Of course, the really smart people are trying to cross the border into North Korea so as to live a full and happy life.
Why is Utsa being so foolish?
The answer is that she is being so foolish because she is a fool. She doesn't understand basic Arithmetic- let alone Economic theory.
Thus she writes-
W A Lewis (1978) very clearly articulates the common misconception that there was higher land productivity in Britain, taken as representing the industrial nations in general, compared to the tropics and makes this idea the lynch-pin of his explanation of the great divergence among nations. The product wage in Europe was higher than in the tropics owing to allegedly higher yields, thereby migrants from Europe to new lands also showed higher product-wage than migrants from Asia to plantations. ‘the yield of wheat by 1900 was 1600 lbs. per acre as against the tropical yield of 700 lbs. of grain per acre’ (Lewis 1978, The Evolution of the International Economic Order’ p. 14). But there is a fallacy in the comparison Lewis makes, because ‘productivity’ has no meaning without a uniform time dimension being clearly specified, which he fails to do.This is nonsense. Productivity is output divided by man hours. Europe had higher productivity because fewer man hours produced food. This meant that people were freed up to do other things- e.g. work in factories, mines, construction etc- while continuing to eat well.
Over one year, an acre of land in Britain may well have produced 1600 lbs of wheat but it could produce nothing else since there was only one growing season in cold temperate lands.This meant that people were only needed for agricultural work at specific times. They could use the rest of their time in some productive way. The result was that they had more to eat and a higher standard of living.
In the tropics crops can be produced all the year round.But at the price of continual labor.
Over the same one year, an acre of land in the tropics produced not only 700 lbs of grain but also a second crop - either another crop of grain, or cotton or jute or vegetables, plus often, a third crop of gram or lentils.All of which was labor intensive and which led to 'agricultural involution'- i.e. more and more people employed in growing a relatively stagnant amount of food. The result of this involution was plain to see. In some parts of India, people were getting shorter and shorter in the Sixties and early Seventies. There was widespread malnutrition. It has been suggested that most Indians were no better off, at least in terms of food, at the end of Nehru's rule than they had been in the time of Emperor Akbar.
The term ‘crop rotation ‘ in temperate lands refers to crops grown over successive years; while the same term in tropical lands refers to crops grown in successive seasons within the same year. Despite all technical change in the advanced countries, by 2007 India, with smaller cultivated area than the USA, produced annually a larger total tonnage (819 million tons) of all crops than the USA (644 million tons).But it used almost a thousand times as many man-hours. This meant that Indians- especially those actually growing the food- were far less well fed than Americans.
As for China, its even more intensive cultivation developed over centuries, and consequent high land productivity was legendary ; by 2007- China produced 1275 million tons adding up all crops from a total arable area less than two-thirds of that of USA – about double the latter’s output (Table 6).Both India and China grow more food when Indian and Chinese people have more money to pay for that food. But, it is still in the interests of both the Indian and the Chinese people to grow food using fewer man hours so that labor can be employed more productively and thus at a higher rate of remuneration.
China’s output per hectare was over three times that of the USA, while India’s was 1.4 times higher.Yet Chinese and Indian agricultural wages and profits were much smaller than that of American agriculturists. That is why the Chinese decided to move people from agriculture into industry and away from the countryside into new built Cities. India was not able to do this as effectively as China which is why its living standards have fallen behind.
Why does Utsa think industrialization is evil? The answer is she is frightened of something called 'dead labor'.
True, technical change in Northern agriculture meant much higher output per worker or per head of population, but this was only achieved by substituting dead labour – fertilizers and machinery- for living labour, which require large inputs of fossil fuels to produce and to operate respectively.So she admits that countries which industrialize have higher living standards but she thinks this is very evil because it means 'dead labor' is running amok- a veritable Zombie apocalypse. Perhaps she also thinks it is wrong for there to be a compound rate of interest. Usury is evil because it means 'dead money' can increase and multiply like livestock.
The ‘energy balance’ namely the ratio of the energy embodied in all the inputs required to produce a unit of final output, to the energy obtainable from that unit of final output, is more unfavourable in temperate lands and the ratio shows a rise over time.Countries with a high standard of living are very evil because they use more fossil fuels or else rely on the 'dead labor' represented by Wind Power or Solar Energy panels.
The path of virtue is agricultural involution. Everybody getting shorter and less and less and less well nourished while working on the land.
Not only W A Lewis but most other writers completely ignore the growing import dependence of today’s advanced countries on cheap primary imports from tropical lands, used for diversifying their consumption baskets and output structure.If so, they also ignore the growing import dependence of today's laggard economies on technologically advanced goods and services- including the military hardware needed to secure one's borders.
The Govt of India spent a lot of money sending people like Utsa to Oxford and Cambridge and Harvard and Stanford. Why did it do so? It is because such places were educationally superior. This represented an 'invisible' import.
