This year, Bangladesh has overtaken India in per capita GDP. Why? It has followed the time tested strategy of getting girls out of involuted agriculture into big factory dormitories. By contrast, industry in India is hamstrung by paternalistic legislation while the Fiscal position remains dismal because of subsidies and populist handouts.
In an interview with a Harvard magazine, Amartya Sen- who contributed to India's disastrous economic policies- says-
I studied the Bengal famine of 1943, in which about 3 million people died. It was clear to me it wasn’t caused by the food supply having fallen compared with earlier. It hadn’t.
Yes it had. The 42-43 harvest was disastrously low. B.R Sen, the senior ICS officer in charge, warned of a terrible famine. Unfortunately, once Shurawardhy became Minister of Civil Supply, a famine became inevitable. By the time the 43-44 harvest became available, millions had been displaced and the effects of long term malnutrition and disease caused massive famine related death.
Sen has a crazy theory according to which any inflationary shock which results in real wages rising for some and falling for others can cause famine.
Elsewhere he wrote-
‘In a poor community take the poorest section, say, the bottom 20% of the population and double the income of half that group, keeping the money income of the rest unchanged. In the short run prices of food will now rise sharply,
Why should it? Supply of food is elastic. More food will come in. Real Prices may fall because of economies of scope and scale. Obviously, if there is a war or embargo and access to open markets is denied then there could be a food availability deficit. But Sen's shtick is that the supply side does not matter. Famine is demand driven.
Suppose food supply is not elastic. More food can't come in from outside. What happens? The answer is that the guys whose income has gone up drive up the price of food items with positive income elasticity- 'normal goods'- and this may mean those above them find the price of meat and fish and butter have gone up. However the demand for 'Giffen goods'- stuff only the poorest will eat- will have fallen. Its relative price will have come down.
In practice this is what happens when there is an economic upswing. The bottom tenth see no rise in money income. But some of the staples they purchase may be cheaper because those above them are now demanding better quality stuff.
since the lucky half of the poorest group will now fill their part-filled bellies.
Sen does not understand that protein and fat and sugar are substitutes for carbs. As income goes up, people have more meat and fish and sweets and butter and dairy. This means potatoes and bread etc. may get cheaper (if supply is inelastic).
The other side of the coin is that when one group's money income goes up it can buy services or offer transfers to the worst off. However, where there is a supply shock such that food prices rise and real wages fall, then the poorest lose the patronage of those less poor which means that, absent Government assistance, starvation beckons. But this is simply the effect of a food availability deficit. It is the supply shock which must be compensated for.
While this might affect the food consumption of other groups as well, the group that will be pushed towards starvation will be the remaining half of the poorest community which will face higher prices with unchanged money income. Something of this nature happened in the economy of Bengal in 1943.’ (Sen 1980 p 618)
Sen knows the price of rice went up a lot. He knew 'money income' was non existent for those at the bottom. Yet he says that ten percent ate twice as much rice which meant another ten percent had nothing to eat at all. How is this possible? One answer is that the employers obtained subsidized rice rations for the upper ten percent in the poor category so there was no 'substitution effect'. But why would they eat more rice? Were the afraid that they would get the sack if they didn't put on weight? Were employers prejudiced against slim people? Sen may say 'previously their bellies were half empty'. But if so, how could they perform the work they were paid to do? Furthermore, if they were receiving a subsidized ration, why did they not sell half of it at the black market price or exchange it for fish or meat or vegetables or dairy products? Sen may say 'Bengalis are rice eaters'. But he must have noticed that Bengalis eat other things along with their rice. Sen's genius is to suggest that working class Bengalis are cannibals in all but name. They greedily gorge themselves on twice as much rice as normal- paying very high prices to do so- simply in order to have the satisfaction of seeing their poorer brethren starve to death. Nirad Chaudhri said some very harsh things about Bengalis. Sen outdoes Chaudhri. Yet he is considered a 'Mother Theresa' of Economics. Why? Academic economists are fools.
What we had was [a] war-related economic boom that increased the wages of some people, but not others.
But those who died had no wages. The rural economy was not fully monetized. Furthermore, because of populist laws brought in by Fazl ul Haq, rural credit had collapsed. Moreover, with the Japs at the gate, the market for agricultural land- and thus ability to borrow- had been gravely affected.
Sen insists that the famine was demand driven. Affluent workers could pay higher prices. But, when prices double there is a psychological effect such that most people cut back. I recall buying less basmati when the price went up though as an economist I knew my demand curve should be inelastic because rice is a tiny portion of my total expenditure.
