Amartya Sen has done quite well for himself. But, supposing he actually was smart and good at maths, he could have done O.R and become a billionaire like Purnendu Chatterjee whose investments in ports in India could lift hundreds of thousands out of poverty.
True, Sen would have had to work a lot harder- rather than just recycle cretinous lectures- but he'd then have made a contribution to actually economizing on the use of scarce resources, rather than just wasting everybody's time.
Sen did relatively well for himself but in absolute terms, his Sen-tentious prattle was bad for poor countries like India and a stupid waste of time for rich countries like America.
Some 40 years ago he wrote an article titled 'Poor- relatively speaking'. It begins bombastically enough.
WHEN on the 6th January 1941, amidst the roar of the guns of the second world war, President Roosevelt announced that "in the future days ... we look forward to a world founded upon four essential freedoms", including "freedom from want", he was voicing what was soon to become one of the major themes of the post-war era.
No doubt, Sen thought that all previous leaders promised their people more hunger and greater deprivation.
In context, Roosevelt was saying something simple- shipping war material to the UK was creating jobs. It was ending the Depression. However, Roosevelt was pretending that he could keep America out of the War. That's why he was bullshitting for all he was worth.
While the elimination of poverty all over the world has become a much-discussed international issue, it is in the richer countries that an immediate eradication seemed possible.
Because rich peeps got money. The poor don't. Ending poverty was simply a matter of giving poor people money conditional upon their adopting a habitus of high productivity such that, in future, transfers between the working class could insure against absolute privation. This was done through pre-existing schemes and ideographic mechanism design focused on raising different types of factor mobility.
It should be noted that the first step was to reduce the marginal utility of leisure- being confined in a workhouse or being arrested under the vagrancy Act, made not working increasingly unattractive. True, at the margin, reducing the disutility of work- better working conditions etc.- played a part. However, the post-war generation had vivid memories of Conscription. If you didn't contribute voluntarily to the safety and prosperity of your country, your country might force you to do so under threat of court martial.
That battle was joined soon enough after the war in those affluent countries, and the ending of povery has been a major issue in their policy discussions. There are, however, great uncertainties about the appropriate way of conceptualising poverty in the richer countries, and some questions have been repeatedly posed.
These 'great uncertainties' only afflicted worthless shitheads. Everybody else knew what poverty meant- viz. not having a pot to piss in and going hungry to bed.
Should the focus be on "absolute" poverty or "relative" poverty?
In a War, or post-War economy, the answer is 'Absolute. D'uh!' Once markets are doing well, you can do transfers if there is a 'peace dividend'. On the other hand, transfers financed by 'fiscal drag'- i.e. workers getting pushed into higher tax brackets- were rejected by voters.
Should poverty be estimated with a cut-off line that reflects a level below which people are—in some sense—"absolutely impoverished", or a level that reflects standards of living "common to that country" in particular?
So long as it is done by sensible people in that country, no great problem arises. Obviously, if you bring in stupid Bengalis, they will continually face 'great uncertainty' as to whether a guy who offers to blow them for the price of a burger is poor or is a plutocrat.
These questions—it will be presently argued—do not bring out the real issues clearly enough. However, a consensus seems to have emerged in favour of taking a "relative" view of poverty in the rich countries.
Why? Because those rich countries are either democratic or else the ruler feels insecure if the rabble is starving.
Wilfred Beckerman and Stephen Clark put it this way in their important recent study of poverty and social security in Britain since 1961: "we have measured poverty in terms of a 'relative' poverty line, which is generally accepted as being the relevant concept for advanced countries."
So there was no argument here. Everybody accepted poverty is relative because our knowledge of it is relative- till Sen turned up.
There is indeed much merit in this "relative" view. Especially against the simplistic absolute conceptualisation of poverty, the relative view has represented an entirely welcome change. However, I shall argue that ultimately poverty must be seen to be primarily an absolute notion, even though the specification of the absolute levels has to be done quite differently from the way it used to be done in the older tradition.
In other words, it must be done in a 'relative' way. So there isn't any 'absolute' notion here at all. Sen is merely bullshitting.
More importantly, the contrast between the absolute and the relative features has often been confused,
Sen thinks everybody else is confused. He alone understand that there is 'grave uncertainty' about whether a homeless dude offering to suck him off for the price of a burger isn't actually the Chairman of ICI.
and I shall argue that a more general question about ascertaining the absolute standard of living lies at the root of the difficulty.
Very true. The fact that the Chairman of ICI lives in a mansion and has a chauffeur driven Rolls and lots and lots of cash in the Bank only suggests that, in relative terms, he is quite well off. However, by an absolute measure, he may be very very poor. That's why he might approach you and offer to suck you off for the price of a burger.
In particular, it will be claimed that absolute deprivation in terms of a person's capabilities relates to relative deprivation in terms of commodities, incomes and resources.
In which case 'absolute deprivation' is a function of 'relative deprivation. It has no independent existence. We may as well say 'in absolute terms, cats are dogs because in relative terms, my Aunty used to have a pussy cat but now she has a puppy dog.'
That is going to be my main theme, but before I get to that general issue, I ought to make clear the sense in which I believe that even the narrow focus on relative poverty has been valuable in the recent discussions on poverty.
It was valuable coz countries like Britain reduced poverty by getting poor people housing and food and education and so forth in return for which they paid proportionately more in taxes and national insurance. A virtuous circle could exist because of increasing female participation and technology driven higher productivity. The Brits didn't use any 'absolute' measure to affect this salutary change. They just used their common sense- which was wholly 'relative' and a product of their own British culture and upbringing.
In the post-war years there was a premature optimism about the elimination of poverty in rich countries based on calculations using poverty lines derived from nutritional and other requirements of the kind used by Seebohm Rowntree in his famous poverty studies of York in 1899 and 1936, or by Charles Booth in his nineteenth century study of poverty in London.
No. There was wholly justified optimism. Only guys fucking themselves up on drugs or drink or who believed incestuous rape was a good reproductive strategy created a residuary problem. Virtue Signallers could get excited about the supposed sufferings of all sorts of losers but working class voters showed they didn't give a shit about those incapable of keeping a job. Still, Trade Union leaders wanted tight Labor markets till the skilled workers in light industries refused to accept 'solidarity wages' or 'Prices and Incomes Policy'. Then Dagenham Man voted Thatcher. Cretins at the LSE who had been banging on about inequality were ignored.