They show little awareness of the tremendously important role reexports of tropical goods played in boosting the global purchasing power of exports from these countries.Why show any awareness of it at all? The fact is Belgium's chocolate exports represent about 200 dollars per head of its population. The Ivory Coast, the biggest exporter of Cocoa, gains much less than that. Even using child labor, many cocoa farmers are barely making a dollar a day. Why does Belgium do well out of chocolate while the Ivory Coast barely breaks even? The answer is that Belgium has a lot of 'dead labor' and is not afraid to use it. The Ivory Coast would do equally well if it had as much 'dead labor' and a flourishing entrepreneurial class.
This is not to say that a country can't simply loot and rob another country. The trouble is there are diminishing returns to looting. No country has been able to sustain prosperity purely by predatory means.
Global patterns of specialization of production were deliberately engineered, were maintained by force exercised through direct political control under colonialism, and were very far from the model of voluntary specialization and exchange leading to mutual benefit, expounded in David Ricardo’s fallacious theory of comparative advantage.Utsa says in a footnote- Whatever Ricardo’s own position may have been, the subsequent use made of his theory leads to apologetics. The trade in wine and cloth between Portugal and England was not owing to ‘comparative advantage’ which was not even definable for England which could not produce grape wine, but resulted from Britain’s naval and diplomatic dominance over Portugal allowing it to extract the Methuen Treaty in 1703 giving nonagricultural market access.
Utsa has lived in England. She could have seen for herself that grapes do grow even in the Shetlands. The British wine industry dates back to the Roman era. It was dealt a death blow in 1860, long after Ricardo's death, when Palmerston cut the duty on imported wine by over 80 %. However, there was a small revival from about 1973 onward.
Utsa thinks the British forced the Methuen Treaty on Portugal. The fact is Portugal's alliance with France was foolish. It endangered its most valuable possession- Brazil. In any case England was an old ally. English cloth could enter Portugal duty free while Portuguese wine had to pay a third less than French wine. This was a good deal for the Portuguese. Port became the Englishman's staple, though the Scots continued to swear by Claret.
Ricardo's theory of Comparative advantage only has salience in free and voluntary exchange. It does not apply where there is either slavery or ethnic cleansing. In the latter instance, a people with an absolute advantage in warfare may wipe out or wholly enslave an indigenous population.
The philosopher Jason Brennan, wrote a foolish article some years ago claiming that if an advanced race from another planet came to earth, then there would be peaceful trade on the basis of comparative advantage. He was wrong. If habitable planets are scarce, the aliens will wipe us out and use the earth's resources in the most productive manner they can devise. Earth's best bet, is to threaten to blow up the planet if humanity isn't given some slender hope of survival.
It is important for countries to be able to defend themselves- perhaps as part of a global alliance. Failure to do so means your people may be enslaved or replaced. However, national defense requires technological savvy and sensible economic planning. Screaming loudly that one is being raped and beaten is no deterrent.
England raised productivity in agriculture and industry and 'invisibles' like Naval transport. This meant higher wages and a booming population which was ready to relocate so as to have an even higher standard of living. One result was that England ceased to fear a foreign invasion. It could play a bigger and bigger role on the Continent while simultaneously making itself the greatest Naval power the world had ever known.
Utsa thinks differently.
Why did the Chinese not colonize Australia or South Africa? It was because they weren't interested in overseas trade. They paid a great price for this insularity. It is noteworthy that China's 'Belt and Road' policy has many similarities to the maritime and geopolitical strategies of the British Empire during its heyday.
The real reason for higher Australian or South African wage than in China, were very different. Britain appropriated the entire Australian land mass relegating its original inhabitants to the same fate as it had the Amerindians, while it followed an equally exclusionist policy vis a vis the indigenous black population in South Africa, appropriating their best lands and relegating them to ‘homelands’.
These vast areas permanently grabbed through a process of primitive accumulation were used for exporting Britain’s criminal underclass and later for settling emigrants.But the Han population of China had expanded in a similar manner within China. Unfortunately, its Emperors were insular in their thinking. They feared losing control over their subjects if they could go and settle on distant islands or continents. The Japanese made a similar mistake. But Japan repented its folly and took another tack. More recently South Korea and China have followed suit.
It is easy enough to understand the strong impetus to emigrate from Britain, a country which could not feed its people at the same level by 1850 as it had in 1700.Britain's population had boomed precisely because it could feed its people at a better level in 1850 than in 1700. Indeed, British agriculture was coming into its Golden Age. The 'Agricultural Depression' Oscar Wilde's characters complain off dates from the 1880s.
