Amartya Sen's parodic pluralism.

In an article in the Statesman titled 'Reflections of a Master Mind' Amitabha Bhattacharya writes- 

While reading Amartya Sen’s Home in the World (Allen Lane, 2021), I remembered my brief encounter with him at the India International Centre, Delhi in the early nineties. A senior colleague of mine wondered, in the context of Sen’s idea of Indian pluralism, why the divisive issue of casteism, a unique feature of our society, remains unexplored.

Sen had given a lecture at the IIC about Indian pluralism- apparently it had to do with being nice to Muslims and pretending Muslims hadn't chased you out of your ancestral homeland and that Aurangazeb used to build plenty of temples for any Hindu he happened to come across. 

Hilariously, Sen invokes a Baghdadi poet whom he names 'Al-Sabhadi' in connection with the Indian origin of Chess. I need hardly tell you there is no such poet. Al-Safadi- a Turk from Safad not Baghdad, had written on Chess and his work was drawn on by Ibn Abi Hagalah- who was the actual author of the statement George Irfah, whom Sen quotes, attributes to this imaginary 'Sabhadi'. This was a type of literature which delighted in solving problems such as (this is from Al-Safadi's al Gayt as mussaggam which was known to Europe through Thomas Hyde) 'how to ensure only Christians are killed if you have 30 passengers, half of whom are Muslim, and the rule is that every ninth passenger must be thrown overboard'! What a wonderful advertisement for pluralism!  Incidentally, Ibn Taymiyya quotes Al-Safadi in a work calling for Chess to be banned. In other words, Sen- while trying to show off his intellectual sophistication- has made a fool of himself. Why not say- 'Hutler was a German Painter who liked drawing Swastikas all over the place?' 

At the IIC, there were always some Muslim savants who knew their Al-Safadi and their Ibn Taymiyya. They must have laughed themselves silly- as did everybody else once they remembered that Sen's family had fled from Islamic rulers in their ancestral Dacca. Thus his praise of the tolerance of Muslims was belied by the fact that he had an Indian, not a a Bangladeshi, passport. 

Indian casteism is a solution to a 'stable marriage problem'. This means that when a person converts to another religion, it is in his interest to get more and more of his caste fellows to convert so that his own descendants have access to a larger pool of marriage partners. Furthermore, castes form alliances of an intricate sort such that 'Consociationalism' appears to prevail. But it is very fragile. The thing can disappear overnight- as Sen's parents discovered when they had to flee Dacca. 

Why is this so? The answer has to do with something Sen neglected to study- viz the game theoretic notion of uncorrelated asymmetries (which give rise to 'bourgeois' strategies) and the related notion of Aumann type correlated equilibria. An example would be small birds which act cohesively to 'mob' predators and drive them away. The problem here is that the dynamics can change very quickly. Predators- under pressure from exogenous scarcity shocks- can adopt the same tactics. Indeed, this eusocial strategy could be 'gamed' till it itself becomes a threat to the species. 

Pluralism, or consociationalism, has failed in the two places where it was touted as a panacea- viz. Burma and Lebanon. This was because, long run, only dynamics matter. Gassing on about the nature of the 'uncorrelated asymmetry'- e.g. the fact that you are male not female or Hindu not Muslim- and suggesting we can all transcend such distinctions is simply a waste of time. Sen's sententiousness was fine and dandy so long as there was no strong motivating reason for retaliation. Then 9/11 happened and once it was obvious that the West had lost that war, Trump rose and appears now to be rising up again. 

Ivy League Professors had been living in an Ivory tower. Their complacent lucubrations had lubed up the West to take Chinese dick. 

A few days later, while Sen was enjoying his breakfast, I thought this was the opportunity to confront him with the question. He was cordial, didn’t mind my intrusion, looked for a few seconds out of the glass panes, and explained why the traditional caste system, an attempt to structure the society, did not qualify to be termed pluralistic in the sense he had defined it.

But India's 'jati' system was not 'an attempt to structure society' because neither the Brits nor the Turks had any notion of the thing. The structures the Brits created are still very much with us. Indeed, they have been used to tackle obnoxious aspects of casteism. 