What actually happened was, those in the modern sector of the economy were getting subsidized rations provided by their employer or the Government. Still, consumption went down for psychological reasons. Nevertheless, the food availability deficit was so severe that even massive spending by the Revenue Department scarcely changed supply- though, no doubt, food was sucked in from Orrisa.
And those who did not have higher wages still had to face the higher price of food — in particular, rice, which is the staple food in the region.
J.K Sengupta, in the 50's calculated that about half of all rural consumption was non-monetized. This included payment in kind to service castes, dependents, and casual labor. The Government understood that a food availability deficit would lead to these types of people going hungry and the District officials were instructed to look for signs of distress amongst them. Such tell tale signs were all too visible but the Famine Code was not implemented though, here and there, some officials took ad hoc measures.
That’s how the starvation occurred.
No. The British had been able to prevent famine by implementing food for work and other measures in a timely manner. However, after 1937, elected Ministries were in charge. In Bengal, they were corrupt, incompetent, and blamed Hindus for hoarding and thus causing the famine. Why did Bombay and Madras and Karachi and so forth which saw a big war time boom not have famine? The answer is that the administration was less corrupt and incompetent.
Sen's theory of famine is mad. But then he warned that Britain under Thatcher might soon experience famine.
In order to do this research, I had to see what wages people were being paid for various rural economic activities. I also had to find out what the prices were of basic food in the main markets. All this required me to go to many different places and look at their records so I went all these distances on my bike.
This is crazy. 'Main markets' were inaccessible to the vast majority of the people. Their records were worthless because they would only record the official price not the going rate. Instead of biking around the place, Sen should have talked to people like B.R Sen or Wallace Aykroyd. He should have placed zero reliance on official figures because they bore no relationship whatsoever to reality.
The fact is, transitioning to Democracy in Bengal caused a big famine on two separate occasions- '43-'44 and the '74 Bangladesh famine. A food availability deficit should have prompted intensive relief efforts. Instead there was corruption and incompetence.
Sen is pretending that Economists can learn a lot by getting on their bikes. But anything they can learn in this manner can be better learned talking to an expert. Thus if you want information of a medical sort- speak to Doctors or local public health officials.
And when I got interested in gender inequality, I studied the weights of boys and girls over their childhood. Very often, it would happen that the girls and boys were born the same weight, but by the time they were five, the boys had — in weight for age —overtaken the girls. It’s not so much that the girls were not fed well — there might have been some of that. But mainly, the hospital care and medical treatment available were rather less for girls than for boys. In order to find this out, I had to look at each family and also weigh the children to see how they were doing in terms of weight for age. These were in villages, which were often not near my town; I had to bicycle there.
But this would not be a large enough sample and there is an obvious selection bias. The fact is Mums don't let visiting economists, or random dudes on bicycles, access to their little girls and boys.
GAZETTE: You were quite young during a time of tremendous political upheaval and change in India’s history. Violent clashes between Hindus and Muslims broke out before the British withdrew from India in 1947. What do you recall of that time?
I suppose Shurawardy's Direct Action Day and the North Indian Hindu retaliation is meant. This decided the fate of Calcutta which remained with India.
SEN: The British didn’t do much to stop the Hindu-Muslim riots. In fact, some people took the view that the British were actually encouraging these riots because that made them indispensable in India. So there were a lot of critics who saw the divide-and-rule policy as being the imperial policy.
Then they realized that without the Brits around, non-Muslims would be ethnically cleansed from Muslim majority areas. Tagore had predicted this.
GAZETTE: The violence erupted quite suddenly?
SEN: It did. There was very little Hindu/Muslim conflict until about the age 7 or 8 in my life.
I suppose Sen means the Dacca riot of 1941.
And then suddenly, it appeared from nowhere, but dramatically, strongly. It took over one’s life almost fully. You couldn’t go outside your home for [fear] of being assaulted. On one occasion, I must have been about 10 or 11, I was playing in the garden when I saw somebody had come in through the outside gates of our compound, a very stricken man who had been clearly knifed in the back, and he was bleeding profusely. He came to the house asking for help and some water. I went running around, getting water, getting my dad to take him to the hospital, which he did, of course. Unfortunately, they couldn’t save him. He still did die. He was knifed by some Hindu thugs. He was a Muslim laborer, therefore, a prey for Hindu thugs, just as the Hindu laborers were prey for Muslim thugs.
