Sen, Famine & Landesque capital

What is the cause of famine? There is a deficit in the amount of food available to a population relative to their biological needs. Summing up these individual deficits gives the total food availability deficit. To end famine, that amount of food should be made available to those experiencing deficit together with appropriate medicines and other needful relief.

This involves problems of provision and distribution requiring expert knowledge of the physical and social geography of the region. This is an essentially idiographic field requiring detailed knowledge of local conditions. The nomothetic approach of the mathematical economist can contribute little- indeed, as with Sen's work, it can  be actively misleading.

Sen may still believe, against all evidence to the contrary, that Bengal did not face a huge food availability decline in early 1943, but he admits that the only way to have broken the famine would have been to make massive amounts of food available through a well functioning public distribution system. In other words, 'exchange entitlements' would only have become effective if food was made available for free or low cost. This being the case, why bother speaking of 'exchange entitlements' at all? We say- 'a man will suffocate if breathable air is not available'. We don't say 'a man's exchange entitlement to breathable air requires an availability of breathable air to be effective'.


What is the cause of poverty? The answer is that earnings or other income is low, uncertain or stagnant. The solution is improved mobility of factors of production, including Labour mobility which may be geographical, occupational, or social. Once again, idiographic knowledge is required to tackle the underlying problem. Simply writing an equation on a blackboard helps nobody.

Sen's nomothetic approach- which speaks of poverty as arising out of a 'capability failure' to translate 'Rawlsian primary goods' into the 'achievement of well being' is useless because nobody knows what a given person's capabilities actually are or what trade-offs might arise in developing them. Suppose I had thought I had the capability to be a rock star. Suppose my parents had bankrupted themselves financing my dream. Me and my family would now be very poor. What we chose to do instead was to seek the most remunerative employment within reach- sometimes investing a little money and time in educational or other credentials, if the expense seemed warranted. To do this successfully we were guided by those with idiographic knowledge of relevant labour markets. At first blush, this might appear to involve comparing incommensurables. After all, a Professor's job is different from that of a Civil Servant which differs in turn from that of an Accountant or Business Executive. Still, one can apply a weighting method to evaluate the different lifestyles represented by each career choice. In doing so, we need to ask how the situation is likely to change. Which career path will involve expanding life-chances? Which might abruptly terminate? This is not an exact science but one can look at earning trends and the underlying market conditions. Psychic benefits may be ephemeral and thus might be discounted. By contrast, Earnings can be measured. They are uni-dimensional. We can calculate what risk attaches to them and whether earnings are likely to rise or fall.

Rawlsian primary goods refer to

Natural primary goods: this category includes intelligence, imagination, health, speed etc.
Social primary goods: this category includes rights (civil rights and political rights), liberties, income and wealth, the social bases of self-respect, etc.

This is a multi-dimensional notion. What weighting should be given to 'imagination' as opposed to 'intelligence'? A guy who takes a lot of drugs might score badly on an I.Q test. On the other hand, he may be very imaginative. Who is to say that, in this context, taking drugs did not enhance his well-being though he is practically unemployable?

 How do we trade off 'income' against 'the social bases of self respect?' I may gain respect and veneration if I become a monk. My economic output may, however, be zero. Who is to say that a society where most people are malnourished monks are not enjoying higher self-esteem than the more materialistic society which feeds those monks by exporting PL 480 food?

Dimensionality creates problems. It leads to McKelvey chaos. A meeting held to decide weightings will run into the problem of agenda control. He who controls the agenda can achieve more or less any outcome he likes. Thus, back in the Seventies, some Indian economists- to curry favour with the briefly dictatorial Indira Gandhi- tried to make out that India was a developed country. Whitey was being mean to us Brown people by saying we were as poor as shit and that our economy was stagnating. This was evil propaganda. Hadn't J.K Galbraith said that peasants in Punjab were better off than Rednecks in the Applachians? Furthermore, the life expectancy of a Black gangbanger in New York holed up in a crack-house was lower than a non crack addict in Kerala. Furthermore, Indians had more imagination than the Americans because they kept having fantasies about winning the Visa lottery or being able to drink a decent Scotch or get allotted a telephone.

Poverty is not caused by 'capabilities failure'.  It is caused by low, uncertain and stagnating real earnings. Capabilities may include earnings but it also includes a lot of irrelevant shite so noise can drown out signal. During the Cultural Revolution, the social standing of teenage girls in Cities rose relative to middle aged male Professors and Technocrats. The girls could organize the beating and humiliation of such men. But this increased their poverty. It lowered their life chances. Had Mao's widow and the Gang of Four managed to seize power, many millions of Chinese women who have risen out of poverty would have starved.

A Society may rise up out of poverty using measures which decrease well-being in the short run. Others- like Chavez's Venezuela- may temporarily increase well-being while ensuring future poverty.
A nomothetic approach is misleading. Expert knowledge of the Society in question is needed. Sen's contribution is worthless when it is not actively mischievous.

