarity between economic growth and human capability expansion applies to many other countries as well.
No it doesn't. It is bleeding obvious that if you are more productive you will have more money and thus can spend on health and education and recreation.
It can be argued, for example, that an odd “disconnect” between public action and economic expansion
there was no fucking 'economic expansion'. Public actions demanding more money for less work failed. Some countries went off a fiscal cliff and pruned entitlements. Savers and pensioners took a haircut. It turned out that there was a 'disconnect' in the minds of Leftie Economists between reality and the cloud cuckoo land they preferred to inhabit.
has plagued the recent attempts in Europe at overcoming the continent’s on-going economic and financial crisis through largely indiscriminate “austerity”, without taking adequate account of the far-reaching social and economic consequences of withdrawal of public services and employment-supporting policies.
The far-reaching consequence was that people weren't paid more for doing less. They had to fucking emigrate or tighten their belts.
I move now to the third line of proposed explanation of the tolerance of severe poverty.
There is only one line. We don't mind poor people unless they try to rob us or create a nuisance of some sort. It's good to know that there probably is a hot chick somewhere who would be grateful to suck us off in return for the protein in our jizz.
The claim that human beings are incapable of sympathy for others is an often-repeated generalisation about mankind.
Sen had no sympathy for those of his students who didn't want to end up being useless tossers.
Oddly enough, this epistemically unsupported and ethically befuddling point of view is sometimes attributed to Adam Smith,
even more oddly, Sen says Smith- who considered Bengalis to be savages- was actually against Racism- probably because Sen too believes Bengalis are savages.
based on a misreading of a couple of paragraphs in one of his books dealing with a different subject (why bakers, butchers, brewers and all of us want trade and can benefit from it), and ignoring the rest of his writings.
Smith was merely a pedagogue. Why bother with him?
Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments opens, in fact, with the following sentence: “How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.”
Fuck does this mean? People like seeing happy people. Why? Chances are if people in a place are happy, then it is a good and safe place for you. Back in Smith's time, it was remarked that some landscapes look nicer than others. A place with a lot of trees and grassland and streams and rivers was pleasing to the eye. A fucking desert was not. The former was a good place for humans to settle. The latter wasn't. Prosy pedagogues could make a bit of money by expressing this simple notion in a verbose manner. But only a stupid Bengali like Sen would think this was some sort of great mystical revelation.
Smith’s analysis is further developed as the book proceeds, and he makes particular use of the thought-experiment of the “impartial spectator” as a device for the reasoned self-scrutiny, of which, he thought, human beings are perfectly capable.
This was just the notion that you shouldn't get drunk and avenge yourself on your cousin, who made fun of your kilt, by sticking a dirk in him. An 'impartial spectator' would tell the Jury that you did not act in self-defence. You ran into the room and stuck your knife in the bloke while shouting 'Fuck you and fuck Mad King George you fucking fuckster!' This might lead to your being hanged.
The point about a witness in a court case who can show that he has no reason to be for or against a party to the action, is that he is likely to be believed since he is impartial. Observe yourself as if you were such a man. You will be less inclined to do stupid, impulsive shit.
There is actually a close link between Smith’s discussion of the nature and reach of “moral sentiments” and the gradual emergence of political demands across the world, over the last two centuries, for social safety nets, human rights and even for the establishment of a so-called welfare state.
Nonsense! Political demands arose because those who made them sought political power. If you promise something like cheap or subsidized health and employment insurance, you may get the power to deliver if not that precisely then something better than what went before. This has nothing to do with 'sentiments'. It is merely a 'collective action' problem where there are non-convexities or the Law of Large Numbers applies.
It is a different matter that the Sultan or Emir may, because he is a pious Muslim, create a welfare state for the people of his own tribe while bringing in labourers from far away to do the menial work. Sentiments can sway the rich. The poor have to be sensible or risk starvation.
These connections apply as much to India as they do to Europe and America and the rest of the world.
So if Indians have very nice Sentiments they will have plenty of money and can send everybody to Harley Street for health-care after which they can spend ten years getting a PhD at Cambridge.
For example, the rapid elimination of famines that followed Indian independence
depended on America sending PL480 food. True, India had to subsidize fertilizers and diesel etc. to have a Green Revolution because Nixon would have let the country starve the way he let Bangladesh starve, but that didn't happen till Nehru kicked the bucket.
and the establishment of a functioning democracy
the Brits established the democracy. The Indians chose to keep it. Pakistan and Burma made the mistake of inviting in the Army. India and Sri Lanka did not.
turn on the capability of people to relate to each other.