The Hindu were once once 30 per cent of the population of Bangladesh. Now they are 7 per cent. Oddly, though the Muslim population of West Bengal initially fell, it has more than recovered to 30 per cent.
I did talk with him a bit while he was getting weaker and weaker. He said with great sadness it was because the children had no food at home that he had to go out to get a little income — so he could buy some food for the children. For that, he lost his life.
No. He lost his life because he was suspected of spying for the Muslim League. As a matter of fact, most of the Hindus there would have to flee soon enough.
While the assailants and victims came from different religions, Hindu or Muslim, the victims were all from the same class, or nearly all.
Plenty of bhadralok landlords were killed. Tagore foresaw this which is why he wasn't keen on Nationalism.
They were poor laborers. Because they didn’t have any shelter at home, it was very easy to break into their homes, very easy to find them on the street, like this person who came to our house for help. Similarly, there would have been Hindu laborers being assaulted by Muslim murderers all over the city. It came suddenly around 1943, 1944, and after 10 years or so, it was gone. India was divided.
Ethnic cleansing did stop in India but it continued in Bangladesh such that the proportion of Hindus continued to fall into this century.
GAZETTE: Did that experience help shape your later career choices?
SEN: Yes, of course, it did.
Had Sen talked to experts like B.R Sen (to whom he was related) , he would have realized that both the famine and the ethnic cleansing arose from the same motive and had pretty much the same protagonists. But, if Sen had said so he would have looked like a sore loser- after all, his people had lost lives and property. So he used his stupidity to good effect as an economist. People felt sorry for him. They said to each other 'poor chap. He doesn't understand that his people lost because they were of the wrong Religion. Don't explain things to him. He'd get angry with the Muslims and join the Hindu Mahasabha. That will ruin his career.'
I was particularly involved in violence and premature death. In this case, it came from murder and criminal violence. In some other cases, it came from famines and people dying of starvation or from illnesses associated with famine. So I was concerned with this rather morbid aspect of human life. And then later on in my life, I did some work on that.
That 'work' was actively mischievous.
GAZETTE: Was economics an early interest?
SEN: I did not have much interest in economics when I was young. It developed much later. Academically, I was interested in math and Sanskrit and physics.
GAZETTE: What was the appeal for you?
SEN: I was reasonably good at math, and I liked doing it, so that was the main reason for doing math. I also liked abstract reasoning. So, along with my interest in reading math from India, where my knowledge of Sanskrit was a great help, I was interested in the early Greek mathematics also as to how, axiomatically, they pursued it.
I was interested in Sanskrit. I liked the language and still do, but I also enjoyed the fact that with my Sanskrit, I could both read great poetry, great novels, great plays in particular, but also great scientific and mathematical writings which were, in ancient India, in Sanskrit.
Yet Sen thought the word Niti means Justice, rather than policy. I suppose he thinks 'Neta' means Judge, not leader. Still, it's sweet of him to pretend that there are 'great scientific and mathematical writings' in Sanskrit.
When the Nobel committee after you get your prize asks you to give two mementos or two objects connected with your work, I chose two. One was a bicycle, which was an obvious choice. And the other was a Sanskrit book of mathematics from the fifth century by Aryabhata. Both I had a lot of use for.
Sen used to ride his Aryabhata to visit remote villages while reading his bicycle.
GAZETTE: You were 23 when you got your first position teaching college-level economics in 1956. How did you become interested in teaching?
SEN: I was very interested in teaching from the time when I was a student. I used to run a night school. We set up a night school for the tribal children. There were a lot of local tribal people who had no schools at all around their homes. So some friends and me started these night schools. There were three or four of us who were interested in that, and we used to go there from about the time of sunset — when we could work with lanterns. And on the weekends, on Sundays in particular, we did day classes. I taught math, mostly. And there were others who taught English and Bengali.
Sen could have stuck with teaching tribals. He chose not to.
GAZETTE: You come from a highly educated and privileged family. How did you first become fascinated with the economic conditions and choices of the poor?
In India, there was a well established tradition of wealthy people, and later the Government, giving some money and a lot of respect to 'educated' people who pretended to care about the very poor. Needless to say, they never actually helped the poor. Why? The only way to do so is to raise their productivity. But that might generate a profit- which is vulgar. The poor we must always have with us, otherwise Development Economics collapses.