To fill the consumption gap Britain colonially exploited Ireland so severely that it caused a massive famine, carrying off one-eighth of the Irish population in 1846-7 and initiating a long period of demographic collapse.Britain did not need to 'fill a consumption gap'. It had the money to pay and there were plenty of willing sellers. The Irish famine affected people speaking a different language and following a different creed. Their population had boomed thanks to the cultivation of the potato. It collapsed because of the potato blight. No doubt, England's policy was a blunder as well as a crime. However, no one has ever suggested that exigent circumstances forced the hand of the British. It was not the case that Ireland was starved so England could eat.
The high ‘product wage’ of emigrants from Europe was not because of high productivity in England or other European countries, but because of land-grabbing and resource–grabbing on a scale never seen before in history, which gave an endowment per household to the settlers which was usually far larger than they had commanded in their home countries where they were either land-poor or entirely landless.Emigrants from 'high product wage' countries would only go to places where the product wage was even higher. They didn't go- as some poor Italians or Portuguese did- to Cuba to toil in the cane-fields.
Still, not all emigrants did equally well. J.K Galbraith, as Ambassador to India, pointed out that some poor Whites in Appalachia were worse off than the Punjabi peasant. But the Americans addressed that problem soon enough. The Punjabi was still better off emigrating to America.
The human cost to indigenous populations was very high especially in the Americas.It is because the human cost of being conquered is so high that countries need to adopt a rational Defense and Diplomatic policy. This involves raising the productivity of one's people by cultivating the gains from trade and the division of labor. The first step is to end agricultural involution and move people from the countryside to jobs in factories in the Cities.
To sum up, the failure of capitalist agriculture in Northern countries has not been recognized at a conceptual levelbecause it isn't true. Capitalist agriculture in Northern countries has succeeded in an extraordinary manner. Holland earns 2000 dollars per head from its net agricultural exports. It is the second biggest food exporter by value. Smart Indian Agronomists are keen to learn from the Dutch. According to Utsa, these Indians are very stupid. Netherlands is not exporting any food at all. Capitalist Agriculture has failed in that country. If its people are well fed it must be because they are getting up in the middle of the night and raiding the kitchen cupboards of poor people in Africa.
and a large part of the reason is that this failure did not constrain their industrial expansion.Industrial expansion is only constrained by whether people will pay good money for your stuff. If they do, you can buy enough food for your workers. Obviously, if your goods can reach people who want them then, on the return journey, food can be brought back.
But this lack of constraint itself arose solely from the forcible access they acquired to tropical lands with their superior productivity and bio-diversity.Switzerland industrialized. What 'forcible access' did it have to tropical lands? Germany industrialized before it got its hands on any African colony. So did Sweden.
By contrast, Portugal had plenty of 'forcible access' to tropical lands. Yet it did not industrialize and lagged behind.
More rarely they also acquired access to temperate colonies – of which only Ireland remained by the 20th century, the only region in Europe to have halved its population over less than a century after the colonial exploitation induced the shock of the great famine of 1846-7.The Irish emigrated. Indeed, even after Independence, the population fell. It was only after the rise of the Irish 'Knowledge economy' that the population began to rise. Cultivation of the potato had caused a population explosion between 1780 and 1840. The peak population of what is now the Republic of Ireland was about 6.7 million. The section of the population which relied upon the potato suffered terribly during the blight. Currently, the Irish population is not expected to rise above 5 million. One reason is that the Irish are very well educated and go where the best jobs are. It may be that post-Brexit, Ireland will emerge as a major competitor to the City of London. In that case, their population may grow substantially.
As advanced countries enjoyed more and more diversified imports-based consumption baskets, the availability of food grains for third world populations declined.This only happened if their populations increased without any accompanying increase in productivity. This is the miserabilist feature of agricultural involution.
This inverse relation, namely rising primary exports and decline in food grains output /availability, can be established very firmly on the basis of the historical data.Nonsense! Correlation is not causation. What can be established is that if very poor people engaged in subsistence agriculture have lots of babies then those babies will grow up to be very very poor.
Nutritional decline and in extreme cases famines were the result – this is the most important adverse impact of export-oriented growth and it is a result in present-day India and China as well : both countries have seen deteriorating average nutrition in the last fifteen years accompanying high GDP growth.This woman is utterly mad. The Chinese are much better fed now than ever before precisely because they tackled the population problem. Most Indians are also better fed because they have more money to buy food.
Famines were the result of population explosions under miserabilist conditions of agricultural involution. It is sheer stupidity to think that very poor Irish people feeding themselves on potatoes on marginal land were starved to death by 'export oriented growth'. The truth is there was a potato blight.
The great Chinese famine occurred under Communism. So did the Ukrainian Holodomor. Communist Agricultural policies are universally judged to be greatly inferior to Capitalist ones.
Utsa didn't get the memo. She thinks The Chinese were well fed in 1960 but are going hungry now that they are a middle income country.
