Tim Rogan on Amartya Sen

To critique something means to evaluate it in a detailed and analytical way. Critiquing Capitalism entails evaluating financial markets and figuring out why and when they can allocate capital in an optimal manner.

Amartya Sen has never studied financial markets. He has no theory of how to allocate capital. Yet Tim Rogan, a Cambridge historian, believes he has critiqued Capitalism.

Critiques of capitalism come in two varieties. First, there is the moral or spiritual critique. This critique rejects Homo economicus as the organising heuristic of human affairs. Human beings, it says, need more than material things to prosper. Calculating power is only a small part of what makes us who we are. Moral and spiritual relationships are first-order concerns. Material fixes such as a universal basic income will make no difference to societies in which the basic relationships are felt to be unjust.

This is not a critique of Capitalism. It is not based on a detailed and analytical evaluation of financial markets or of capital allocation. It is a criticism of Capitalism of a wholly normative type. It does not involve any knowledge of Economics or Philosophy. A poet or a preacher or a failed prostitute might make this criticism with more conviction than a person who, for better or worse, has taught Economics for far too many years.

Then there is the material critique of capitalism. The economists who lead discussions of inequality now are its leading exponents. Homo economicus is the right starting point for social thought. We are poor calculators and single-minded, failing to see our advantage in the rational distribution of prosperity across societies. Hence inequality, the wages of ungoverned growth. But we are calculators all the same, and what we need above all is material plenty, thus the focus on the redress of material inequality. From good material outcomes, the rest follows.

If Capital is efficiently allocated and financial markets are incentive compatible then though National Income increases, Labour's share is likely to fall. If Capital is inefficiently allocated and financial markets are incentive incompatible then National Income may fall. It is likely that some working class people will fall below the social minimum. In both cases, distributional efficiency has worsened. To redress matters, Human Capital formation needs to increase or financial market mechanism design needs to be improved.
It is certainly possible to 'critique' any given Capitalist regime along these lines. However, Amartya Sen has never done so.

The first kind of argument for capitalism’s reform seems recessive now. The material critique predominates. Ideas emerge in numbers and figures. Talk of non-material values in political economy is muted. The Christians and Marxists who once made the moral critique of capitalism their own are marginal. Utilitarianism grows ubiquitous and compulsory.

This is nonsense. We decided long ago that a lot of markets are repugnant and so we no longer have them. The State provides many merit goods either directly or with some element of market involvement. The Business Enterprise 'internalises' a lot of externalities and has evolved a culture and ethos which is not solely focused on the bottom line. The Law has sometimes taken the initiative in changing the commercial ethos by directly tackling gender and racial discrimination. Economists like Roland Fryer do highly detailed and analytically brilliant work not just 'critiquing' Capitalism but enabling Courts to change it for the better.

Utilitarianism was a silly availability cascade which lost salience long ago. It belongs to the history of Economic thought. No doubt, some stupid Professors can make a living regurgitating worthless courses on it but they represent Credentialised Preference falsification- nothing more

Rogan has hit upon one such savant-

But then there is Amartya Sen.

Every major work on material inequality in the 21st century owes a debt to Sen.

 Yes- but these 'major works' are all worthless. Just because some Professors make money writing shite doesn't mean any actual debt is created when they quote each other. Shite is shite. It isn't worth anything in itself.

But his own writings treat material inequality as though the moral frameworks and social relationships that mediate economic exchanges matter.

Economic scarcity very quickly alters 'moral frameworks' and 'social relationships'.  That is why the State has to step in if there is a food availability deficit. It can't leave things to charity or 'the moral economy'. Every single country in the world learned this lesson during the course of the Twentieth Century.

Famine is the nadir of material deprivation. But it seldom occurs – Sen argues – for lack of food. To understand why a people goes hungry, look not for catastrophic crop failure; look rather for malfunctions of the moral economy that moderates competing demands upon a scarce commodity.

This is shite. Vietnam, Holland and Bengal experienced famines due to food availability deficit during the Second World war. They had different types of 'moral economy' but the outcome was the same. It was obvious that the State had to step in and organise a public food distribution system.

Material inequality of the most egregious kind is the problem here. But piecemeal modifications to the machinery of production and distribution will not solve it. The relationships between different members of the economy must be put right. Only then will there be enough to go around.