The post-war estimates using these given standards yielded a very comforting picture of the way things had improved over the years, and indeed in terms of old standards, the picture certainly looked greatly more favourable than in the darker pre-war days. For example, the third York survey of 1951, following Rowntree's earlier ones, indicated that using the same standard, the proportion of working class population in poverty appeared to have fallen from 31 per cent at the time of the last survey in 1936 to less than 3 per cent in the new survey of 1951.2 This was partly the result of general economic growth and a high level of employment, but also the consequence of various welfare legislations following the Beveridge Report of 1942, covering family allowances, national insurance, national assistance and national health service. Deducting public transfers would have made the poverty ratio higher than 22 per cent rather than less than 3 per cent.
The ability to make 'public transfers' was a relic of the War economy. Going forward, only horizontal, not vertical, transfers were possible. Then the working class itself decided that they didn't give a shit about those who wouldn't get on their bike and get the fuck out of depressed areas.
The changed situation—despite some statistical problems—was indeed genuine, but it was much too slender a basis on which to declare victory in the war against poverty.
No. It was enough to show that poverty was not inevitable for people willing to get on their bike and find well paid work. This caused the Marxists to shit themselves. They thought that all the Top Hatted Capitalists had to go bust before the proletariat could get enough to eat and have an indoor loo.
While the Labour government did go to the electorate in 1950 with the emphatic claim in its Manifesto that "destitution has been banished", and that the government has "ensured full employment and fair shares of the necessities of life", there was little real reason to be smug about eradication of poverty in Britain.
Yes there was. That is what the subsequent decades revealed. The Butskellite consensus worked.
There were lots of people who were in misery and clearly deprived of what they saw (as I shall presently argue, rightly) as necessities of life, and the battle against poverty was far from over.
They had to wait till National Income rose. What was important was that the UK, once it got rid of rationing and returned to Tory rule, had hit on an incentive compatible mechanism for providing a social minimum. In other words, the working class was willing to pay for some horizontal redistribution. Mass immigration weakened this resolve but, it must be said, most 'Windrush' migrants were as or more productive than the native population.
It is in this context that the change of emphasis in the academic literature from an absolutist to a relativist notion of poverty took place,
This is false. There was never an 'absolutist' notion of poverty because there was no objective way of determining minimum colorific or other intake for the human species as a whole. All one could look at was local conditions- i.e. relative deprivation. A Bushman in the Kalahari would not be able to work out what might constitute poverty under conditions of advanced industrial capitalism.
Environmental factors- expressed in culture- determined a purely local and relative standard. The dream- attributed to the 'Yankeefied Baron' Rumsford to find the cheapest way to feed both Germans and Guatemalans and Ghanaians was doomed to fail. The potato turned out to be a poisoned chalice for the Irish.
But this sort of stuff was bleeding obvious by about 1870.
and it had the immediate effect of debunking the smug claims based on inadequate absolute standards.
The academic literature was ignored. Labor lost even after reducing Income inequality to its lowest level ever. The Trade Unions were able to break Heath's administration. Then Thatcher got elected and fucked over the Unions. The Berlin Wall fell. Sen reinvented himself as the 'Mother Theresa of Indian Economics'. But Mother Theresa only gained salience in Calcutta because her people could help Marwari industrialists get their money out of that Leftist shithole. Don't say the Vatican Bank was all bad. Do say Sen was utterly useless. But that's why you have diversity hires at Ivy League. White peeps should understand that Brown people are as stupid as shit. That's why Whites ruled over them.
But instead of the attack taking the form of disputing the claim that the old absolute standards were relevant still, it took the investigation entirely in the relativist direction, and there it has remained through these years.
Can Sen do better? No. He can only pretend that 'capabilities' have an objective or absolute measure. Modi is capable of being P.M of India. This means he is also capable of being the President of America.
The relativist response to the smugness was effective and important.
This cretin thinks 'smugness' is a major problem. Why stop there? Why not suggest that humbuggery is an existential threat to anal cherries everywhere?
What happens when you admit there can't be an absolute metric for a thing but then go on to say absolute metrics are useful? You get shite like this
First, absoluteness of needs is not the same thing as their fixity over time.
Yes it is. Either the needs exist always at all times and all places or they are not absolute. They are relative. But if they are relative, they can be changed by some moral suasion or coercive mechanism. Thus, a girl who stubbornly insists that she has to have a nice ribbon to tie her hair can be beaten- indeed all girls can be beaten- till they give up this 'bourgeois' idea. That is the Naxalite utopia.
The relativist approach sees deprivation in terms of a person or a household being able to achieve less than what others in that society do, and this relativeness is not to be confused with variation over time.
If this is a relativist approach, then it is fucked in the head. It says that the Prince of Wales was very poor when he was a baby. Prince Harry was suffering from relative deprivation when he served in the military.
So the fact that "the necessities of life are not fixed" is neither here nor there, as far as the competing claims of the absolutist and relativist views are concerned.
Yes it is. Suppose a bunch of scientists find some package of artificial nutrients and some types of clothing and shelter and so on which make all human beings, wherever they may be from, or whatever current standard of living they have, much, much healthier, and smarter and happier and more long lived then we would indeed have an absolute standard. For specific purposes- e.g. access to COVID vaccination- we could indeed speak in these absolute terms. Similarly we may speak of access to ultra-fast broadband or free internet porn as tracking absolute deprivation.
Even under an absolutist approach, the poverty line will be a function of some variables,
No. Under an absolutist measure the poverty line would be defined in terms of some type of objective nutritional unit and other types of objective metrics for clothing, housing, education etc. It may be that scientists will arrive at such a measure- perhaps for stocking Space Ships for the colonization of far away planets, or for other similar purpose.
and there is no a priori reason why these variables might not change over time.
Yes there is. The human phenotype is relatively robust to selection pressure. It is unlikely that there has been any great change in our biology over the last few millennia.
The second problem is perhaps a more difficult one to sort out. There is a difference between achieving relatively less than others, and achieving absolutely less because of falling behind others.
No there isn't. The difference is between achieving less than others and having less than you did before. There is no difference between having less relative to other people and also having less according to some 'absolute' metric of an arbitrary type. Sen is a cretin. If you are absolutely fucked coz u fell behind others, you are also fucked relative to others who didn't fall behind.
It may be thought that Sen is just shit at English. But his reasoning in Bengali is even worse.
This general distinction, which I think is quite crucial to this debate, can be illustrated with a different type of interdependence altogether—that discussed by Fred Hirsch (1976) in analysing "positional goods".