What Sen has said is sheer nonsense unless you believe some Ruler invented all the thousands of jatis we have in India. It is obvious, that caste is 'spontaneous order' and represents a 'separating equilibrium' based on 'costly signals'. That is why Iyers have a different caste mark from Iyengars. There is huge 'pluralism' in Hinduism- a Vadadesi Vadama has different customs from a Brhatcharanam Iyer- and it must have arisen spontaneously, not by administrative fiat. Since this 'pluralism' is spontaneous, ecumenism too is spontaneous. It is obvious that we don't want Vadamas fighting with Brhatcharanams in the street- though that may actually have happened some centuries ago- and that is why we like Godmen and Devijis and Gurus and Swamys and Mahatmas and so forth. 

Sen in his lecture pretends that the Indian state has the power to change the personal law of Muslims. This was certainly not the case when he gave this lecture. Since 9/11 however the willingness of non-Muslims to react to violent protest by Muslim minorities has greatly increased. Still, this is a hornet's nest nobody in their right mind would want to kick.

It doesn't matter how you define pluralism or whether you think it is a good thing or a bad thing. What matters is whether your head will be kicked in- or your people chased away- if you try to mess with a stronger, or simply more fanatical, opponent. 

An office is also hierarchically organised for a purpose – can it be called a pluralistic office?

But caste is not hierarchically organized at all. Who can say whether Iyengars are higher than Iyers? Are Baidyas, like Sen, above or below Kayasthas? In Gujrat, non-Nagari Brahmins would not be considered superior to Banias. In Punjab, a Jat would scoff at the notion of Brahmin superiority. In Tamil Nadu, the Brahmin pipes very small indeed. 

An office could be hierarchical and pluralist if, for example, only White officers are allowed to decide on matters pertaining to Whites and so forth. Indeed, this was a feature of the Raj till about 1922 and prevailed to great effect in apartheid South Africa. 

I was not sure if I understood him fully,

There was nothing to understand. The man was a fool. 

but I was deeply moved by his willingness to listen, and engage with this question.

He would have been even more deeply moved if Sen had stood up and urinated in his face.  

As an economist, Sen is reckoned as one of the great minds who has enriched the world of ideas and actions,

he may be reckoned as such by equally stupid people but when we discover that China doesn't listen to Sen whereas India did, then we realize the fellow was useless.

augmented by his erudition in fields as diverse as Sanskrit grammar and literature,

The guy is so ignorant he translates 'Niti' as 'Justice' when everybody knows it means 'Policy'.  

mathematics and philosophy.

But mathematics includes Category theory which, sadly, philosophy has refused to learn from with the result that is now utterly shit.  

When he tells the story of how such ideas had taken root, of incidents triggering his imagination and of people whose company and friendship helped him refine such ideas, the personal and the impersonal, the past and the present fuse to create a masterly narrative.

But it is a narrative of stupidity. The guy sees people starving because food is not available and then comes to the conclusion, many years later, that the famine was not caused by food availability deficit.  

Tracing the first thirty years of his life – through Dhaka, Mandalay, Santiniketan, Calcutta, Cambridge, other places in the West, and Delhi [where the book ends] – reflecting on the drama of this remarkable phase, he has avoided certain aspects that would have made the book more saleable.

But where people still alive would have had a motive for denouncing this guy as a selfish, stupid, liar.  

There are glowing references to his association with relatives, friends, teachers, students and colleagues, but none to romantic love, for example.

Meghnad Desai says Sen's divorce is what forced him out of India. The dude ran off with his best friend's wife.

This book is not soaked in emotions; it chronicles the adventure of ideas collected in tranquility, erring sometime on the side of grace.

This is a guy who never failed to utterly misunderstand any idea he came across.  

In his continuous stream of interactions with people of all hues, two persons stand out, his maternal grandfather Kshiti Mohan Sen

we don't interact with our grandfathers. We hug them and ask them to tell us stories.  

and his Cambridge professor Piero Sraffa.

Sraffa didn't teach Sen. Indeed, he didn't teach. 