This is a crock of shite. Vinobha Bhave had organised 'bhoodan' and 'graamdaan'- but those villages in which the 'moral economy' had become more compassionate and egalitarian suffered even worse from food availability deficit. Only the State p.d.s could tackle the underlying problem. Pi-jaw about putting right 'the relationship between different members of the economy' was a complete and utter waste of time. Lal Bahadur Shastri told the Indian people to skip a meal. Restaurants would shut down so as to make more food available to the poor. Did this help? Nope. It was stupid. India needed to grow a lot more food- ending food availability deficit by using scientific means- and then distribute it through State ration shops.

In Sen’s work, the two critiques of capitalism cooperate. We move from moral concerns to material outcomes and back again with no sense of a threshold separating the two.

Right, because Sen is a worthless pile of shite. While he was in India, his big idea was that poor people should eat less so that the State gets a 'surplus' to invest in factories. This was a very very stupid idea. Indian workers needed to eat more, not less, so as to be more productive.
Sen didn't stick around to join the Planning Commission- he wasn't a complete sociopath- but emigrated to England instead and made his money honestly in the globalised market for Credentialist shite.

Sen disentangles moral and material issues without favouring one or the other, keeping both in focus. The separation between the two critiques of capitalism is real, but transcending the divide is possible, and not only at some esoteric remove. Sen’s is a singular mind, but his work has a widespread following, not least in provinces of modern life where the predominance of utilitarian thinking is most pronounced. In economics curricula and in the schools of public policy, in internationalist secretariats and in humanitarian NGOs, there too Sen has created a niche for thinking that crosses boundaries otherwise rigidly observed.

Right! Sen's worthless shite is useful for worthless U.N/ NGO gobshites. We all now know that these turds never helped any poor people. They were and are a white elephant simply.

This was no feat of lonely genius or freakish charisma. It was an effort of ordinary human innovation, putting old ideas together in new combinations to tackle emerging problems. Formal training in economics, mathematics and moral philosophy supplied the tools Sen has used to construct his critical system.

Critical system? Are you kidding me? Entitlements and Capabilites can't be measured. Sen has no way of distinguishing by an improvement in the H.D.M.I caused by Chavez type policies and one caused by South Korean type policies.
Sen was once a hero in India. Now he is considered a vain little gobshite who always gives the worst possible policy advise and makes the most ludicrous type off argument.

But the influence of Rabindranath Tagore sensitised Sen to the subtle interrelation between our moral lives and our material needs. And a profound historical sensibility has enabled him to see the sharp separation of the two domains as transient.

 Tagore was an artist and the leader of a religious sect. Sen is neither. Tagore condemned credentialised education. Sen chose to be an academic of the most boring and worthless sort. Rogan isn't Indian but even he must know that Sen's verbose shite is the polar opposite of Tagore's lyricism.

Tagore’s school at Santiniketan in West Bengal was Sen’s birthplace. Tagore’s pedagogy emphasised articulate relations between a person’s material and spiritual existences.

Nonsense! Shantiniketan was and is about the living arts of India. It wasn't about 'material' or 'spiritual' existence but about aesthetic excellence.

Both were essential – biological necessity, self-creating freedom – but modern societies tended to confuse the proper relation between them.

Yes, yes- that is the problem with modern societies. They get confused about the proper relationship between 'biological necessity' and 'self-creating freedom'. Which one is the 'top' and which the 'bottom'? If you all  go out to dinner together, do you hold out the chair for the former or the latter? Which one do you ask to carve the roast? If 'self creating freedom' gets up to go the loo, should you pick up your handbag and accompany it? Modern Societies get very confused by this sort of thing.

In Santiniketan, pupils played at unstructured exploration of the natural world between brief forays into the arts, learning to understand their sensory and spiritual selves as at once distinct and unified.

'Unstructured exploration of the natural world' eh? You mean they climbed trees. Cool.

Sen left Santiniketan in the late 1940s as a young adult to study economics in Calcutta and Cambridge. The major contemporary controversy in economics was the theory of welfare, and debate was affected by Cold War contention between market- and state-based models of economic order.

Sheer nonsense. Welfare Econ had been killed off by Arrow's theorem. There was a mathematical theory of growth and choice of technique. Sen was supposed to have gone in for it- but his maths wasn't in the Kolmogorov or Kantorovich class. Anyway, the Planning Commission in India quickly showed itself to be utterly silly. Sen, as a Professor, rediscovered Utilitarianism as a philosophy and then emigrated on the basis of his Social Choice shite.