SEN: I was always interested in the economics of the poor people. I was interested in the lives of people who were very short of income and prosperity — how do they cope? Mainly, as I ran the night schools, the people I was mixing with were students from the tribal villages in the neighborhood. They were very poor.
Thanks to India's stupid economic policies, soon almost everybody became very poor.
And we very often talked about how they earned their income or how their parents earned their income, and how do they manage, how do they plan their future, and all that.
So I got interested in that. And I didn’t think I would have much money to invest, and I didn’t. But I did think I might have a great deal of interest in the politics of poor people. So that played a big part in my getting involved with that kind of economics.
This is quite mad. The tribals wanted property rights and good quality government schools and dispensaries and so forth. They didn't want Sen-tentious shite.
GAZETTE: Your interest in politics started while you were a college student in Calcutta?
SEN: No, I think earlier. In Shantiniketan it started. The family was quite political because nearly everyone was interested in getting rid of the British Empire.
Once that enterprise wound up, the family would have to run away from East Bengal.
My father’s cousins, my mother’s brother and cousins, they were all getting arrested under what the British called “preventive detention.” That doesn’t mean they’re charged with any crime, and the government didn’t have to establish that they have committed any crime. But it’s a preventive detention that unless you detain them, they could cause crime. That was the idea. So I think among my parents’ cousins, I had about seven or eight people who were periodically in and out of “preventive detention.”
The alternative was extra-judicial killing- which is what happened to the Naxals in the late Sixties and Seventies.
GAZETTE: What were they worried about your relatives doing?
SEN: Basically, because they were writing essays saying why the British ought to go. I remember from the time when I was between seven and eight [that] I went with my grandfather and grandmother, who were trying to plead with this Indian, but British, civil service officer, asking, “Why have you kept my son in prison?”
But Fazl ul Haq- who supported the Pakistan resolution- was in power. Power had been devolved to the elected Premier. Still, the Brits were in charge of Defense and Foreign Policy. Thus, since War had been declared when Sen was about 7 years old, this cousin of his was probably saying Indians should oppose the war effort. That was the Communist line till Hitler invaded Russia.
To which this officer said, “Because he writes anti-imperial essays and op-eds in newspapers and magazines, and we have to make him stop doing it.” So my grandmother said, “But he has never committed any violence.” And this officer said, “No, and indeed, that is not the reason why he is in prison. But as soon as he stops writing anti-British raj essays, we would be happy for him to come out.” I was very impressed by this conversation [laughs], but I didn’t fully understand what else was going on.
What was going on was that the Communists switched sides once Russia was attacked. The Muslim League supported the war. After the Japs took Burma, Buddhists started killing Muslims in Arakan. The fear was this would spread into Chittagong. Meanwhile Congress bet on the Japs and launched Quit India. But then the Americans turned up and the tide of battle turned.
GAZETTE: After you graduated from Presidency College in two years, you went to Trinity College at the University of Cambridge in 1953. Tell me about that decision.
SEN:
My Calcutta degree was a BA degree, and the Cambridge people treated it as the “part one” of the BA degree. And I think they were right. It’s not a very high-level degree, but I had that, and I’d done well. So when I went to Cambridge, they said, “OK, you can do our three-year degree in two years.” So I did another BA in two years in Cambridge. And by that time, I was also doing relatively advanced economics of various kinds. There was a kind of gulf, because in Calcutta, I was quite used to doing rather technical economics, and suddenly, I found myself attending classes in Cambridge with people who had done very little technical economics.
The situation would have been the same if Sen had gone to America. Strange as this may seem, Calcutta was ahead or at least equal to most Econ Depts in Maths & Stats.
GAZETTE: You set out on an 18-day voyage by boat from India to England. Was attending Cambridge something you had always dreamed of doing?
SEN: It was originally my dad’s idea. When I was a student in Calcutta, I had what they call squamous cell carcinoma in my mouth. I had radiation treatment, and it destroyed a lot of the bones in the mouth. So it was a hard time. The doctors gave me a 15 percent chance of living for five more years; that’s all. But when I recovered from it, I think my father thought that it may be a good thing for me to go abroad. He was a teacher, but he had just about enough to support me for three years in England. Initially, I didn’t get in. But when I eventually got in, he was able to pay for it, including the boat trip.
Most Indians assume that Sen was a Government of India scholar. It is interesting that, like Spivak (who borrowed money from an Uncle), Sen got his start through a shrewd market decision. His father's investment paid off spectacularly. This may also explain the nature of Sen's product- it is nicely calculated to serve a globalized market of a virtue signaling type.