K.M. Sen’s well-known primer on Hinduism is actually the version translated by Sen,

It isn't well known. Sen translated his grandpa's book. So what? The boy rejected his grandsire's religion.  

while in his twenties, from the Bengali original. Kshiti Mohan’s lifelong search to understand and bring to wide public attention the syncretic relationship between various religious communities

which ones? Kabir-panthis already got along well with Udasis etc.  

influenced many including Rabindranath Tagore.

The arrow of causation goes the other way. Sen was an employee of Tagore's.  

The ideas of Sraffa, a close friend of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein

he had no patience with Wittlesstein and, finally, that fool repented his stupidity only to engage in greater stupidity yet 

and of the Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci,

Gramsci was an activist who only turned into a thinker because he was stuck in jail. Incidentally, the lady Sen ran off with had family connections with both Gramsci and Sraffa. Partha Dasgupta went one better that Sen by marrying Nobel Laureate Meade's daughter. 

deeply impressed Sen.

What did Sraffa achieve? Nothing. What about Witlesstein? Von Neumann's Game theory is useful, Witlesstein's 'language games' are useless. As for Gramsci, how come the Italians aren't impressed with him? Why is it only stupid Bengalis who went ga ga for that shite?  

After his graduation from Presidency college, Sen applied only to the Trinity – ‘the possibility of working with (Maurice) Dobb,

Marxist nutter 

Sraffa

who was producing nothing 

and (Dennis) Robertson

who had parted ways with Keynes. Perhaps he could be seen as in the Wicksell tradition. History has forgotten him. 

was altogether thrilling… In effect I decided, ‘Trinity or bust’.’ He completed his doctoral dissertation in one year on the choice of techniques,

stupid shit. It is obvious that Tardean mimetics drives choice of techniques- i.e. you imitate what some smarter guy is doing. Development Econ was utterly useless because it didn't get that math didn't matter. Imitation did.  

became a Prize Fellow there and many years later, the Master of Trinity College.

Full disclosure- I campaigned vigorously for Nicholas Bates to be appointed to that august position- because a truly pluralistic Social Choice theory would deem Master Bates the mot juste for one who presides over Trinity College. 

While Santiniketan school, Presidency and Trinity colleges, in a sense, shaped Sen, his personal observations of the Bengal Famine in 1943 and the communal killings later, contributed no less.

His family certainly fled East Bengal where they might starve or get hacked to death.  

His seminal work on the causes of famine and his steadfast fight against man-made divisiveness

such as his growling at Modi while purring at Mamta.  

demonstrate how a perceptive and analytical mind can transform day-to-day experiences into profound lessons of life.

such as those imbibed from Trinity's Master Bates.  

Every page of this autobiography is illuminated by examples of such observation followed by discussion and arguments, leading to the revelation of truth.

I have shown that the reverse is the case. The guy gets everything wrong.  

He brings to our notice how decisive intervention by the media can make government see reason.

This simply didn't happen. The Bengali media wouldn't attack Shurawardy- the Minister of Supply responsible for the famine deaths- because Shurawardy's goons would have kicked their heads in. The Whites in the Statemen attacked Whites in Delhi though they knew full well that under the 1935 Act, Food was a Provincial subject. What enabled Wavell to take some action was that he was a General. Defense was a Central subject and Wavell knew the Army had the relevant capacity because the tide of War was turning.  

About the catastrophic Bengal famine, The Statesman, Calcutta, under its editor Ian Stephens attacked severely the British policy regarding the famine. ‘The British Parliament had not discussed the man-made disaster before Stephens spoke. All that changed immediately after The Statesman’s reporting.’

Was the Muslim League Government dismissed? Was Viceroy's rule promulgated? No. Don't be silly.  

The Buddha, Tagore, Panini and to some extent Gandhi, were among those impacting Sen’s thinking.

But they weren't economists. So Sen's thinking was 'impacted' by the wrong people.  

He discusses Tagore’s disagreement with Gandhi’s comment that the devastating Bihar earthquake ‘was a divine chastisement sent by God for our sins’. Tagore was dismayed at this linking of ethical principles with a cosmic phenomenon.