In India's case, democracy had to do with politicians having a relative succeed them. Rahul joined politics to spend more time with Mummy and Sister.
The share of famine victims in the total population is always very small—it is typically not more than 5 per cent of the people, and hardly ever exceeds 10 per cent. So the power of voting in a majoritarian democracy would not be able to explain how a democracy could serve as a deterrent to famines,
only if it is America's policy to feed 'democracies'- unless they sell jute to Cuba.
if other people really lacked sympathy or concern for the famine victims.
Which is what Bengal's famines in 1943 and 1974 amply demonstrated. Periodic Malthusian famines occurred and Indian classical literature has recorded examples of even great Sages being reduced to stealing dog meat.
Public discussion about the agony and misery of the famine victims, along with an understanding of the complete preventability of famines, makes their elimination a policy priority for a majority of the people and thus irresistible in a majoritarian democracy.
Sheer nonsense! The subcontinent- even West Pakistan- preferred 'free food' and 'free money' from the US even though this was inflationary. The Commies, it is true, tried to make famine an issue. They failed. Mujib calling for 'Tebagha' and then presiding over a big famine was fucking hilarious. Oddly, Ershad did more to help the tenants.
The use of the media in a functioning democracy is critically important for broadening the political reach of people’s moral reasoning.
No. It is useless. Moral reasoning is stuff you learn from your Mummy and then from the Priest or from Scripture. The reason you should help the poor is because you will go to Heaven or get a real nice re-birth if you do so.
To conclude, it is hard to believe that the quiet tolerance of poverty and deprivation really arises from some basic inability of people to sympathise with each other.
You may sympathize greatly with me. It is clear I suffer acute deprivation. But will you lend me a couple of thousand quid? No. You suggest I get a fucking job.
We get more help from the hypothesis of ignorance—not arising from the unavailability of empirical information, but from established barriers against paying attention to information about socially distanced people.
Sen is saying 'if Indians cared about each other, they would constantly be offering bananas to starving women. Why are they not doing so? It is because of the Media. Instead of headlines about Manmohan's meeting with Obama Mama, they should have a big big picture of me giving banana to a starving lady- preferably one who attended Vassar and who has a PhD in Capability Theory. Why is this not happening? The answer is, Indians are totes ignorant. Media is creating barriers which prevents the Indian masses from paying attention to me instead of Manmohan. '
In the case of India, it is almost certainly linked to hardened social stratifications of caste, class and gender and to the biases that these barriers impose on the coverage of the otherwise vibrant Indian media.
Very true! Why Indian Media is not tracking down starving women to whom Sen gave banana? Why is it that Sen himself is having to tell us about this wonderful achievement of his? BTW, did Manmohan give banana to starving lady? No! Sardarjis are eating makkiyan di roti only. They don't even know what is banana! Yet Indians are so stupid they are letting Manmohan be two term Prime Minister! Who will give banana to starving women? Will it be Montek? Don't be silly! He too is Sardarji and thus an incessant devourer of makkiyan di roti.
The nature of that media, however, is not an immutable social fact, and a clear recognition of the need for change can itself be an important step towards remedying the limited nature of the coverage.
Very true! A clear recognition of the need for immortality can be an important step towards remedying the problem of mortality. However, so can fisting yourself vigorously while telling everybody about a banana you once gave a starving woman.
The fact that the experience of the world—from Europe to east Asia—shows a positive connection between economic expansion, on the one hand, and public efforts to enhance human capability, on the other, has to be much more widely discussed and far better appreciated.
Only by those who don't get that having more money means you can buy more cool shiny stuff.
If it seems possible that the tolerance of the intolerable arises ultimately from fallacious reasoning,
'tolerance of the intolerable' is an oxymoron. It represents fallacious reasoning like speaking of 'the son of the barren woman' or 'the cat which is a dog'.
rather than from the unsympathetic nature of human beings, that recognition must surely provide some ground for relief.
Sen feels relieved that saying 'the cat which is a dog can cause poverty to turn into a mouse which it gobbles up' will cause every country to become rich enough to afford to take up the 'Capabilities approach' to pissing money against a wall.
It also generates the understanding that there is work to be done.
Spotting a logical fallacy doesn't 'generate understanding'. It merely enables you to ignore the nutter who thinks 'tolerance of the intolerable' is not an oxymoron.