Sen will now show he doesn't understand 'positional' or Veblen goods. He will confuse them with club goods with crowding effects. Essentially, if you are driving a brand new Rolls, you are still showing your superiority to the other guys in the traffic jam who are driving junk.
Your ability to enjoy an uncrowded beach may depend on your knowing about that beach when others do not, so that the absolute advantage you will enjoy—being on an uncrowded beach—will depend on your relative position—knowing something that others do not.
Sen is a truly shit economist. You may enjoy an uncrowded beach because everybody else thought 'it will be too fucking crowded'. On the other hand, if you have valuable information which is not common knowledge then there is an uncorrelated asymmetry This is not an absolute advantage unless for some reason you have some extra-sensory ability such that you and you alone can find uncrowded beaches. But that is not a 'relative' position. It is an absolute difference.
Why did nobody notice that Sen was ignorant and stupid? The answer is that nobody cared about the shite he was doing in the Seventies. They just said 'oooh! Little brown man is talking little brown bollocks. No wonder Bengal is such a shithole. Hark at this brown genius!'
You want to have that information, but this is not because you particularly want to do relatively better than or as well as others, but you want to do absolutely well, and that in this case requires that you must have some differential advantage in information.
If you do absolutely better, with respect to a 'rival' good in fixed supply, you also do relatively better. Why can't Sen grasp this? The fact is, if you want the beach to yourself, you must not tell anybody else about it because they are bound to blab about it. What we are speaking off is a club good, where information asymmetry creates a measure of 'excludability'. Since the thing is not 'non-rival', there is an incentive for a person who wants the 'absolute benefit' to withhold information. Indeed, the absolute benefit disappears if no relative 'differential advantage' obtains.
So your absolute achievement—not merely your relative success—may depend on your relative position in some other space.
He means your better position in an information space dictates 'absolute and relative success' w.r.t a rival but only informationally excludable club good. That's reasonable. But what Sen deduces from this is crazy.
In examining the absolutist us. the relativist approach it is important to be clear about the space we are talking about.
It is a configuration space. D'uh.
Lumping together needs, commodities, etc.,
does not happen in a configuration space.
does not help to discriminate between the different approaches,
because there is no 'absolutist' approach. People are interested in whether they are poorer or richer than those around them. This motivates Tardean mimetics. It may also lead to the majority supporting a reduction in the benefits to earning ratio.
and one of the items in our agenda has to be a closer examination of the relationship between these different spaces.
We don't know the 'absolutist' space. Scientists may figure it out by the time we have to evacuate this planet on giant space-ships. But that day is long distant. Stupid Economists won't be allowed to contribute to that type of research.
Before I come to that, let me consider a different approach to the relativist view—this one ocurring in the important study of "poverty and progress in Britain" between 1953 and 1973 by Fiegehen, Lansley and Smith. They put the question thus: In part the renewed concern with 'want' reflected generally increased prosperity and the feeling that the standard of living which society guaranteed should be raised accordingly.
For a Keynesian reason. Britain wanted to get economies of scope and scale by expanding its internal market by stimulating Aggregate Demand. This meant transfers to those with higher marginal propensity to consume. This was affordable because they were transferring into higher productivity jobs. 'Working mothers' and 'latch key kids' became a thing- much to Enid Blyton's disgust.
This led to 'relative' concepts of poverty,
No. What was happening was that the British voter understood that the country could move in an egalitarian direction such that there would be rising material standards of living for the vast majority while the upper class had to do without butlers and chambermaids and valets who would suck them off in between tying their ties and doing up their boot-laces.
by which the extent of poverty is judged not by some absolute historically defined standard of living, but in relation to contemporary standards.
No. The idea was to spot places where nobody had an indoor loo and change consumption patterns there. This was paid for by moving the locals into more productive work. Immigrants could always be brought in to do the dirty jobs.
By such a moving criterion poverty is obviously more likely to persist, since there will always be certain sections of society that are badly off in the sense that they receive below-average incomes.
Sen thinks the British were so stupid as to imagine that as Garrison Keillor said 'every child could be above average'.
Thus renewed interest in poverty stemmed to a considerable extent from
Virtue signaling academics- some of whom were imported from starving shitholes like Bengal.
a recognition that it is incumbent on society to assist the relatively deprived.
Sen, being Bengali, did not understand that the reason Britain had a Poor Law was because guys who didn't have a pot to piss in were, obviously, not doing productive stuff. So locking them up in 'work-houses' or impressing them into the Navy or shipping them off to Canada or Australia was a way of raising their productivity and thus making money for the country.
The reason 'relative deprivation' mattered to the Brits is because they wanted to break a 'clogs to clogs in three generations mindset'. When Coronation Street first aired, Ken Barlowe was exceptional in that he'd been to Uni. Thus other working class people viewed him as a class traitor. But, England knew that to compete with the Continent- not to speak of the Rooskies- more and more working class people would have to adopt a middle class 'knowledge worker' habitus. Consider 'the likely lads'. When it first aired, it was supposed that working class peeps viewed getting a promotion to management to be a type of treachery. Maybe joining the army or emigrating to Australia was better. However the generation of working class kids which grew up watching 'likely lads' decided that being 'management' was fine and dandy. An indoor loo and a car in the garage and a three piece suit and holidays in Spain and prawn cocktails as a starter were perfectly compatible with being a football hooligan and kicking in the head of a Paki after ten pints and a curry.
One consequence of taking this type of a rigidly relativist view is that poverty cannot—simply cannot—be eliminated, and an anti-poverty programme can never really be quite successful.
Just when you eliminate it, you realize you need cheap blow jobs. Either emotionally damaged locals will supply it or hard eyed whores, and more ruthless pimps, will turn up from countries where torture is the main National artform.
As Fiegehen, Lansley and Smith note, there will always be certain sections of society that are badly off in relative terms. That particular feature can be changed if the relative approach is differently characterized, e.g., checking the number below 60% of median income (the answer can be zero). But it remains difficult to judge, in any purely relative view, how successful an anti-poverty programme is, and to rank the relative merits of different strategies, since gains shared by all tend to get discounted.
This does not matter because voters don't think academics who 'measure poverty' are doing anything useful. Why not just keep measuring your own dick in the hope it will grow bigger?
It also has the implication that a general decline in prosperity with lots of additional people in misery—say due to a severe recession or depression—need not show up as a sharp increase in poverty since the relative picture need not change.