But Gandhi could get Tagore money for his Shantiniketan.  So, in the end, Tagore had to play along. As a matter of fact, a religious leader is welcome to link earthquakes to sodomy or masturbation or whatever bee he has in his bonnet. That's how religion works. I myself have frequently stated that neglect of Socioproctology caused the COVID pandemic.  

Sen pondered over this as also on Gandhi’s insistence on ‘charkha’, for instance, and was generally on Tagore’s side.

Sen did some empirical work showing 'charkha' was wasteful and stupid- as if everybody didn't already know this already.

Later in life, however, Sen wondered if they, including Tagore, had misunderstood Gandhi in certain respects.

Sleeping naked with your grand-niece can give you super-powers.  

He draws pen portraits of his friends and acquaintances, teachers and colleagues, gurus and chelas. Whether it is Kenneth Arrow whose ‘impossibility theorem’ in the context of social choice inspired much of Sen’s work,

Arrow, though taught by Tarski, ignored the fact that 'Preference' is a 'Tarskian primitive'- i.e. can't be defined or given a univocal mathematical representation.  Sen, being as stupid as shit, jumped on an utterly foolish bandwagon. 

or Paul Samuelson

Arrow's brother-in-law, whom he was scoring off 

or Joan Robinson

a nutter who went ga ga for Mao's cultural revolution 

or John Rawls,

a fool who didn't get that insurance is the solution to risk aversion 

Nicholas Kaldor

who tried to tell the Indians that their tax policy was crazy. 

or Oscar Lange,

Poles, even Poles who are economists, are smart. Kalecki could have helped India but Indians don't want any type of useful help.  

Sen has covered their contribution while highlighting his own gains from such interfaces. About Samuelson, Sen notes ‘He remained entirely focussed on the truth that could emerge from the argument, rather than being concerned with winning the battle…’

That fool was still insisting the USSR could overtake the US when the Berlin Wall fell.  

Sen also alludes to his days at Jadavpur University where he led the founding of and headed the economics department (at the age of twenty-three), and at the Delhi School of Economics where he was chosen by V.K.R.V. Rao to be his young successor.

DSE turned to shit after becoming part of DU. However, measuring poverty does not actually alleviate poverty just as measuring your dick every five minutes won't actually cause it to grow in size.  

Anyway, Accountants not Economists, should do that kind of work. A background in auditing, not algebraic topology, is the sine qua non. 

All through this work of love, as he moves from despair ,when diagnosed with cancer at the age of nineteen, to satisfying achievements,

which helped him but did not help India 

he weaves stories and dialogues, laced with humour as if in an adda, and combines them with serious deliberations as on issues like ‘What to make of Marx’.

in other words, he thriftily recycles his old papers so as to make a little money while the going is good. We appreciate his entrepreneurial instincts but not his sententious stupidity. 

His years with wife Nabaneeta have also been recounted with tenderness and respect.

Good for him.  

Sen’s relentless espousal of causes like empowering the disadvantaged through enhancement of their capabilities,

Did Sen enhance any one's capability? No. He chose students who had already got high marks and turned them into mindless drudges in Academia or the Bureaucracy where they created no value but simply captured a rent. 

Sen believes 'second order public goods'- i.e. campaigning for more 'first order public goods'- is itself a public good. It isn't . The thing is a fucking nuisance. Bengali students may have thought burning buses was a good way of campaigning for better public transport but they were wrong.  

deepening democracy and freedom through discussion and persuasion,

doesn't fucking work! Did Sen's stint at Harvard defend that country from Trump? Will it result in fairer voter registration? No. Of course not. Don't be silly.

A smart guy may persuade you but a senile fool can only exhibit his own prejudices.  

enhancing investment for universal coverage of basic health and education

means creating wealth and thus permitting extra resources to be used in this way. But that means making and selling useful things- not worthless shite.  

– well over the last fifty years – has altered global thinking in no small measure, leading to almost universal acceptance now.

Do these Bengali cretins really not know that Europe and America were for better health and educational coverage hundreds of years ago? Is it really the case that Bengalis say to each other 'Amartya told Queenji she must open schools for British kids. She said 'Fuck off you stupid wog' but Amartya did not lose patience. He tenderly stroked first her corgi and then her pussy till she became amenable. Indeed, she even opened National Health Service because Amartya explained to her that Kant had told Marx that it was a very nice thing to do.'