Just as food availability is the only thing that matters when it comes to famine, so is real income the only thing that matters when it comes to poverty. But only idiographic measures of real earnings or food availability deficit, based on expert local knowledge, are useful. Nomothetic pi-jaw creates McKelvey chaos- i.e. pundits hoarsely shouting stupid, but emotive, slogans so as to gain agenda control.

Sen also talks about 'entitlements'- legally enforceable rights for which the State is obliged to provide remedies. These don't exist. States, unlike individuals, can change the law. Furthermore, bureaucracies can always find ways of evading their obligations. Here again an idiographic approach can be helpful. It can tell us whether a particular State has an incentive compatible mix of transfers. If it does, then entitlements are effective. A nomothetic approach can't make these sorts of judgments. It can't say 'it is silly for Scotland to have the sort of Right to Food administrative machinery that India has. There is no need for a special official to 'check that women are getting their fair share of the family rations' or that they have access to land to grow vegetables to feed themselves. After all, from a mathematical point of view, Scotland is the same as Southern Sudan. They only differ idiographically.

What about Sen's early work on the choice of technique? It too was nomothetic and based on purely mathematical reasoning.

Sen’s ‘Choice of Technique’ was a research work where he argued that in a labour surplus economy, generation of employment cannot be increased at the initial stage by the adoption of labour intensive technique.

This is sheer madness! Japan, Korea, the Asian 'Tigers'- every country which has come up has done so by first exporting labor intensive goods- like textiles- before accumulating capital and adopting capital intensive techniques.

He pleaded for adoption of capital-intensive technique in a developing country like India. His argument was that capital-intensive technique strengthens the economic foundation of the country which help in further expansion of the economy.

Capital intensive techniques require a lot of Capital- i.e. money. Poor countries don't have a lot of money. They can set up one or two capital intensive plants but then they run out of money. Moreover, those plants operate at a loss because they don't have external economies. When a machine breaks down in Dusseldorf, there's an expert repairman just down the road. If it breaks down in Bihar, that repairman has to be flown in at enormous cost.

Economic foundations are not strengthened by having one or two 'show piece' white elephants. On the contrary, the Economy is weakened.

Indians possessed idiographic knowledge that the State was bound to increase low or negative marginal product white collar employment because that's what voters wanted. Clerical jobs were prestigious and provided a hedge and a leg up for an entire extended family.

 Making stuff was not prestigious- because the productive portion of the population was preyed upon by corrupt officials and the muscle-men employed by local notables. India should have encouraged labour intensive industries which could choose techniques for themselves on the basis of idiographic knowledge. Sen, taking a nomothetic approach, thought that mathematicians working for the Planning Commission could make better decisions, After all, Economics is just math- right? It isn't about social and physical geography at all.

Consider Sen's notion of 'Landesque' capital- Wikipedia says-

The concept of landesque capital was first used in academic texts by economist Amartya Sen. It occurred in his 1959 thesis on the choice of techniques of agriculture for “underdeveloped countries”. Sen claimed that previous studies had failed to take into account the implications of such technical investments for non-wage economies with land as a dominant factor of production:

Once land is introduced in our analysis, we have to distinguish between two types of capital goods—those which replace labour (e.g., tractors) and those which replace land (e.g., fertilizers). We may call them, for the sake of brevity, “laboresque” capital and “landesque” capital respectively. 

... [O]ur experience seems to suggest that while investment in fertilizers,or in irrigation, or in pest control, increases yield per acre considerably(without replacing labor), investment in machines like tractors, threshing machines, etc., is useful mainly in replacing labor (without raising yield per acre).^[2]

Dams and canals for irrigation decrease the amount of arable land. They carry certain risks- e.g. of earthquakes or salinification. Fertilizers are produced in big expensive factories. They don't drop like the gentle rain upon the earth below. Tractors increase cropping intensity. They increase yield per acre.  Farmers buy tractors if it is profitable to do so. Assuming zero marginal cost of labour at harvest time, because brothers working in factories return home at this time, yield had to increase- as experience of the Green Revolution in North West India confirmed.

Sen's term was useless for economics but has found a life in the idiographic project of historical ecology to describe archaic features like hill terracing and traditional conventions for preserving bio-diversity.

No doubt, it was to preserve 'bio-diversity' that he got a Nobel and achieved apotheosis as an Academician.

Yet, Sen is the ultimate victim of Bengal's two Twentieth Century Famines. His intellectual inedia may have prolonged his life and reputation. But only because some bhadralok Bengalis still glory in this type of Famine as necessary and sufficient to underpin 'ontological meaning' (as Prof. Janam Mukherjee puts it) and thus sustain their peculiar Searlian 'Center of Social Ontology' whose 'background' is not sexual harassment but a more private, and puerile, intellectual incontinence whose dirty diapers are dissertations qualifying one to change the same in 'safe places' in America's declining Liberal Arts faculties.