The reason is not far to seek. Land is not a product of human labour – as Karl Marx had pointed out in a striking formulation, therefore the ‘price of land’ is an irrational category.WTF? How is the price of land 'irrational'? It is scarce and thus commands a price based on supply and demand.
What we understand as the ‘price of land’ can only be the capitalized value of the product of the land or of capitalized value of the income to be drawn from the land.What stupid Marxist nutjobs understand is precisely nothing about any Economic process. That is why Marxism failed.
Land, not being itself a product of human labour, cannot be augmented at will, it cannot be ‘produced’.Much of Mumbai is built on land reclaimed from the Sea. Holland has all those dykes into which little boys are constantly sticking their fingers. Marshes can be drained. There is even talk of 'sea-steading'.
Greater external demands on a developing country’s limited land simply means that less is available for satisfying the needs of the local population.Poor people having lots of babies means that the needs of the local population can't be met unless those poor people get jobs making stuff which can be exported in return for imports of food and raw materials.
And if the purchasing power of local populations can be restricted through heavy taxation and measures of fiscal compression,how can you tax people who have nothing? Poor countries can't raise much in taxes. India, like most of the world, was very poor. Perhaps ten percent of GDP could be taxed. But the cost of collecting taxes was so high that the surplus might be 3 percent. If the country continued to stagnate under conditions of agricultural involution, that 3 percent became less and less attractive.
so much the better for the advanced countries which can then access the productive capacities of these foreign lands simply through the market, which responds only to purchasing power and not to needs. Indian and other developing country lands then produce more and more products for filling up supermarket shelves in the North at the expense of less and less food and basic staples for their own populations.But those populations continue to grow. India will soon become more populous than China. However, more industrialized and urbanized parts of India have achieved demographic transition. Only if the rest of India catches up will the country escape a Malthusian trap.
If Utsa is correct then there is some part of India where you will see a lot of very thin people. You ask them 'why don't you grow some food for yourself?' They reply 'we do grow food. But that food is bought by MNCs who ship it to America or Europe. We are left with nothing.' You can then shoot a video on your smartphone showing these very people filling up sacks with the food they grow and handing it over to the representative of a Multinational. Post this video on Youtube. It will cause a sensation.
Why has this not already been done? The answer is because the thing is not happening anywhere in India. Only some stupid Marxists believe such a thing is possible.
This is not to say that poor people in poor countries don't sell any agricultural produce to MNCs. They do so and then have lots of babies and end up poorer than ever. The way forward is to move up the value added chain- Ivory Coast could produce its own chocolate- and to industrialize, urbanize and encourage demographic transition to avoid a Malthusian trap.
Utsa has a bizarre belief that 'unemployment can be exported.
The early industrializers overcame the problem of growing unemployment inherent in their capitalist growth and technical change, simply by exporting their unemployment abroad, an option which is not open in any serious way to today’s large labour surplus economies like India and China.Sheer nonsense! The early industrializers overcame the problem of labor shortage by importing workers from agricultural areas or poorer countries.
The same thing is happening in India. The country attracts migrants from Bangladesh and Nepal. China- like Japan and South Korea- is also attracting migrants. This does not mean that there is no demand for Visas to wealthier countries in either India or China.
The export of unemployment took place through colonization and imperialism and appeared in multifarious forms.Nonsense! People quit lower paying jobs for better paying jobs even if this meant moving abroad.
Unemployed people were welcome to starve or enter the Workhouse where they'd be set to some menial task and segregated from their spouses so as not to keep having babies.
The most direct form of export of unemployment was the physical migration of population.The vast majority of those who 'physically migrated' were not unemployed. They had jobs and hence had marketable skills. They relocated in the expectation of higher wages and a better standard of living. No doubt, there were also 'charity cases' as well as special measures for Scottish crofters or Irish peasants and so forth. However, these people were previously employed under conditions of agricultural involution.
The precondition for this was the seizure of enormous tracts of land by the West Europeans from indigenous peoples in the Americas, South Africa, and Australia, and their permanent occupation by the immigrants.The precondition for the seizure was Naval supremacy. Without it, ships carrying emigrants would have been captured by pirates who would sell the survivors into slavery.
The precondition for Naval supremacy was being smart enough to master sailing and to find ways to make the activity profitable.
Those who did not meet this precondition suffered. That is why, smart people in Japan and then South Korea and China and so forth, placed so much emphasis on ship building and improving transport infrastructure. India did not because it had stupid Marxist economists who thought whining about Whitey was the best way to defend the country.
As the unwilling recipients of the export of unemployment from today’s advanced countries, India the former colony and China the former semi-colony, had ended up by the mid-20th century with mass povertyfor a purely Malthusian reason
and with significantly tertiarized economies -a higher share of services and lowered share of both agriculture and industry in GDP- compared to their initial states.the lower share for agriculture and industry was because of irrational economic policies which strangled enterprise and required a vast bureaucracy and- in the case of China- plenty of secret-policemen and prison guards.
