Amartya Sen's views in 1959 compared to 2019

Back in 1959, Amartya Sen explained why he thought India should pursue a Socialist path.

Remarkably, he still makes the same flawed assumptions now as he did back then. His first is that Indian agriculture, for some reason, will always be 'pre-capitalist' and should be ignored. Indeed, his whole theory of famines is based on the notion that duskier types of peasants are as stupid as shit.

His second assumption was that-

economic history of the modern world shows that in the planned socialist economies, growth is much faster than in the capitalistic countries, and this is what we should expect also from a comparison of the nature of a capitalistic economy and that of a socialistic one.

What economic history showed was that a command economy could grow faster if it used highly coercive methods including genocide.
India was not in a position to do any such thing. It didn't have a Communist Party which had waded its way through an Ocean of Blood to achieve total dominance.
Sen may be pardoned for naivete in '59, yet even forty or fifty years later he continued to compare India to China as though India could have corrupt officials shot or take land from peasants on a massive scale.

Sen's third assumption was that 'luxury goods' were evil. Thus they must hurt growth.

 Now whether the rate of growth will be high or not will depend upon the extent to which entrepreneurial interests coincide with the requirements of economic growth. Every time an entrepreneur chooses a more profitable machine, he may favourably affect economic growth; but every time he uses scarce economic resources to produce luxury goods, he affects economic growth adversely. In a socialistic economy, however, economic growth will not be a by-product but the object of the exercise and the whole economic machine can be, if necessary, geared to this.

Sen did not understand that 'luxury goods' motivate people to change resource allocation. A politician may agree to displace a thousand peasants, so a Factory can be put up, if he gets an air-conditioned BMW in return. His conscience would not permit him to do it in return for a cup of tea. This was as true of Communist politicians as Capitalist ones. However this was not blindingly obvious in '59. Since then, have his views changed?

Not really. He doesn't get that the lack of 'luxury goods' in rural areas is the reason Teachers and Doctors and so on don't want to work there. Thus fixing India's poor 'human development index' involves making life better for the people with the skills to lift up rural populations. India does not have the option of forcing smart young people to go to the villages. It has to provide incentives.

Sen's Chancellorship of Nalanda was a disaster because he completely failed to see the importance of 'luxury goods'. He thought students wanted 'autonomy'. It turned out they wanted yoghurt- not exactly a luxury but they couldn't get it in Nalanda according to a newspaper report. Well qualified professors too were reluctant to relocate to such a place.

Sen's final and most damning error was the notion that a National Planning Organisation would have better, rather than necessarily worse, information than entrepreneurs who knew their business.

 Secondly, even if the capitalists ignore profits and try to maximise the rate of growth, they will find it difficult to achieve as much as a coordinating national planning organisation will.

Perhaps Sen is being humorous. The idea that people from Bombay or Calcutta could get any useful information out of bureaucrats in New Delhi is very funny.

Each entrepreneur lacks some knowledge of what the others are doing. Economic decisions are interrelated, and, for maximum economic efficiency, decisions in one field must be linked with those in others.

If you have a Planning Commission then nobody does anything before bribing it first.

An organised national planning authority, thus, has certain direct advantages over a collection of decision-taking entrepreneurs from the point of view of this objective.

Sen sticks with this view even now. He thinks there can be an 'idea of Justice' which focuses on outcomes because he thinks that substantive knowledge about this is easily available to some superior sort of bureaucrat.

Finally, Sen makes clear his lifelong hatred of Right Wing parties- not because they might be crooks but because they might be honest and run things better than the Left- because this would be sure to lead to Fascism.

Indians need to develop an abstruse type of critical theory because otherwise there might be

a widespread feeling that all that is needed to make things satisfactory is a bunch of honest, moral men quite irrespective of their political ideals or social background. This is the kind of atmosphere in which fascism came to power in Italy, and the process has repeated itself in a number of countries since.
The defenders of socialism and supporters of planning must, therefore, be very careful about the arguments to support their case. This is particularly important in the context of India, where the right-wing is likely to be increasingly less liberal than it has been in the past putting more emphasis on ‘efficiency’, ‘order’ and ‘honesty’. It is, therefore, just as important to dismiss the wrong arguments for socialist planning as it is to put forward the right ones.

 To summarize, Sen thought Indians were shit. The peasants could never rise above subsistence. The entrepreneurs might produce luxury goods which would make the Goddess of Growth very angry and cause her to run away. The Leftists were stupid because they said 'businessmen are corrupt' when the fact is businessmen, by and large, thrive when they have a reputation for honesty and delivering what they promise. Thus any criticism of corruption would lead to highly moral and efficient Right Wing people being put in charge. This would cause Fascism because...urm... well, it happened in Italy and Gramsci was from Italy and he was a great pal of Sraffa.

Anyway the really important thing is that Right Wing people should not come to power because then India might stop being shit. But, that would be Fascism! Thus to prevent Fascism, Socialists must have an arcane and incomprehensible 'critique' of Capitalism which would prevent its evils ever being ameliorated. That's why India must embrace Socialism- not to actually become Socialist coz that would be impossible for a shite country- but so as to avoid becoming a non shite country coz that would be Fascism.