Amartya Sen on Mrs. Thatcher's 'man-made' famine.

Is there any point measuring the prevalence of poverty or inequality in a nuanced, multi-dimensional way? Writing almost four decades ago, Amartya Sen argued that such metrics could be used to avoid humanitarian disasters even in rich countries- like the UK.

It can, however, be argued that such sharp declines are most unlikely in rich countries, and we can forget those possibilities. But that empirical point does nothing to preserve the basic adequacy of a conceptualisation of poverty which should be able to deal with a wide variety of counter-factual circumstances. Furthermore, it is not clear that such declines cannot really take place in rich countries. A measure of poverty should have been able to reflect the Dutch "hunger winter' of 1944-45, when widespread starvation was acute. And it must not fail to notice the collapse that would surely visit Britain if Mrs. Thatcher's quest for a "leaner and fitter" British economy goes on much longer.

Sen is making a valuable point. How would the Dutch people have been able to find out that they were starving to death under Nazi occupation if they lacked a proper conceptualization of poverty? They probably thought they were flourishing as never before. Similarly, Britain too lacked an adequate conceptualization of poverty, which is why the British people did not notice that millions of their countrymen had starved to death under Thatcher's brutal regime.

The tendency of many of these measures to look plausible in situations of growth, ignoring the possibility of contraction, betrays the timing of the birth of these measures in the balmy sixties, when the only possible direction seemed forward. 

 Sen does not mention that the Sixties was a period of rampant promiscuity and drug taking. This led to the adoption of flawed conceptualizations of poverty which, in the Eighties, caused widespread famine in Thatcher's Britain and Reagan's America.

Economists should stop getting high and promiscuously rutting. They should properly conceptualize poverty so as to prevent the recurrence of famine in wealthy countries.