Sen’s sympathies were social democratic but anti-authoritarian. Welfare economists of the 1930s and 1940s sought to split the difference, insisting that states could legitimate programmes of redistribution by appeal to rigid utilitarian principles: a pound in a poor man’s pocket adds more to overall utility than the same pound in the rich man’s pile.

Fuck off! There were no 'welfare economists of the 1930's and 1940's'. The subject hadn't developed enough for that sort of specialisation. Pigou's name is associated with ideas in both monetary and welfare econ.
No economist during the Depression was hollering about the principle of diminishing marginal utility. Why? It would have been silly to do so. What they were saying was 'let's put people back to work. It's crazy that machines are standing idle while the people who operate them are on the dole or lining up for the soup kitchen'.

Here was the material critique of capitalism in its infancy, and here is Sen’s response: maximising utility is not everyone’s abiding concern – saying so and then making policy accordingly is a form of tyranny – and in any case using government to move money around in pursuit of some notional optimum is a flawed means to that end.

Nonsense! Rogan is quoting a 1979 paper which had zero political impact. Sen had never opposed punitively redistributional taxes nor 'solidarity wages' on the Swedish model nor would he come out against Layard's Tax based Incomes policy which would synthesise the two. Instead he made the point that utility can't be measured. But then neither can capabilities nor entitlements no inequality nor Income nor Capital nor Wealth nor anything else.

Why is 'using (the) government to 'move money around' a 'flawed means'? What is the alternative? Instead of the state paying pensions or other transfers, who will do it? How will they get the money? Where will they get the information as to who should receive it?

Economic rationality harbours a hidden politics whose implementation damaged the moral economies that groups of people built up to govern their own lives, frustrating the achievement of its stated aims.

Utter nonsense! Perfect information was assumed and transfers were costless in the relevant models. That's why the State was conceived as costlessly redistributing income so as to equalise the marginal product of money. There was no 'hidden politics' at all.

Moral economies don't let 'groups of people' 'govern their own lives'. On the contrary, moral economies tell you what you can and can't do with your own resources. The khap panchayat represents a 'moral economy'. It may ban you from cultivating your land in a particular way or prevent you from taking up a specific profession- e.g. tanning- for a purely sociological reason.

In commercial societies, individuals pursue economic ends within agreed social and moral frameworks.

Fuck off! Commerce proceeds in the complete absence of 'social and moral' frameworks. A South African diamond cartel may have believed brown people to be subhuman but still sold diamonds to Gujeratis. All that matters is contract enforcement.

The social and moral frameworks are neither superfluous nor inhibiting. They are the coefficients of durable growth.

Rubbish! Social and moral frameworks change because of durable growth. They are dependent variables, not 'coefficients'. That's why Economics kicked Sociology in the goolies and stole its lunch money.

Moral economies are not neutral, given, unvarying or universal. They are contested and evolving.

And don't mean shit in the final analysis. They are just 'cheap talk' availability cascades.

Each person is more than a cold calculator of rational utility.

'More'? No person is a 'cold calculator of rational utility'. The thing is mathematically intractable. That's why we have 'regret minimization' not 'utility maximisation'.

Societies aren’t just engines of prosperity.

'Just'? Societies aren't engines of anything. They emerge as a cheap talk pooling equilibrium out of the interplay of economic forces. This involves, not 'prosperity but 'scarcity'.

The challenge is to make non-economic norms affecting market conduct legible, to bring the moral economies amid which market economies and administrative states function into focus.

There is no such challenge. Pi-jaw is noise. Ignore it- or, if that's what you are paid to produce, be prepared to be ignored or rendered otherwise ineffectual.

Thinking that bifurcates moral on the one hand and material on the other is inhibiting.

Nope. The rapist bifurcates 'moral' and 'material' but is quite disinhibited about fucking over her victim.

But such thinking is not natural and inevitable, it is mutable and contingent – learned and apt to be unlearned.

Sez you coz that's what happened during the Rape of Berlin. Soviet troops learned to rape German women because...urm... raping the enemy in revenge is not natural and inevitable but mutable and contingent.

Sen was not alone in seeing this. The American economist Kenneth Arrow was his most important interlocutor, connecting Sen in turn with the tradition of moral critique associated with R H Tawney and Karl Polanyi.

Arrow never mentioned Tawney or Polanyi. He was a student of Tarski who was influenced by a wholly different Socialist tradition.

Each was determined to re-integrate economics into frameworks of moral relationship and social choice.

Social Choice is a mathematical theory. Tawney & Polanyi were silly nutters with a romantic view of English history.

But Sen saw more clearly than any of them how this could be achieved.