This is only true if Labor is homogenous and the economy is flexprice. But in that case there couldn't be a 'recession' because there would be deflation and a 'real balance effect'. Provided there is wage stickiness in at least one market, there will be a change in the 'relative' picture- e.g. public servants on fixed pay-scales rising relative to private sector workers who have had to take pay cuts.
Sen is using terms from economics, but is using them ignorantly. It must be the case that a depression means less skilled people become disproportionately unemployed or suffer wage compression. This is a relative change.
It is clear that somewhere in the process of refining the concept of poverty from what is viewed as the crudities of Charles Booth's or Seebohm Rowntree's old-fashioned criteria,
There was no such process. What happened was that the electorate was expanded. Voters influenced politicians to do sensible things. This had nothing to do with any academic availability cascade. Still, it must be admitted that the LSE was set up to help Labor with statistical research and so forth. But hiring stupid Bongs who knew shit about England was a mistake. People doing mathematical dissertations of Inequality were actually queuing up for the few decently paid jobs on American Liberal Campuses reserved for 'diversity hires'. To be honest, such people were too stupid and risk averse to do anything else. By contrast, a Bengali who did a PhD in O.R could become a partner at McKinsey's before founding his own company and turning into a billionaire employing 8000 people on three continents. Meanwhile Sen went on repeating this sort of senile shite.
we have been made to abandon here an essential characteristic of poverty,
because we don't yet have the science to determine what is 'essential'- i.e. true in all possible worlds- though, for any specific purpose, we may have a good enough approximation- e.g. essential supplies to be distributed in the event of a natural disaster.
replacing it with some imperfect representation of inequality as such.
If the inequality reflects lower productivity, it is good enough. But this is bleeding obvious. You want to set up a sweat shop in a place where you can see lots of people haven't had a square meal in a long time. Similarly, you want to set up a hi-tech lab in a place where most peeps are driving Teslas and eating Sushi. Chances are, they are highly productive or else highly productive people will have no objection to moving into their neighborhoods.
That poverty should in fact be viewed straightforwardly as an issue of inequality has, in fact, been argued by several authors.
In advanced economies- sure. In shithole countries poverty is a function of disease and crime and lack of infrastructure and witchdoctors putting a curse on your dong.
The American sociologists
i.e. cretins. That is what the word 'sociologist' means.
Miller and Roby have put their position thus: Casting the issue of poverty in terms of stratification leads to regarding poverty as an issue of inequality. In this approach, we move away from efforts to measure poverty lines with pseudo-scientific accuracy. Instead, we look at the nature and size of the differences between the bottom 20 or 10 per cent and the rest of the society. I have tried to argue elsewhere that this view is based on a confusion
Everybody except Sen is confused. He sure is one very special little Bong.
A sharp fall in general prosperity causing widespread starvation and hardship must be seen by any acceptable criterion of poverty as an intensification of poverty.
When prosperity falls poverty increases because...urm... that's how the English language works. On the other hand if the starvation is caused by an alien occupation force, then poverty or prosperity aren't relevant. What is relevant is that you are a conquered people.
But the stated view of poverty "as an issue of inequality" can easily miss this if the relative distribution is unchanged and there is no change in "the differences between the bottom 20 or 10 per cent and the rest of the society".
This is false. If the poor starve, then there is less inequality. Why? The poorest have zero or small marginal product. Assuming higher disutility from labor intensive work, wage differentials will be eroded by the death of sickness of the lowest marginal product workers.
But this is self-evident. Sen thinks stupid academics matter. People in War-time Holland didn't know they were starving because no Dutch academic had done a proper econometric survey. Similarly famine might occur under Mrs. Thatcher because not enough economists were doing Sen-tentious shite.
For example, recognising starvation as poverty is scarcely a matter of "pseudo-scientific accuracy"!
But starvation isn't poverty. Thinking otherwise is simply false. Some rich peeps starved at Auschwitz. Some poor people put on weight during the same period. Consider the Indian student in occupied territory who, on orders from Netaji Bose, joined the Waffen SS. He got plenty of beer and sausages and French whores. But he was likely to have much lower wealth and earning capacity than many perishing in the concentration camps.
It can, however, be argued that such sharp declines are most unlikely in rich countries,
Or even in poor countries. Health improved during the American Great Depression and the more recent Cuban 'Famine'. Still, not being able to dig your own grave with a knife and fork is too deprivation.
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.
Everybody already has that. This is a case where akreibia- groping for more precision or rigor than the subject matter can afford- is a mistake. Still, some stupid drudges can come up such metrics for polemical purposes.
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"8 of 1944-45, when widespread starvation was acute.
Wow! The Dutch did not know they were malnourished and some were starving! Some Economist needed to 'conceptualize' this for them. They probably also had to explain that Nazi soldiers weren't actually Nuns and the Gestapo wasn't an auxiliary of the Women's Institute.
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. 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.
As was the direction in the Eighties and Nineties and so forth. Sen was predicting mass famine in the UK.
Sen finally gets around to arguing for an 'absolutist' measure without which rich countries might not realize that they were starving to death just because no econometrician told them about it.
There is, I would argue, an irreducible absolutist core in the idea of poverty.
In which case it would be meaningful to refer to a particular tree as being poor but cheerful while the bush beneath it was very wealthy but miserly. There is no 'absolutist' core in the idea of the minimum needed for survival and reproduction. The species adapts. Co-evolutionary processes feature 'innovation' and thus there is no closure on the configuration space. Thus we don't know what can be true in all possible worlds. No 'irreducible absolutist core' can exist.
One element of that absolutist core is obvious enough, though the modern literature on the subject often does its best to ignore it. If there is starvation and hunger, then—no matter what the relative picture looks like—there clearly is poverty.
No. There is food availability deficit because of war or ethnic cleansing or some other such endogenous factor- e.g. transition to Democracy as happened twice in Sen's native East Bengal. That's why some Dutch people died as did many Bengalis when the Axis was winning. However, the Dutch don't fuck up their own country the way Bengali politicians do. That's why Bangladesh had a big famine in the Seventies.
In this sense the relative picture—if relevant— has to take a back seat behind the possibly dominating absolutist consideration.
In other words only food availability deficit, or medicine or shelter availability deficit matters. Entitlements and Capabilities don't at all. If there is an earthquake or massive flood, both rich and poor will need the same type of relief. In other words, Sen and Nussbaum etc. have been talking worthless shite for decades.