GAZETTE: Did Cambridge’s reputation in economics at the time draw you there?
Suppose he'd gone to MIT and then joined a MNC. The 'pay-back' on investment would have been quicker but Sen would have ended up adding economic value and thus would have felt bad about himself.
SEN: That’s right. There was a combination. I was going to do economics. At that time, Cambridge had the reputation of having the best department of economics in the world. That was one reason. It may not have been true, though, but people believed that. But I also was interested in mathematics, and particularly in the college I chose to go to, in Trinity College, there had been people whose influence was still there, like Bertrand Russell, [Alfred North] Whitehead, [Ludwig] Wittgenstein, and others who were interested in the philosophy of mathematics. I was interested in that. And I also had a lasting interest in politics, and there were a number of good thinkers on the left in Cambridge.
GAZETTE: Who were some of the people advising you back then?
SEN: One mentor was an Italian economist, Piero Sraffa. He was my director of studies, as they call him, so he was in charge of my education in Cambridge. And I got on very well with him. There was Maurice Dobb, who was a Marxist economist, and probably the leading Marxist economist in Britain at that time. And then there was Dennis Robertson, who was a conservative economist, but very amiable and friendly. They were great mentors of mine. I spent quite a bit of time chatting with them, and they were indulgent of me. Sraffa and I used to go out for walks after lunch on a regular basis, almost every other day. He liked chatting with me, and I did like chatting with him.
GAZETTE: What were the big economic debates happening at that time?
SEN: Among the conventional ones, there was a good debate still about whether unemployment could be kept away by Keynesian policies — by government expenditure and planned action.
This was silly because Western economies had tight labor markets. Moreover, Government's share of National Income had risen sharply and thus the value of the multiplier was low or, because of crowding out private investment, negative.
The Keynesian remedy for unemployment was one of the major debates on that subject. This was about a decade after FDR here, and, in economic theory, John Maynard Keynes in England had made a big difference to the thinking about unemployment — that you could eliminate it.
But I was also interested in the poor people’s economics, [people] who had nothing to sell except their labor because they don’t have any assets.
This describes most people in most places all the time.
How could they survive?
By getting wages or some minimal type of benefit provided by collective risk pooling or charity.
And what can you say about their economic studies? And what can you say about the issues being discussed very much now here, like minimum wages? That also made me interested in such subjects as the labor theory of value, because labor theory is very important for those who have only labor to offer to the market and hardly any assets.
This is mad. Suppose the only thing I can offer the market is my jizz. Would having a jizz theory of value help me in any way? No. Even if I argue that my jizz created the Milky Way and thus our Sun and our planet, nobody will give me lots of money. At best I might get a few coins by way of charity.
So I was generally interested in poor people’s economics. There was quite a lot of debate going on, and I liked joining in, which I did.
GAZETTE: How would you describe your politics then?
SEN: Definitely much left of center, but very keen on liberty and pluralism. That is, I thought the left had much better things to offer — this was true also in Calcutta, much earlier, before I came to Cambridge — had much more things to say. But what I disliked is that often they would regard liberty and giving people the freedom of choice — First Amendment, for example — to be a kind of bourgeois luxury, which I didn’t think it was at all. So I opted for the left, but with a lot of interest in liberty and freedom.
In other words, Sen opted for a Left which couldn't actually do anything because of liberty and freedom. One may as well opt for a Christianity without any God or Jesus or Saints or Churches.
GAZETTE: So much of your work has been pioneering.
But it has led nowhere.
Before you had become established, did people suggest that your career would advance faster, perhaps further if you focused on more conventional areas of economics?
But in that case Sen would have been competing with smart people. He would soon have been derided and chased away.
SEN: I didn’t spend too much time thinking about it, because first of all, as far as my small life is concerned, I was not having a difficult time. The college [had] elected me to a Prize Fellowship. For four years, I had no obligations. I could do what I liked, and I got an assistant professor’s salary, or what in Cambridge would be a lecturer’s salary. So I was doing quite well. My only problem was that I didn’t often have people working in a similar area who I could chat with about my own work. For that, I had to do some traveling. And I decided quite early in my life, when I had just finished my degree in Cambridge, that I will, every fourth year, go to America for a year and be a visiting professor. I was at MIT for a year, and I went to Stanford. I went to Harvard and then Berkeley. I was traveling and really enjoyed the interactions very much indeed. So it worked out all right.