Sen is a blinkered donkey turning in futile academic circles. He has never seen anything clearly. He does not know how to achieve anything.

He realised that at earlier moments in modern political economy this separation of our moral lives from our material concerns had been inconceivable.

In the past, as now, some writers got paid a little money to pretend that 'moral lives' were separate from 'material concerns'. Thus, even if equality for women or coloured people or Jews resulted in material prosperity it would be wrong to permit any such thing because clearly, women and Jews and niggers destroy the moral economy by reason of their long hair and chrematistic scheming and ginormous dicks.

Utilitarianism had blown in like a weather front around 1800, trailing extremes of moral fervour and calculating zeal in its wake.

Is that what happened? How come no one noticed? Bentham was considered a silly man. The young John Stuart Mill was a fucking clerk. Nobody gave a shit about Utilitarianism then or later. What mattered was Chartism and Trade Unions and so forth.

Sen sensed this climate of opinion changing, and set about cultivating ameliorative ideas and approaches eradicated by its onset once again.

What fucking climate of opinion is Rogan talking about? The fact that Reagan and Thatcher were elected? Sen wasn't part of that. He wasn't part of anything. He was just a Professor of a holier than thou Ivy League type. But he had nothing substantive to say.

There have been two critiques of capitalism, but there should be only one. Amartya Sen is the new century’s first great critic of capitalism because he has made that clear.

Utter bollocks! Critiques of capitalism focus on 'crises'- e.g. the subprime catastrophe and its aftermath. This necessitates studying capital markets. Sen hasn't done so. He is wholly irrelevant. Saying 'let's all be good' isn't a critique of anything.

Then there is the material critique of capitalism. The economists who lead discussions of inequality now are its leading exponents.

Why be shy? Name names. Who are these 'leading exponents'? Piketty? Anwar Shaikh? Who? But they aren't indebted to Sen in the slightest.

Homo economicus is the right starting point for social thought.

Nope. Social thought should begin with mimetic and network effects not by assuming substantive rationality of a cognitively costly type.

We are poor calculators and single-minded, failing to see our advantage in the rational distribution of prosperity across societies.

Which is why families don't exist. Men fail to see that they would be better off sharing stuff with their wives and kiddies and siblings and so forth. The business firm also doesn't exist for the same reason. Instead human beings exist as solitary hunter-gatherers.

Hence inequality, the wages of ungoverned growth.

What fucking 'ungoverned growth' has Zimbabwe or Venezuela seen? Inequality worsened in those countries. Why pretend that something bad is the side-effect of, or payment for, something good? Clearly, there is no such necessary connection. This is not 'moral science' but immoral imbecility of a Manichaean sort.

But we are calculators all the same, and what we need above all is material plenty, thus the focus on the redress of material inequality. From good material outcomes, the rest follows.

Fuck off! We are not calculators which is why our behaviour is mimetic. Very few people- even those with Wharton MBAs or PhDs in Actuarial Science- take positions in the market on the basis of their own calculations. The vast majority behave like herd animals.
Material plenty does not mean 'redress of material inequality' though it may militate for it. Good material outcomes- for example, improved HDI under Chavez- may or may not persist. It depends.

The first kind of argument for capitalism’s reform seems recessive now. The material critique predominates. Ideas emerge in numbers and figures. Talk of non-material values in political economy is muted. The Christians and Marxists who once made the moral critique of capitalism their own are marginal. Utilitarianism grows ubiquitous and compulsory.

What is this shite? Christians and Marxists and Islamists and Greens and every one of us after a couple of drinks talk the same shite that has always been talked. But that shite has nothing to do with the absurd, probably autistic, mummy of UCL- Jeremy Bentham.

There have been two critiques of capitalism, but there should be only one. Amartya Sen is the new century’s first great critic of capitalism because he has made that clear.

The critique of Capitalism is the Economic theory of capital allocation. Sen abandoned that field long ago preferring to pose as a 'Mother Theresa of Economics'. The philosophers think his Econ work holds up and the Economists think he understands philosophy. Actually, he is just a successful moral entrepreneur on the globalised market for credentialized shite. Good luck to him. He pays his taxes and ponces around talking bollocks as a living exemplar of Rothbard's law- 'Economists specialise in what they are least good at'.

What is Sen's alternative to what we have now? Nothing. Just more of the same pi-jaw. The man has achieved immortality through the sedulous pedagogy of premature brain-death. He is as much a mummy as Jeremy Bentham behind his glass display case at UCL.