While it might be thought that this type of poverty—involving malnutrition or hunger—is simply irrelevant to the richer countries, that is empirically far from clear,
This cretin was living in England and America. It wasn't 'empirically clear' to him that obesity, not malnutrition was the problem in affluent countries.
even though the frequency of this type of deprivation is certainly much less in these countries. Even when we shift our attention from hunger and look at other aspects of living standard, the absolutist aspect of poverty does not disappear. The fact that some people have a lower standard of living than others is certainly proof of inequality,
No. Those with a lower standard may be saving more. Those with a higher standard may be deeply in debt.
but by itself it cannot be a proof of poverty unless we know something more about the standard of living that these people do in fact enjoy.
No. The only relevant information is net fungible assets.
It would be absurd to call someone poor just because he had the means to buy only one Cadillac a day when others in that community could buy two of these cars each day.
Nonsense! The guy may be as poor as shit. He has borrowed money from loan sharks and is buying a Cadillac a day so as to create the impression that his business is doing very well. The fact that he is very poor, and was afraid that loan sharks would break his legs, may be a relevant factor when it comes to sentencing for fraud.
The absolute considerations cannot be inconsequential for conceptualising poverty.
Sen hasn't shown that this is the case.
The temptation to think of poverty as being altogether relative arises partly from the fact that the absolute satisfaction of some of the needs might depend on a person's relative position vis-a-vis others in much the same way as—in the case discussed earlier—the absolute advantage of a person to enjoy a lonely beach may depend upon his relative advantage in the space of knowledge regarding the existence and access to such beaches.
Poverty is relative because wealth is an accident not an essence. If there is no scarcity, there is no point in having wealth. For any given set of agents, there may be some mechanism such that there is no scarcity with respect to food, shelter etc. An example would be a wealthy joint family where some may pursue remunerative employment while others devote themselves to religion or the arts. Since the means of the family are ample, nobody goes short of food or clothes or medicine or education. The citizens of oil rich Emirates were in precisely this position. However some were poor- as girls who married them soon discovered- though they stayed in 5 star hotels while accompanying a relative who was being treated at Harley Street.
The point was very well caught by Adam Smith when he was discussing the concept of necessaries in The Wealth of Nations: By necessaries I understand not only the commodities which are indispensably necessary for the support of life, but what ever the custom of the country renders it indecent for creditable people, even the lowest order, to be without. ... Custom ... has rendered leather shoes a necessary of life in England. The poorest creditable person of either sex would be ashamed to appear in public without them.
Why? Because, women not advertising their 'genteel' status by wearing a bonnet might be raped and offered a small coin by way of compensation. Youths might be rendered drunk and impressed into the Army or Navy.
A shabbily dressed man was at risk of arrest as a vagabond even in the nineteen fifties and sixties. Thus Dom Moraes, an Oxford graduate from a wealthy Indian family, was questioned by the police because though he was wearing a raincoat, he had omitted to put on a cap. Genuine vagabonds were very careful to have some item of headgear at all times because of some antiquated provision of the law. Come to think of it, the 1824 Act is still with us.
In this view to be able to avoid shame, an eighteenth century Englishman has to have leather shoes.
No. Smith said 'creditable person'- i.e. a person with whom, prima facie, you have no reason not to conduct business. Thus, if I say I was defrauded by a lawyer dressed in a three piece suit, my case has merit. If I say the barrister in question was dressed as a truck stop ho, I have only myself to blame.
To maintain your credit, absent great wealth or power or connections, it is wise to display embarrassment if you find yourself improperly accoutred. Thus, when an Indian banker turned up wearing a tweed suit to a business meeting in the Seventies, his British counterpart explained away this faux pas by claiming that the fellow had just returned from shooting small birds or furry animals on some aristocratic estate. The Indian's credit wasn't affected, the Britisher's was. The latter felt 'shame', not the former. Why? The Indian's credit depended on that of the Accepting House of his l.o.c. The Britisher's credit depended on his aristocratic connections.
It may be true that this situation has come to pass precisely because the typical members of that community happen to possess leather shoes, but the person in question needs leather shoes not so much to be less ashamed than others—that relative question is not even posed by Adam Smith—but simply not to be ashamed, which as an achievement is an absolute one.
Sen's ignorance of British history prevents him from seeing that what Smith was saying was Scottish 'gentlemen' (i.e. those with landed estates or a 'learned profession') had to spend a much higher proportion of their income so as to cut a creditable figure in the eyes of the English gentry. This wasn't ostentation. It wasn't vanity. It was canny business practice and had to do with commanding 'credit'.
However, at that time, there were plenty of Scots who were barefoot. Indeed, wooden 'clogs' were common in English Mill Towns because of their superior utility. Later their was a fashion element to this. Clogs might be more expensive than 'patent leather' shoes. There was a good reason for this- they were water proof and protected the feet from industrial accidents.
Sen is a man. Most men understand that males don't give a fuck about fashion- save if this impacts on their business. It is not the case that I would feel 'shame' if you said you'd seen me naked or even if you have naked pictures of me. I'd think you were a bit peculiar but I would scarcely feel violated or shamed and humiliated in some terrible way. Sen nevertheless gets very exited by Smith's mention of people seeking credit simulating embarrassment for being incorrectly dressed in some social context. Sen says 'Aha! White man was quivering with shame due to he didn't have nice shirt. That is why he is coming to conquer Bengal so as to get plenty of Dacca muslin shirts and trousers. Otherwise, Whitey would have been improperly dressed. Someone might suddenly glimpse his naked ankle or knee or elbow. Whitey would immediately have died of shame! This is a truly great discovery. Bengalis should have woken up early and stolen Whitey's clothes when he was taking bath. Then Whitey would have been naked! Bengali would have become Viceroy! Come to think of it, W.C Bonnerjee did propose himself as a future monarch of independent India. Sadly he didn't pull down pants of Prince of Wales and thus cause that worthy to die of shame.'
Women may, however, find Sen's discovery of 'shame' as a big factor in- not Japanese but Scottish!- Society to be in keeping with their own deep intuitions. I'm kidding. Women know men would go about naked if it wasn't for fear of injury to their testicles. Still, there is something very feminine to Sen's oeuvre. But the fellow is shameless.
Sen next turns to 'capability' though it is completely unconnected to wealth or poverty or income distribution.
At this stage of this discussion I would like to take up a somewhat more general question, viz., that of the right focus for assessing standard of living.
It is the focus of ordinary people who look around and say 'how come that guy has a nicer house and a nicer car and eats at fancier restaurants'? Tardean mimetics is driven by emulation of those with the higher standard of living. This is a good thing. It causes people to switch to more productive occupations or to get the fuck out of shitholes.