No one can say that Sen hasn't sedulously fostered his own career.
GAZETTE: You left a prestigious teaching job in India to return to Cambridge to pursue a Ph.D. in philosophy. Why philosophy?
I don't get this. His PhD thesis was 'Choice of Technique' which is Econ, not Philosophy. Perhaps he was doing philosophy but couldn't find a supervisor. Or perhaps he wants to present himself as a professional philosopher.
SEN: I was always interested in philosophy. I had studied on my own a certain amount of philosophy, including Indian philosophy. When I became reasonably skilled in Sanskrit, I could read the old philosophical documents in Sanskrit.
Which ones? There is no evidence he has read anything at all in Navya Nyaya or anything else.
I was never really interested in religion very much, so these were non-religious subjects, especially epistemology and ethics. And I really enjoyed doing them, including philosophy of mathematics. I fully enjoyed doing them. But when the college suddenly said, “Now, for four years, you can do what you like. We’ll give you a salary,” I said, “This is a really good chance to do some philosophy systematically,” which I did.
GAZETTE: Who were some of the thinkers that influenced you in those days?
SEN: When I was in school, I was particularly involved in the philosophy of an Indian philosopher called Aryabhata. He was around 500 AD. He was a mathematician and an astronomer and a philosopher.
We know nothing of his philosophy- if he had one.
He was an expert on such things as the diurnal motion of the Earth, rather than the sun going around the earth.
Nonsense! He has a geocentric theory with epicycles
. युगरविभगणास् ख्युघृ शशि चयगियिङुशुछ्लृ कु ङिशिबुण्ल्ष्खृ प्राक् ।
शनि ढुङ्विघ्व गुरु ख्रिच्युभ कुज भद्लिझ्नुखृ भृगुबुधसौरास् ।। १.३ ।।
Translation:[3]
1. In a yuga the revolutions of the Sun are 4,320,000, of the Moon 57,753,336, of the Earth eastward 1,582,237,500, of Saturn 146,564, of Jupiter 364,224, of Mars 2,296,824, of Mercury and Venus the same as those of the Sun.
He was interested in the theory of eclipses. He was interested in the fact that since Earth is a round object, being up when you were on one side of the Earth was the opposite of being up on the other side of the globe. He was concerned with the relativity of your position compared with other positions on Earth you could occupy. Aryabhata and his follower Brahmagupta were also interested in gravity, in explaining why small objects are not thrown away as the earth rotates.
They thought the earth was a sphere at the center of the universe.
I spent quite a bit of time in my school days studying these Sanskrit puzzles, as to why this happened. These were mostly anti-religious, but rationalistic thinking. So they remained a part of my interest.
It may be that Shantiniketan didn't teach Physics and Maths properly. This poor fellow had to make do with Aryabhata.
When I came to Cambridge, they got gradually transferred into modern mathematical philosophy, like that of Russell and Whitehead and Wittgenstein and so on. But I also, by then, was getting interested in ethics and epistemology. In ethics, John Rawls was a big influence on my thinking. I read quite a bit of “Mathematical Logic,” particularly [Willard Van Orman] Quine, who was also here, and Hilary Putnam. These are people I read with great admiration and profit. I was reading more and more of their writings as I advanced. And eventually, I did some work that was influenced by their works.
Sen does not mention his great contemporaries- Kripke, David Lewis, Martin Lof etc- or the developments in the late Sixties and early Seventies re. Concurrency, Complexity, Computability etc.
GAZETTE: You focused on economic inequities between women and men when it was a relatively uncommon thing to do. What prompted you to examine those issues?
Feminism had emerged as a major force on Campuses from the Seventies onward
SEN: I was particularly struck by the fact that even in my school, which was a very progressive school, that the achievements of girls and achievements of women in general seemed to receive far less appreciation and acclaim than men’s work did. I also thought that some of [my women] classmates almost seemed to understate their own claim to fame because they didn’t want to generate a sense of nervousness among the men as to whether they are keeping up. And as a result, they end up understating their reasons for recognition. So I spent a bit of time thinking how we could make it more natural that women should be less modest. That was one of the reasons. The other is, I encountered all these big problems like missing women (that there are fewer women than there would be had they received equal care). Women do have a pretty bad deal in life, and that seemed to me to be an immediate reason for working on the issues of gender inequality.