They inherited very high levels of unemployment and under-employment,which increased for Malthusian reasons.
which became a matter of serious concern as they sought to pursue an independent path of national development. The choice of techniques question was much discussed in the early decades, the 1950s and 1960s, and it was recognized in both countries that industrialization with employment generation meant ‘walking on two legs’, to borrow Mao Zedong’s words - capital intensive heavy industries and intermediate goods production had to be built up from scratch or expanded, there had to be a simultaneous thrust for expansion in labour intensive segments of manufacturing including small-scale and village industry, and for all this to occur in a non-inflationary way agricultural growth had to accelerate to provide the required wage goods and raw materials. This was the rationale for giving priority sector status to small scale industry and agriculture in India as regards credit.Mao was crazy. He believed some Russian cretin's claim to have discovered a way to grow much more food. He also thought steel could be produced in village backyards. Mao's stupidity triggered a great famine.
Nehru's India also went a big a crazy from the time of the Second Plan. Everybody knew that the country should take the Japanese path- i.e. start from textiles and then move into higher value added knowledge based industries. Moreover, the Mill owners who would benefit had bankrolled Congress. Yet this path was not taken for a purely political reason. Delhi was afraid that the balance of power would shift to Ahmedabad and Mumbai. Thus the bureaucracy had a vested interest in pretending to be both Marxist- so as to get control of heavy industry- as well as Gandhian- so as to promote power-looms over the big Mills. Agriculture didn't get anything initially. Only later on, when it became clear that dependence on American PL480 shipments meant having to back them on Vietnam, did Agriculture- in certain areas- get assistance.
However, the licence-permit Raj continued to strangle the economy and so India, like Mao's China, groaned while a small class of stupid Leftists preened themselves on their ideological purity.
However though the fastest expanding segments of manufacturing output in the first 15 years of Indian independence logged 9 percent annual growth rate, the associated employment growth was only 3 percent. It was already very clear and widely recognized that no visible net shift of the workforce out of agriculture could be expected even at such high manufacturing growth rates.Thus the Planning Commission should be wound up. It would be enough to just have a 'Niti Aayog'- i.e. a bunch of Economic advisers. It was silly to pretend that India could go down a Stalinist path. Anyway, its economists were as stupid as shit. However, it had a smart entreprenurial class- people like Ambani- who could raise capital and employ it effectively even if doing so meant having to grease a lot of hands.
Subsequently the elasticity of employment with respect to manufacturing output has been falling steadily and especially sharply after liberalization in the 1990s for obvious reasons.The obvious reason is India's crazy Labor laws. Add in all the red-tape to do with land acquisition and environmental clearance and it is a wonder that India has any manufacturing sector worth the name.
China went in the other direction. It also invested heavily in infrastructure. But, if it hadn't tackled the population problem, there would have been no great divergence from India.
Maintaining competitiveness by firms in a trade- and- investment open economy entails adopting the latest technology and the loss is in terms of employment generation.Nonsense! There are economies of scope associated with the latest technology. It enables new markets to be tapped. Look at Silicon Valley. Why has its population risen, not fallen? By contrast, zombie firms (which the Indians call 'sick industries') utilizing obsolete technology cause structural unemployment. They take up resources which ought to be more efficiently allocated.
Additionally the thrust of neo-liberal reforms is always towards retrenchment of labour and ‘downsizing’ with a total ignoring of the impact of this on aggregate demand and hence on the inducement to invest.Who wants to invest in a plant where the permanent employees smoke dope and play cards in the factory? A Leftist British Sociologist has written a book describing just such conditions in a Tata plant in Jamshedpur. It is India's crazy labor laws which deter investment.
The combination of the two factors has led to near-zero impact of manufacturing growth on employment while for organized industry there is absolute job-loss, as is well established by now.Because of crazy Labor laws backed by nutters like Utsa.
It was amply clear from the 1960s that industrialization even at a respectably high rate could not make any substantial dent in the unemployment and livelihoods problem especially for the rural millions.Because bureaucrats, or Oxbridge trained Economists, were as stupid as shit and very very bad at allocating resources. By contrast, there were plenty of smart Indian businessmen who, however, had to go overseas to achieve success because of India's stupid 'licence-permit' Raj or, later on, its stupid labor and land laws.
While there was never any conscious strategy of mobilizing labour for capital formation in India, an expansionary fiscal stance up to the 1980s including expanding rural development expenditures, and a system of market intervention via state procurement or commodity board procurement of crops at prices covering production costs, were together conducive to maintaining reasonably buoyant levels of activity and inducing private investment, so that employment in rural India was expanding faster than the labour force up to the early 1990s.But, this was not sustainable. The country ran out of foreign exchange. The IMF put a gun to Narasmiha Rao's head. Manmohan Singh took advantage of this opportunity to scrap a lot of stupid laws. However, because Leftists like Utsa had entrenched themselves, he could not or would not tackle India's stupid labor laws. Even Modi has fought shy of doing so. Thus, the economy is faltering. Catching up with China seems a distant dream.