In my Tanner Lecture (given at Stanford University in 1979) and my Hennipman Lectures (given at the University of Amsterdam in 1982), I have tried to argue that the right focus is neither commodities, nor characteristics (in the sense of Gorman and Lancaster), nor utility, but something that may be called a person's capability.
Which has nothing to do with standard of living. I could live in a big mansion while Terence Tao could be confined to a prison cell. His capability not just in Math, but writing English, would always exceed mine.
The contrasts may be brought out by an illustration. Take a bicycle. It is, of course, a commodity. It has several characteristics, and let us concentrate on one particular characteristic, viz., transportation.
As opposed to what? It's use as a sex toy?
Having a bike gives a person the ability to move about in a certain way that he may not be able to do without the bike.
No. Having a bike does not give me that ability. Learning how to ride would. But then I need not 'have' a bike. I could borrow or steal one.
So the transportation characteristic of the bike gives the person the capability of moving in a certain way.
No. The person's ability to ride a bike endows any bike with that characteristic for him. Not me.
That capability may give the person utility or happiness if he seeks such movement or finds it pleasurable.
It may give him utility even if he does not ride it.
So there is, as it were, a sequence from a commodity (in this case a bike), to characteristics (in this case, transportation), to capability to function (in this case, the ability to move), to utility (in this case, pleasure from moving).
There is no such sequence. Bikes would not be a 'commodity' if people didn't know their characteristics and a 'mimetic effect' re. bicycle riding did not already exist. If cars become cheap, your old bike may no longer give utility. What Sen has written is stupid nonsense.
It can be argued that it is the third category—that of capability to function—that comes closest to the notion of standard of living.
No it can't. That hobo can ride a bike. This billionaire can't ride shit. He is kept alive by medical science and can only swallow a little gruel. But he has a very high standard of living.
The commodity ownership or availability itself is not the right focus since it does not tell us what the person can, in fact, do.
Yes it is. My neighbor has a great standard of living as evidenced by a state of the art kitchen, a heated swimming pool, and a garage full of sports-cars. But he can't cook, does not swim and lost his license 20 years ago.
I may not be able to use the bike if—say—I happen to be handicapped. Having the bike—or something else with that characteristic—may provide the basis for a contribution to the standard of living, but it is not in itself a constituent part of that standard.
Yes it is. A handicapped guy may buy a bike so his servant can get to the market more quickly. You don't have to be personally able to use something for it to contribute to your standard of living. The last time I went to my neighbor's home for dinner, the event was catered. One of the staff asked me how to use the state of the art induction hob. I was baffled. We finally found a Youtube video which took us through the steps. Still, there can be no doubt that my friend's kitchen was 'positional' and related to 'standard of living'.
On the other hand, while utility reflects the use of the bike, it does not concentrate on the use itself, but on the mental reaction to that use.
No it doesn't. Utility is a 'Tarskian primitive'. It is undefined.
If I am of a cheerful disposition and enjoy life even without being able to move around, because I succeed in having my heart leap up every time I behold a rainbow in the sky, I am no doubt a happy person, but it does not follow that I have a high standard of living. A grumbling rich man may well be less happy than a contented peasant, but he does have a higher standard of living than that peasant; the comparison of standard of living is not a comparison of utilities. So the constituent part of the standard of living
are purely material and objective- stuff like how fancy your kitchen appliances are and whether you have an indoor pool.
is not the good, nor its characteristics, but the ability to do various things by using that good
nope. You are still mega-rich in Fulham if you have an indoor pool even if you never use it.
or those characteristics, and it is that ability rather than the mental reaction to that ability in the form of happiness that, in this view, reflects the standard of living
Rubbish. Standard of living is purely material. You have a high standard of living if you own luxury homes even if you sleep in the office and eat only coco-pops.
What Sen is working up to is the following foolishness
poverty is an absolute notion in the space of capabilities
No. It has no existence there whatsoever. A very rich guy could have no capabilities whatsoever. He may be being kept alive by medical science.
but very often it will take a relative form in the space of commodities or characteristics.
No. It is only defined on the asset space. A very rich miser can have very little in the way of commodities.
Let us return to Adam Smith. The capability to which he was referring was the one of avoiding shame from the inability to meet the demands of convention.
He was speaking of Scottish gentlemen like himself. Not the working class.
The commodity needed for it, in a particular illustration that Smith considered, happened to be a pair of leather shoes. As we consider richer and richer communities, the commodity requirement of the same capability—avoiding this type of shame—increases. As Adam Smith (1776) noted, "the Greeks and Romans lived ... very comfortably though they had no linen," but "in the present time, through the greater part of Europe, a creditable day-labourer would be ashamed to appear in public without a linen shirt" (pp. 351-2).
Smith knew shit about day laborers.
In the commodity space, therefore, escape from poverty in the form of avoiding shame
is meaningless. You don't escape poverty if you borrow a shirt. Shame is not relevant. A very wealthy lady may feel ashamed because her milliner hadn't kept up with the latest fashion. Sen takes a throwaway remark by Smith (who was trying to fool people south of the border into thinking Scots folk had a higher standard of living than in fact obtained) and starts babbling utter nonsense.
No doubt, women reading this identified with the poor and starving because they remembered a traumatic occasion when their thousand dollar prom dress was laughed at by the mean girls. This convinces them that they too have suffered like the starving billions of Bengal.
requires a varying collection of commodities—and it is this collection and the resources needed for it that happen to be relative vis-a-vis the situations of others.
No. Either everyone is wearing a linen shirt and you feel ashamed because Mummy said you should wear a silk blouse- in which case there is only commodity which is important. It is not the case that a boy who goes to school in his mum's silk blouse can avoid shame by adverting to his ownership of a super-fast space ship. People still mock him till he wets himself and then Mrs. Sharma takes him to the Vice Principal's office and you end up wearing a gym slip coz there's nothing else fits you in the 'lost and found'. This didn't happen to me. It happened to someone I once knew. Incidentally, he is very successful and handsome and has completely forgotten this traumatic event.
But on the space of the capabilities themselves—the direct constituent of the standard of living—
Coz your standard of living depends of what you can cook or what you can weave or what you can grow in your garden or what you can butcher- not on what you can buy.
No doubt, White peeps listening to this shit thought- 'in Bengal they don't have this thing we call money. This poor undersized brown monkey is hilarious because he teaches Econ at Harvard but has no idea of how money works.
escape from poverty has an absolute requirement, to wit, avoidance of this type of shame.