Saying 'boo to gender inequality' will cause it to burst into tears and run away. The plain fact is that women may not care about 'recognition' in a shitty subject. But they do care about money. If they go into business, they will kick their weaker rivals in the testicles so as to dominate the market. That's a win win for society. The more efficient entrepreneur gains economies of scope and scale while useless tossers have to get a teaching gig.
I’m planning to do a book on gender. There should be one in about a year or two. There are so many different problems people get confused that I thought I might put together the problems that make up gender disadvantage. It will draw on prior research, but there will be a number of new things in it.
GAZETTE: Your work seems to address, either directly or indirectly, issues of social justice. Where does that come from?
My work addresses the Cosmos with my Milky Way.
SEN: I’ve always been interested in issues of social justice, even in my school days. And it continued when I was in Cambridge. Earlier I talked about Piero Sraffa mainly as an economist, but he was interested in philosophy, too, and he was very concerned with issues of justice.
The trouble with Sraffa was that he used used logic to show the incoherence of economics even though by its nature economia is the enemy of akribeia- logical precision. But this just means economics is nonsense- unless it is useful. But what is nonsense can't be the foundation of justice or anything else. What is useful may be yet more useful if there is a law court to adjudicate incomplete contracts. But that is merely commerce. It isn't anything academic.
And then, because of John Rawls, social justice became very easily a subject for me to talk about and decide where I disagreed with Rawls, which I did.
Rawls's solution looks like 'Sarvodaya'- maximize the benefit of the least well off. It was silly. Collective insurance is the way to go.
But I would not have been able to do any of this work without Rawls. With Rawls, I could say, “Well, yes, Rawls is important for me, but I disagree here. There, I disagree.”
But the disagreements were sillier than the statements.
The other influence was Hilary Putnam.
From a Leftist background, like his class-mate Chomsky. His tutor was Hans Reichenbach. The difficulty mathsy Lefties faced was that their core beliefs were beyond silly and had been empirically refuted. Thus they were condemned to be grey eminences of Credentialist Ponzi scheme. This entailed talking incessant bollocks.
But underlying all that was my interest in social choice, the mathematical reasoning involved. Kenneth Arrow, who essentially invented the subject, was, of course, a big factor in my choice of work. I taught a class with Ken Arrow and John Rawls in ’68-’69. I was visiting here at Harvard. Arrow was then on the faculty of Harvard for some years, and Rawls was very established at Harvard. So the three of us together, we did a class on justice and social choice, which was quite fun.
Sadly, these three reinforced each others delusions. Arrow-Debreu ignores Knightian uncertainty and generates 'weapons of financial mass destruction'. Sen's approach can, as he says, be accommodated in Arrow's framework- i.e. has no applicability, save of a mischievous sort, to the real world. Why didn't Arrow say to Rawls that rational people will choose a collective insurance scheme with moral hazard protection whether or not they are behind a veil of ignorance. They won't be so crazy as to lexically preference the worst off- who, in any case, are a moving target. Still, Sen did tell Arrow about the Spilrajn extension theorem which essentially meant Samuelson was right.
I remember, while flying to a meeting in Washington, my neighbor on the plane asked me what did I do? I said, “I teach in Delhi, but at the moment I’m visiting Harvard.” I told him that I’m concerned with justice and social choice involving aggregation of individuals’ disparate views. And he said, “Oh, let me tell you: There is a very interesting class taught by Kenneth Arrow, John Rawls, and some unknown guy on this very subject. You should check it out!”
Sen was a lot younger than either. Few had heard of him back then. Or perhaps this 'neighbor' was pulling Sen's leg.
I really enjoyed it very much because they had such excitingly original minds. They invented questions that others had not thought of and dealt with them, both Rawls and Arrow did. I had been under their influence even before I came to Harvard, but of course, it was wonderful to be able to teach a class together.
GAZETTE: Arrow’s groundbreaking “Social Choice and Individual Values” (1951) was published when you were a first-year undergraduate. How influential was it to your thinking then?
SEN: It was a transformation for me. I knew different people had different values and preferences, and so the question could easily arise: What should the society do given the variety of views that we happen to have? But the fact that one could get a systematic discipline out of it had not occurred to me.
Voting theory has always been around and various institutions have different ways of aggregating preferences- e.g. a College may say 'we will give 10 percent weighting to students. 20 percent to faculty and the rest is up to the donors'. Obviously this will vary from College to College. The 'Shapley values' of different interest groups may determine the outcome.