Utsa believes poverty is caused by rich people stealing from poor people. Everybody else thinks that poverty is caused by very poor people having lots of babies who will be very poor themselves.
Globally Capitalist Accumulation produces Poverty at one pole and Riches at the other Global interdependence in the past produced in today’s developing countries, falling nutritional standards and even famine, on the one hand,if there was rapid population growth under conditions of agricultural involution.
and promoted underemployment and unemployment on the other.Only if the unemployed were given enough to eat. Otherwise they either starved or migrated or found employment.
Utsa is describing Malthusian poverty but is trying to pass it off as Marxist in some way. But Marx said only a person who is employed can be exploited. This is because he is paid less than he produces. The 'surplus value' accrues to the Capitalist. How can you exploit the unemployed or the subsistence farmer? How is it a rich man's fault if poor people keep having babies who will themselves be poor?
Global interdependence in the current era is producing exactly the same outcomes, the moment the attempt to follow autonomous development trajectories, was given up by developing countries under the onslaught of the hegemonic dogmas of finance capital from the late 1970s.But those developing countries had already turned to shit because they borrowed money and pissed it against a wall. 'Hegemonic dogmas' means 'we won't lend unless you pay back what you owe'. It isn't something sinister at all.
Leading advocates of high growth in advanced and developing countries alike have tried to obfuscate and mask these adverse welfare outcomes by putting forward fallacious theories, but these negative welfare outcomes are so obvious and so blatant, that all they succeed in doing through their apologetics is to intellectually discredit themselves.It is certainly true that Development Economics was and is utterly worthless. Its 'leading advocates' were disintermediated from policy planning long ago. If Sukhamoy Chakraborty was made Planning Chief it was only because he would do Sanjay's bidding without question.
It is a little difficult to explain away over one hundred thousand farmer suicides in India since neo-liberal economic reforms and trade liberalization started from the mid 1990s, as a positive result of high growth.It is very easy to explain these suicides by purely Malthusian methods. Farmers who have a lot of babies, have to split up their land when those babies grown up and start having lots of babies. Thus lots of farmers don't have economically viable holdings. They have a miserable life. Thus they kill themselves. Sometimes the family gets some monetary compensation or, at least, its debts are written off.
It is more than a little difficult to explain declining per head daily energy (calorie) intake and similarly declining average protein intake in both rural and urban India, as a positive effect of ‘dietary diversification’.It is very easy to explain it by pointing to rapid population growth amongst the poorest, least educated, sections of the population. The better off have fewer children. They educate them. The positive effect of 'dietary diversification' is easily visible in their progeny. My grandmother was 5 foot tall. Mum was 5 foot four. My sister was 5 foot ten. Why? One reason is that Granny had 4 children. Mum had two. My sister and I have only one child each. We represent a declining portion of the population. However, as poorer Indians get a chance to move out of agriculture, they too stop having lots of kids. Instead they have just one or two and spend money educating them.
It is hardly a credible proposition, which is officially put forward and continues to be reiterated, that over the same period that agricultural incomes became stagnant and unemployment rose sharply in both rural and urban India, poverty as officially estimated, registered substantial decline.It is perfectly credible. Farming families supplement their agricultural income by sending family members to earn in the Cities. They also find other niche activities in their own locality. But this also happens in America and Europe and China and everywhere else.
Higher unemployment is itself a sign of increased prosperity. Often, the unemployed person supported by the family has a superior education. He or she can make herself useful in various ways. Some, especially females, may fall out of the labor pool altogether. Others may 'settle' for a more menial job. That is why so many people with Post Grad qualifications apply for jobs as peons in Government offices.
The truth of the matter is that capitalist accumulation has never taken place within closed economic systems.The world is a closed economic system. Capitalist accumulation has taken place there.
The historical conditions for the industrial transformation of today’s advanced nations, lay in the primitive accumulation they practiced vis a vis other nations and regions, through direct seizure of resources by means of force.Primitive nations also seized resources by means of force. So did wolves and tigers. The historical condition for industrial transformation had to do with smart people doing smart things. Utsa doesn't get this. Why? Marxism has rotted her brain.
Without primitive accumulation on this scale their poorly endowed temperate lands were incapable of meeting the wage good and raw material needs of their own industrial growth.How come Switzerland is rich? What about Finland? Why was Salazar's Portugal so poor? Utsa is talking nonsense.