This is simply false. Smith knew there were plenty of very rich guys- including mad King George- who had a great fucking standard of living and thus who felt no fucking shame if they ran around naked with a radish up their arse rather than a fucking linen shirt or a powdered wig. You can avoid shame by borrowing or stealing but this does not mean you 'escape poverty'.
Not so much having equal shame as others, but just not being ashamed, absolutely.
Sen is fixated on shame. He probably thinks that Adani is always feeling ashamed because his banyan is full of holes and so he is trying to escape poverty by accumulating a few more bullions. Apparently the guy is currently worth more than Zuckerberg who is very ashamed of the holes in his shoes.
The fact is some societies have a notion of 'shame' as opposed to 'sin'. There is greater pressure to conform. Why? It may be that, historically, there was service provision discrimination of a 'casteist' type. If you didn't look like you were of 'gentle birth' (albeit poor) you might suffer grave indignities which your lack of muscle could not protect you from. However, if you were earning well and did not depend on the patronage of anybody, nor were afraid of the Secret Police etc, then you could wear and do what you liked. This had everything to do with Social mores and what sort of political regime obtained and nothing at all to do with poverty or capability or income inequality. Thus Singapore was richer than Calcutta. But a kid in Calcutta could wear fashionably ripped jeans and chew gum. If he tried the same thing in Lee Kuan Yew's utopia he'd have been publicly flogged. Apparently, ripped clothing have bad fengshui. They will cause monetary loss.
Sen displays his naivete in his next assertion regarding the educational value of TV
the child without a television in Britain or in Ireland would be clearly worse off—have a lower standard of living—in this respect than a child, say, in Tanzania without a television.
Yes. That is why ownership of color TV was a determinant of standard of living at that time.
It is not so much that the British or the Irish child has a brand new need, but that to meet the same need as the Tanzanian child—
the same need? Does this cretin think Tanzanian kids were outperforming British kids? Poor people in countries without TV were gravely disadvantaged in virtually every 'value adding' type of work or life skill. Being able to hoe your 'shamba' or use a panga wasn't gonna get you a job with McKinsey's or Goldman Sachs. On the other hand, us Indians did have an advantage in that we'd read a lot of English literature- and thus did better on Western campuses- purely because Doordarshan was utterly crap.
the need to be educated—the British or the Irish child must have more commodities. Of course, the British child might fulfill the need better than the Tanzanian with the help of the television—I am not expressing a view on this—but the fact remains that the television is a necessity for the British child for school education in a way it is not for the Tanzanian child.
No. If Tanzania wanted to catch up with Britain, it should have brought in color TV and drive-in theaters and so forth. Instead it chose to do stupid Socialist shit. Maybe things would have been different if it had been floating on a sea of oil. The fact remains, the rich adopt mores which raise the productivity of their kids so they get richer yet. The poor may be stuck in a Malthusian trap of agricultural involution.
But whereas the commodity requirements of these capability fulfilments are not tremendously variable between one community and another,
yes they are. Setting up a TV network costs a lot of money. It is a different matter that this can more than pay for itself through advertising revenue.
such variability is enormous in the case of other capabilities. The capability to live without shame emphasized by Adam Smith, that of being able to participate in the activities of the community discussed by Peter Townsend, that of having self-respect discussed by John Rawls, are examples of capabilities with extremely variable resource requirements.
No. They are wholly invariant. You just need social mores which punish bullies or 'mean girls' or those who try to shame or exclude others. The fact is the Scots were not tortured by feelings of shame. They wanted to get ahead and were prepared to copy what had worked for others before hitting upon unique innovations of their own.
People with nice personalities participate in communities. People with horrible personalities, like yours truly, tend to be shunned. This doesn't dent my self-respect any.
And as it happens the resource requirements typically go up in these cases with the average prosperity of the nation,
Not if there are economies of scale and scope in which case the resource requirement falls because 'Tardean mimetics' has increased the size of the market. The average cost of broadband falls steeply as adoption becomes universal. Furthermore, as E-business flourishes, the total resource requirement of any given real income matrix may fall.
so that the relativist view acquires plausibility despite the absolutist basis of the concept of poverty in terms of capabilities and deprivation.
There is no absolutist basis at all. There is only Sen blabbing on about 'shame' and 'self-respect' as if he had been earning his money as a rent-boy for all these years.
It is perhaps worth remarking that this type of derived relativism does not run into the difficulties noted earlier with thoroughgoing relativity of the kind associated with seeing poverty as "an issue of inequality".
Meaningless shite.
When the Dutch in the hunger winter of 1944-45 found themselves suddenly in much reduced circumstances,
Coz the Allies were fighting the Nazis on their soil from September 1944 to April 1945
their commodity requirements of capability fulfilments did not go down immediately to reduce the bite of poverty, as under the rigidly relativist account.
In other words, the fact that everybody had very little did not mean some didn't die of malnutrition.
While the commodity requirements are sensitive to the opulence and the affluence of the community in general, this relationship is neither one of instant adjustment, nor is it a straightforward one to be captured simply by looking at the average income, or even the current Lorenz curve of income distribution. Response to communal standards is a more complex process than that.
This fucking cretin doesn't get that the only thing that mattered was killing the Nazis till they surrendered so Allied food can get to those who needed it.
Sen wrote this shite some four decades ago. However he never resiled from this stupidity nor did any of his acolytes point this out.
Why measure poverty? One reason is for a polemical purpose- under the present administration trillions of our people are having to suck off strangers in order to gain a little protein! Another is because knowing who is poor and where they live and how this is changing is important for marketing of negative income elasticity of demand goods- e.g. pawnbrokers etc. Thus the fact there are entrenched pockets of poverty in Fulham means that you have pound shops a mere hundred yards from Michelin star restaurants. I notice that when relative poverty is falling the 'predatory lenders' pull out and relocate. It wouldn't surprise to me if some algorithm doesn't decide these things.
There are sound Social and political reasons to measure poverty but there are none for using any particular metric rather than another. For any given purpose, there is a specific way to capture or simulate the data. Sen's own metric was useless.
Consider the following-
In presenting my measure in Econometrica 1976, I expressed some support for the view that the poverty measure must satisfy an adapted version of the so-called Pigou-Dalton condition of transfer, to wit, any transfer of income to a poor person from a person who is richer must reduce the recorded poverty level.