In the book D. School (Ed. Dharma Kumar and Dilip Mukherjee, OUP,1995), Prabhat Patnaik wrote ‘Students discussed whether Amartya Sen was better than Sukhamoy Chakravarty in the same way that people elsewhere discussed whether Madhubala was better than Meena Kumari..’,

i.e. whom do you toss off to? Is it Marliyn Monroe or Amartya Sen?  

though he found the comparison unwholesome.

Till Trinity College Master Bates. 

Sen’s star-like profile has often eclipsed his renown for complex mathematical work,

which is shit. He has made no mathematical discoveries whatsoever. On the other hand, Mahalanobis had and he was a terrible Planning Commission chief. Sukhamoy looked more Mathsy than Sen back in the Sixties- he appeared to be getting into Pontyragin type control theory which can be useful- but nothing came of it.  His fellow Bengalis thought he was sub-par in Maths. Sen, very wisely, didn't stick his neck out in that direction and escaped from India before his pal could drag him into the Planning Commission.

articulating serious philosophical concepts,

which he wholly misunderstands. That's the problem with 'intellectual affirmative action'- the Whites think this darky knows his own culture and so maybe there's some subtle point to his otherwise obviously foolish perorations. But the truth is nobody really cares. Once a citation cartel gets off the ground you can publish any shite and then say you are fighting Fascism.  

and expanding the frontiers of economics as a discipline.

But those frontiers were expanded into utter nonsense. 

Taken as a whole, his systematic body of work over a lifetime to create a world – just and equitous, inclusive and free –

which does not exist. This fool merely gained a rent as part of a Credentialist Ponzi scheme 

has made a difference that no Nobel Prize could capture.

Mother Theresa's Nobel probably helped her become a Saint. That's cool because you can pray to a Saint for miracles. Fuck is the point to Sen?  

The memoir helps us understand this man and the influences that made him what he is.

It helps us understand that he didn't have any common sense as a kid. This wouldn't have mattered if he had stuck to STEM subjects. He might have some local renown as a good Physics or Mathematics lecturer. Instead he got sucked into the fraud that was Development Economics from which he managed to escape by embracing 'Social Choice theory' which is sheer nonsense. 

Unlike Tagore, who saw that Bengal's problem was lack of food and who sent his son to study Agricultural Science in America, Sen could never see what was right under his nose. Bengal wasn't growing enough food so its people starved once Bengalis were running things. His family gets chased out of Dacca by Muslims, because the Brits were no longer running things, and so he decides that nothing of that sort ever happened. 

He says pluralism is important for two reasons. Firstly democracy needs heterogeniety. Yet every single democracy ever has reduced heterogeniety. The language and mores of the majority have been imposed on the minority- unless it has been killed or chased away.  Empires encourage heterogeniety. Indeed, the earliest Empires forcibly resettled people so as to reduce nationalistic sentiment and democratic institutions. 

Sen says the practice of pluralism produces cultural riches. The opposite is the case. If minorities go their own way then they don't compete with each other. America has produced 'cultural riches' because the Jews stopped going to their Yiddish theaters and Catskill entertainment shows. Instead they competed with the Goyim in a homogenous entertainment industry- Hollywood, Broadway etc. Suppose Mindy Kaling had stuck with bharatnatyam dancing- who would have heard of her? If Aziz Ansari had concentrated on making a name for himself at 'mushairas', he wouldn't be on Netflix. Both Mindy and Aziz began their ascent by being ultra-American not by playing up their Indianness. Anyway, it would have been a fake Indianness- like Sen's- and would have only cornered a small rent based on aesthetic 'affirmative action'. 

Sen concludes his talk on Pluralism with an oxymoron. Practicing pluralism involves looking at the fairness of social arrangements. But since there are plural conceptions of fairness, pluralism means either suppressing pluralism so as to hit upon a common notion of fairness or else it means doing nothing- i.e. the practice of pluralism isn't actually a practice at all. 

Bengalis might think Sen is smart for saying shit like this, but we now think of such Bengalis as shitheads.