This resulted in initially in decimation of entire populations and subsequently in their enthrallment and exploitation producing declining nutrition and famine.What decimation did India experience? It had Malthusian famines before and after the Raj established itself. The last big famine in the subcontinent happened in Bangladesh when Utsa was studying Econ. at Oxford. How was it Whitey's fault?
The labour displacement caused by the mechanization associated with industrial transformation, far exceeded any notion of a normal ‘reserve army of labour’ and only their ability to export unemployment staved off acute social and political tensions.Sheer idiocy! The British population grew by leaps and bounds and was supplemented by substantial immigration. Indeed, after India became independent, millions of Indians emigrated to Britain- as Utsa must herself have observed. Britain's industrialization meant importing employees not exporting unemployment. The same is true of America's industrialization.
At the other pole de-industrialization and unemployment resulted in the global South.Malthusian agricultural involution or corrupt and incompetent political leadership resulted in mass poverty even in China and South Korea. Industrialization is associated with political reforms and a 'circulation of elites' favorable to more rational economic and social policies. Urbanization, by itself, can greatly enhance life-chances- provided it is not chaotic or hopelessly corrupt.
After half a century of decolonization we find once more that a new phase of primitive accumulation has been launched with a more sophisticated ideology, under which developing country elites are offered integration with the global elite provided they collaborate with the economic and educational policies which will betray the interests of their own people and will once more subordinate the national interest to global capital.Utsa has a Doctorate from Oxford. She is integrated into a global elite. However, she is as stupid as shit and Indians ignore her completely. Thus her collaborating has no effect whatsoever. It merely confirms one's opinion that JNU should not receive a penny from the tax-payer. It is not fit for purpose.
Rosa Luxemburg’s brilliant insight in The Accumulation of Capital, that capitalist expansion at the core was always at the expense of destruction of the small –scale production of the peasant and the artisan not only within the core countries but at the global level, remains as true today as it was a century ago (Luxemburg 1963).It is as true today as it was because its truth content is still zero. Small scale production survives because it finds niche markets. However, there is a good reason why most people don't want to be self-employed. This is because there is a benefit from 'risk-pooling'. Essentially, the employee who is covered by a compulsory insurance and pension scheme, gains security and higher 'Permanent Income' because Knightian Uncertainty is reduced.
While the main emphasis in her work was on the question of creation of markets for realizing surplus value – which was indeed very important – I have in this paper stressed the question of past and continuing appropriation of land and resources.Luxembourg's work was not entirely silly. After all, the Boer War and the Russo-Japanese war had shown that 'International Financial Capital' could influence the Global Balance of Power. The Great War confirmed the suspicion that there was some force other than rivalry between crowned cousins which was at work undoing the old order. Still, Luxembourg's work could as easily be used to promote 'the Socialism of Fools'- i.e. Anti-Semitic Conspiracy theories- as it could to promote the Bolshevik brand of Evil.
By contrast, Utsa's paper is wholly cretinous. She thinks cold, northern, countries could never get rich on their own. They had to grab land from tropical countries. She does not explain why the people of the tropical countries put up no resistance.
The importance of the struggle for control over energy resources hardly needs to be emphasized. The new element is that with increasing uncertainty faced by advanced industrial nations over their control of global energy resources, there is a reversion to the land to provide energy just as was the case during the first industrialization: corn in the North and sugarcane in Brazil is being diverted on a large scale for producing ethanol. This has serious implications for food security in the South.Nonsense! Rampant population growth has serious implications for food security and access to drinking water and so forth. What the North does with its wheat or Brazil with its cane is wholly irrelevant. What matters is getting poor people to first make some money before making babies. They they will be able to afford to pay for food- which, more likely than not, will be grown within their own country.
Since the advanced countries today are even more dependent on the qualitatively superior productive capacity of tropical lands, over the last three decades they have made ever increasing demands on these lands to produce, apart from traditional tropical exports, a new range of perishable products from fruits and vegetables to flowers.Advanced countries are not dependent on shit-hole countries. The reverse is the case. The shit-hole country wants to buy cool stuff from the Advanced country. Its leaders want to buy property there and settle their families in those rich countries. So the shit-hole country is constantly trying to sell what little it produces to the Advanced countries. Meanwhile its population keeps growing so there is a Malthusian disaster just waiting to happen. The good news is that corrupt Governments can make money out of a famine because of all the utterly useless NGO executives who will fly in and monopolize the 5 star hotels and 3 star Restaurants and better looking hookers.
Most developing countries have succumbed to the demand to open up and engage in free trade.Why? Because they want to buy cool stuff they can't make for themselves.
This produced area diversion to export crops, led to decline in the food grains growth rate which fell below the population growth rate, resulting in falling per capita output and availability of food grains.So the problem is population growth rate- more particularly the fact that it was very poor people who were having the most babies. This meant they could not pay for food grains. This in turn meant that farmers had to produce cash-crops for which they could get paid.