In other words, it can't have a mimetic effect- e.g. people see that one or two are applying for and getting Income support or Child Tax credits and this causes them to follow suit- in which case it is a bad program because take-up is low relative to the administrative cost.
This axiom was not used in deriving my measure P, and indeed as I noted the following year in Econometrica, it is possible for the measure P to violate this Pigou-Dalton condition, albeit in rather rare circumstances.26 It turns out that all the variants of this measure mentioned above—with a few exceptions involving other unattractive characteristics—can also violate the Pigou-Dalton condition.
But it is an obviously foolish condition. When you introduce a measure meant to benefit the poor, you want the poor to come forward and avail of it. Maybe this is not true in Bengal, but it is true in Britain. You genuinely want to find out whether people you assumed were doing well were in fact struggling. This can also tell you about slack in the economy. If there are a lot of people on tax credits etc, then this means they are under-employed or, at any rate, available for higher productivity employment.
Measuring stuff is useful for all sorts of purposes. Sen, sadly, was only interested in purely academic purposes. But, because he had shit for brains, his contribution was wholly mischievous.
There is a weaker version of the transfer axiom, which I called the Weak Transfer Axiom, which insists on the Pigou-Dalton condition being invariably satisfied whenever the transfer to the poor person from the richer person does not change the number below the poverty line, and this of course is fully consistent with the absolutist approach, and is indeed satisfied by the measure P and most of its variants.
What this cretin is saying is that the only licit transfers are 'lumpsum', not means-tested. In other words, no Social Security program of any kind should exist because they have mimetic and incentive effects. Yet, the truth is, it is helpful to put in poverty relief programs- just as it is good to put in rape reporting programs- because they you get a picture of the true size and incidence of the problem and can begin to tackle it. Obviously, in the short run, the immediate effect would be that the poverty head count or the rape statistics go up. But by getting the thing out into the open, you are halfway to finding and implementing the solution.
I end with a few concluding statements. First, I have argued that despite the emerging unanimity in favour of taking a relative as opposed to an absolute view of poverty, there is a good case for an absolutist approach.
Though Science hasn't yet developed to a point where such a thing is feasible.
The dispute on absolute vs. relative conceptualisation of poverty can be better resolved by being more explicit on the particular space (e.g., commodities, incomes, or capabilities) in which the concept is to be based.
Absolute conceptions can't have a closed configuration space because of co-evolution. No doubt, some future science may be able to show that some particular set of lab-synthesized nutrients etc are absolutely better than anything which has ever been available. But we aren't there yet. We don't even know if there is some scientific reason why the thing is unwise.
Second, I have outlined the case for using an absolute approach to poverty related to the notion of capability.
It is utterly mad. Only if everything a person owns is directly related to their capability- there is no inherited wealth and no Knightian Uncertainty etc- would it not be utterly fucked in the head.
Capabilities differ both from commodities and characteristics, on the one hand, and utilities, on the other. The capability approach shares with John Rawls the rejection of the utilitarian obsession with one type of mental reaction, but differs from Rawls' concentration on primary goods by focusing on capabilities of human beings rather than characteristics of goods they possess.
This cashes out as saying 'give more basic goods to the handicapped' so they can trade some for necessary services. However, in the original position, everyone would have contracted for compulsory social insurance with disability benefits anyway. Thus this is no sort of insight. Still women identified with talk of 'shame' and self-respect as equating to wearing dress to prom or whatever.
Third, an absolute approach in the space of capabilities translates into a relative approach in the space of commodities, resources and incomes in dealing with some important capabilities, such as avoiding shame from failure to meet social conventions, participating in social activities, and retaining self-respect.
And slut shaming the mean girl who snaked your boo- right? Come to think of it, Sen only started babbling this sort of shite after he snaked the boo of his best friend from Shantiniketan. One reason why he may have run of with Eva Colorni was she was well connected. Her dad was related to Sraffa and her Mum was the niece of Hirschman. Before she married Sen's pal, she'd been hitched to a guy from a prominent political family in Italy. I believe he served as Finance Minister in the Eighties. Partha Dasgupta went one better by marrying James Meade's daughter thus becoming Welfare E-Con's ghar jamai.
Fourth, since poverty removal is not the only object of social policy and inequality removal has a status of its own,
no it doesn't. Professors may pretend otherwise, but voters think they are shit.
taking an absolutist view of poverty must not be confused with being indifferent to inequality as such. While poverty may be seen as a failure to reach some absolute level of capability,
It isn't. It is seen as a failure to attain an absolute level of productivity. People who are poor have an incentive to relocate or retrain so as to get more of the good things of life.
the issue of inequality of capabilities is an important one—on its own right—for public policy.
No it isn't. Nobody wants the government to put out their eyes and chop off their limbs so as to achieve equality with blind quadriplegics.
Fifth, while the inter-country and inter-community differences have been much discussed in the context of conceptualising poverty,
There was little such discussion even among academics. What there was a lot of discussion about whether you'd be less poor teaching some shite subject in England or the US of A
the differences within a country and within a community need much more attention because of interpersonal variations in converting commodities into capabilities.
Disability? You need a medical certificate.
This is particularly important since poverty is often associated with handicaps due to disability or age.
For age, you need a birth certificate and proof of eligibility.
This problem could perhaps be handled by using efficiency-income units reflecting command over capabilities rather than command over goods and services.
We have statistics showing how much peeps earn and thus how much they can buy. We don't and can't have any similar statistics for 'capabilities'.
Finally, I have argued that the reasonableness of various axioms that aggregative measures of poverty may or may not be asked to satisfy depend (sometimes in an unobvious—certainly unexplored—way) on whether fundamentally a relative or an absolute approach is being adopted.
Sen is wrong. The 'various axioms' are obviously stupid shit. Still, you could have an arbitrary x dollars a day poverty-line but it would be pretty damn meaningless.
This has practical implications on the choice of statistical measures to be used. It is important to know whether the poor, relatively speaking, are in some deeper sense absolutely deprived. It makes a difference.
Middle class Indians who studied Sen-tentious shite did okay in terms of getting academic or bureaucratic jobs. But they were deprived of the ability to think sensibly. Purnendu Chatterjee was fortunate in that he didn't go to D.School or LSE after finishing IIT. Instead he did O.R in America and joined McKinsey. Now he is a billionaire. He actually knows econ- i.e. how to economize on the use of scarce resources. I hope the Chatterjee group can give the Adanis sound competition in port development. That's what lifts people out of poverty- not Sen-tentious shite.
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