I was only 17, I guess, then. But once it occurred to me and I could see what Arrow had done, I couldn’t resist taking a serious interest in the subject. The literature then was quite limited. Now, of course, the literature’s exceedingly vast.
But almost wholly useless.
GAZETTE: You’ve seen the conventional wisdom, as it were, evolve in economics on a number of fronts. Have you reconsidered any of your own thinking over the years?
SEN: Well, indeed yes. It happened even in social choice theory, too. That is, initially I was convinced, as Arrow had been, that the problem is arising from the fact that we are asking society to have an organized, systematic preference. Whereas society cannot have such a preference because it’s not an individual.
Nor can an individual. However, both Society and the individual can be studied, for any practical purpose, as having an imputed multiplicative weighting update algorithm of a regret minimizing sort.
Persons do have such preferences.
No we don't. What we actually do bears little relationship to the preferences we claim to have. For important stuff, Tardean mimetics is what guides us- i.e. we do what the smart folk- or folk we think are smart- are doing.
So instead of asking, how do we go from individual preferences to a systematic social choice based on a social preference, we could ask the question: How can we go from individual preferences to any social choice so that in every group of alternatives from which to choose, there will be an alternative which gets to be a majority choice by the people over every other alternative in that group.
The smart thing is to exclude people who don't matter from having a voice. 'Transferable utility' is key- i.e. pay off those who might create a nuisance.
The prevailing intuition was that there should be no impossibility there.
There can be an impossibility anywhere if we demand that a procedure be algorithmic whereas a non-deterministic decision strategy dominates. This is because, to our knowledge P aint equal to NP.
Development Econ turned to shit because countries which actually developed just went in for Tardean mimetics. They ignored cretins like Sukhamoy how-shite-am-I Chakroborty.
I was increasingly convinced that this itself would lead to an impossibility. So, in this respect, I changed my mind on how the impossibility in “the impossibility result” of Arrow comes about.
Arrow's impossibility result came about by defining x as non x. It was a case of ex falso quodlibet. He said a guy who aint a Dictator is a Dictator. But this also means that cats are dogs.
GAZETTE: Looking back, when did you feel like you had made your mark in the field? Was it the publication of “Collective Choice and Social Welfare,” which is widely-considered a foundational text?
SEN: I have not reached that point yet. I’m working hard to get there! [laughter] “Collective Choice and Social Welfare” is the book that made me think I understood the subject, namely social-choice theory. I hadn’t earlier on had the sense of being in command of the subject. By the time I wrote “Collective Choice and Social Welfare,” I did have the sense that I could do all those things and that I could lecture on them. And indeed I did — everywhere. I did it in Delhi. I did it in LSE, London School of Economics. I did it here in Harvard, when I was visiting here for one year, 1968. In addition I was extending the results already known. I enjoyed those classes. I still enjoy doing problems in social choice theory. I teach now here with Eric Maskin and Barry Mazur, [Gerhard Gade University Professor], and we do cover social choice theory from time to time. That interest is unlikely to go away for me.
Rothbard's Law explains that Economists specialize in what they are least good at.
GAZETTE: Is there more out there you’d still like to explore?
SEN: There are a number of problems which I would love to do. Some of them are things that would make a difference in the world a bit more. For example, we can move from poverty to security and see what help we get from social choice theory.
None. Poverty is removed when peeps either die or imitate what the less poor are doing.
Further there are quite a few other analytical problems involving mathematical logic that still interest me. Who knows? I may think of new problems.
Mathematical logic has developed greatly. If you don't understand the Mochizuki proof of the abc conjecture, you are condemned to being merely a spectator
GAZETTE: In 1998, you were awarded the economics Nobel for your many theoretical, empirical, and ethical contributions to the field. Yet it doesn’t seem to have been the career capstone for you that it often is for other laureates. You remain as busy as ever writing, working, traveling, teaching. Why?
There is a market for the repetitive drivel produced by Nobel laureates in worthless subjects.
SEN: People have given up hope that I might retire. But I like working, I must say. I’ve been very lucky. I’ve never done, when I think about it, work that I was not interested in. That is a very good reason to go on.
I’m 87. Something I enjoy most is teaching. It may not be a natural age for teaching, I guess, but I absolutely love it. And since my students also seem not unhappy with my teaching, I think it’s a very good idea to continue doing it.
Sen is a good teacher. His students feel that they are engaged in something which will make a difference to the world. This may indeed happen- if they flunk out and get a proper job or set up a business.
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