In India per capita output of foodgrains which had been rising more or less steadily between 1951 and 1993, started falling thereafter under the new policy regime of trade-openness. By 2005 the entire gain of forty years after Independence, the rise of per head net grain output from 155 kg to 185 kg., had been wiped out.Did India's population fall as a result? Nope. It has gone up by more than 200 million. True, better transport and storage and so on means Indians get more food to eat. But this does not mean India can afford to neglect the population problem.
The inverse relation has been recreated with a vengeance since we find declining per head food grains output combined with fast growing per head exportables output in every important developing region ranging from India to countries in Latin America and the whole of Sub-Saharan Africa. Developing countries were urged to dismantle their domestic foodgrains procurement and distribution systems and purchase their requirement of grains from the global exporters. In India as agricultural output growth has slowed down drastically, far from larger imports, it is a larger net foodgrains exports which has emerged. This is owing to the contraction of domestic aggregate demand following from fiscal compression and rising unemployment.India's domestic aggregate demand has increased in nominal and real terms. However, because population growth is increasingly confined to the poorest and least educated Indians, the statistics give a misleading picture. Even the poorest are eating more but, since they make up a larger share of the total, it looks as though people are eating less. This is because those with a traditionally higher nutritional intake are a declining proportion of the population.
The National Sample Survey data show that per capita calorie intake, per capita protein intake, and per capita cloth consumption has fallen. The nature of growth in GDP has been such as to enrich a minority which is consuming much more, while a sufficiently large majority is eating so much less than before, as to lower the overall average consumption.There is no evidence that the poor are eating less. They are eating more and having loads of babies which means that the average is going down. This is a classic example of 'Simpson's paradox' in Statistics.
Utsa does not understand that if poor people get a chance to work in big factories then they will be able to buy more food- which will benefit farmers- and that they will also have fewer babies. The cumulative effect of industrialization and urbanization is to avoid a Malthusian trap and to have a well fed, stable, population.
Utsa is not interested in achieving this goal. She simply want to rant and rave at the rich who, she believes, steal food from the poor.
Consider the intellectual fraud she is practicing here-
In a critique of the proposition put forward by A.Deaton and J. Dreze (2002, 2005) that as per capita income rises cereal consumption falls, where they had claimed US cereal consumption per head as being lower than in India, I had pointed out (Patnaik 2010c) that this proposition is factually incorrect since US per capita cereal consumption, was more than five times the Indian level as Table 7 shows.Is this woman completely mad? Does she really believe Americans can digest 5 times as much wheat or rice as Indians?
What her 'Table 7' actually shows is that Americans eat less cereal but more meat. Utsa is including cereals fed to cows and hens and so on. This is illicit.
The widely –held misconception (an inverse relation between per capita income and per capita cereal consumption namely a negative income elasticity of cereal demand) that Deaton and Dreze articulated represents a fallacy of composition, in which the behaviour of only a part of cereal consumption namely direct consumption (which is indeed lower in US compared to India) is improperly taken as representing the behaviour of cereal consumption in general.Direct consumption is the only type of consumption known to Economics. It is a 'term of art'. Cereals used as an input for an industry are not classed as 'Consumption'. The output of that industry- the meat industry, in this case- is classed as Consumption.
Deaton & Dreze are right. Utsa is just being silly and playing with words.
Contrary to popular belief cereal consumption has a positive elasticity with respect to income – it normally rises when populations get better off and diversify diets towards more high-protein animal products. The only exceptions found are small insular nations that are habituated to consuming fish in preference to other animal products (Iceland, Fiji).Cereal consumption does not have positive income elasticity. Cereal output may do so if cereals are used to make Liquor or Meat or ethanol. However, rising prosperity may lead to a preference for organic, free range, meat fed on grass in which case cereal output may have a negative income elasticity.
What is Utsa's conclusion?
Capitalism cannot provide a solution to the unemployment problem or maintain living standards in advanced countries without constantly promoting higher unemployment and inducing greater poverty among developing country populations.Under Malthusian conditions, this is true. However, poor people can stop having babies before they have enough money to feed and educate them. Thus, there is a human solution to a human problem.
Alternative strategies of growth which preserve employment and livelihoods, are feasible in the small and are being implemented already in many local level experiments.However, they will fail soon enough unless poor people stop having babies who will themselves be poor.
In the large however, I believe that only a system- transcending change, which is not on the immediate horizon, can provide the answer; and such change must be theorized anew even when its realization appears to be remoteThe 'system-transcending' change is simple. Birth control. Get young women into factories so they can save up some money. When they marry, they will have just one or two kids. Then, as the kids grow up, they will return to work.
Stupid people, like Utsa, can theorize all they like. This is the only way out of the Malthusian trap.
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