Sen on Poverty and Famines

 Rich people can starve if they have no access to food. Poor people can develop obesity related illnesses if they have unrestricted access to tasty grub. There is no necessary connection between the two. However, if one wants to bang on about poverty for a virtue signaling purpose you must describe, with tears in your eyes, the plight of starving wretches prostituting their sallow flesh to gross, gormandizing, Capitalists on the boulevards and avenues of the great Cities of the World. 

Back in '81, some stupid UN agency- I think it was the ILO- gave a bit of money to Sen to write a shite book on 'Poverty and Famines' from which I quote-

Starvation is the characteristic of some people not having enough food to eat.

Nope. That's malnourishment or being underweight. Starvation is a severe deficiency in caloric energy intake, below the level needed to maintain an organism's life. It may occur for reasons of lifestyle or psychological abnormality or deprivation of a circumstantial sort. However, from the economic point of view, there is another type of starvation- which we may term unanticipated and 'frictional'- like 'frictional unemployment' becoming 'structural' because of incorrect expectations- where the belief that 'entitlements' exists prevents the Muth rational mobility choice from being implemented. 

War-time Famine in Bengal was different from that in Japanese occupied Vietnam. People starved quietly. They didn't steal or run riot. Why? Bengal had been ruled by popular elected Bengali politicians since 1937. Vietnam was Vichy French. When they weren't brutal, they were corrupt. Then, their ally, Tojo's terror troops turned up. 

It is not the characteristic of there being not enough food to eat.

For the person in question- yes it is. What's more the food must be stuff recognises as food and which she is able to properly consume. That was the point of Kipling's 'William the Conqueror' which was required reading for people working in Famine Relief.

 Similarly, a person suffocates because they don't have enough breathable air.  If our planet blows up and we all die it is not because there is a shortage of habitable planets. There may be plenty we could have relocated to. But we had no means to do so. Thus our extinction occurred because we didn't have a habitable planet, not that such things were in short supply in our Universe.

While the latter can be a cause of the former, it is but one of many possible causes

Nope. It is the only cause. Only by increasing supply and ensuring uptake of appropriate nutrition to the person in question can starvation be avoided.  

Whether and how starvation relates to food supply is a matter for factual investigation.

So, not Sen's shite then. 

Food supply statements say things about a commodity (or a group of commodities) considered on its own.

Not unless that is what we stipulate for. We can easily ask for statements concerning supply of nutrition to particular individuals or classes of individuals.  

Starvation statements are about the relationship of persons to the commodity (or that commodity group).

No. The are statements about nutrition availability to individuals or groups. 

Leaving out cases in which a person may deliberately starve, starvation statements translate readily into statements of ownership of food by persons.

No. They translate into availability statements. Ownership is not availability. I may own a big orchard but no apples are available to me in my prison cell. Meanwhile folks in the vicinity of my orchard are gorging on pippins.  

In order to understand starvation, it is, therefore, necessary to go into the structure of ownership.

No it isn't. The two things are wholly unrelated. Under Stalin and Mao, millions starved though the 'People' owned every thing.  

Ownership relations are one kind of entitlement relations.

They may be, they may not. That is a legal question. In general, ownership does not per se create any entitlement though it may become the basis of a claim which is affirmed by a court order. But that claim could be self-enforced though the other party may have a remedy in law, or by resort to a stronger right arm.

It is necessary to understand the entitlement systems within which the problem of starvation is to be analysed.

Nobody knows what entitlements exist. Madoff's clients thought they were entitled to live large. Then they discovered they were as poor as shit. An entitlement is merely a claim. Others may have a superior claim or else the claim may not be enforceable.  

This applies more generally to poverty as such, and more specifically to famines as well. An entitlement relation applied to ownership connects one set of ownerships to another through certain rules of legitimacy.

No. There is no such relation. Adverse possession is a real thing. Possession is nine points of the law. Sen pretends to know Jurisprudence. He doesn't know shit.  

It is a recursive relation and the process of connecting can be repeated.

No. It is a buck stopped relation in so far as it is justiciable at all. If it is not justiciable, it is simply a function of uncorrelated asymmetries and relative strength or treat points.  

Consider a private ownership market economy. I own this loaf of bread. Why is this ownership accepted? Because I got it by exchange through paying some money I owned.

Sen is unaware that a gift of a loaf of bread creates ownership as does just picking the thing up and not being challenged.  

 Entitlement relations accepted in a private ownership market economy typically include the following, among others: ( i ) trade-based entitlement: one is entitled to own what one obtains by trading something one owns with a willing party (or, multilaterally, with a willing set of parties);

This is not true. One is not entitled to own child-porn even if one paid for it. Ownership is a legal category. It is extensional though intensional arguments may be entertained by a court. But once judgement is handed down, the thing is extensional. What is owned is an extensional set which can't be fully specified by any listing of intensional properties.  

(2) production-based entitlement, one is entitled to own what one gets by arranging production using one's owned resources, or resources hired from willing parties meeting the agreed conditions of trade; (3) own-labour entitlement: one is entitled to one's own labour power, and thus to the trade-based and production-based entitlements related to one's labour power; (4) inheritance and transfer entitlement: one is entitled to own what is willingly given to one by another who legitimately owns it, possibly to take affect after the latter's death (if so specified by him). These are some entitlement relations of more or less straightforward kind, but there are others, frequently a good deal more complex. For example, one may be entitled to enjoy the fruits of some property without being able to trade it for anything else. Or one may be able to inherit the property of a deceased relation who did not bequeath it to anyone, through some rule of kinship based inheritance accepted in the country in question. Or one may have some entitlements related to unclaimed objects on the basis of discovery. Market entitlements may even be supplemented by rationing or coupon systems, even in private ownership market economies, such as in Britain during the last war.

 These are all examples of claims- administrative or legal or moral. They are not necessarily entitlements in the sense that economists assume. Why? Going to court costs money and time and enforcement of a legal order can be too expensive or can itself be frustrated by some other legal expedient. Indians knew this all too well. You let your house out to a tenant. Good luck trying to get it back! A High Court Judge, around this time, was discovered to have used gangsters to get back his property. Instead of public outrage against him, people sympathized with him. But, by then, in Bihar, Proudhon's dictum had been reversed 'Theft is Property.' 

The interpretation of entitlement relations here is descriptive rather than prescriptive.

in which case it should recognize that the thing doesn't exist. It's one thing to say everybody should be nice- that's prescriptive- and another thing to describe everybody as being nice.  

In contrast, Robert Nozick's (1974) well-known exploration of 'the entitlement theory' of justice is prescriptive, discussing private property rights and other rights in normative terms. The two exercises are thus differently motivated, and must not be confused with each other. 

There is no point having a 'descriptive' theory of entitlement unless you are prepared to include stuff like a gangster's entitlement to beat the fuck out of you and rape your wife while making you watch. This in turn creates his entitlement to take half your earning for the rest of your miserable life.  

. 1.2 EXCHANGE ENTITLEMENT In a market economy, a person can exchange what he owns for another collection of commodities.

Not in my experience. We sell and buy incrementally using money. Sen lives in a world where, every morning, people load all their possessions onto their backs and then go to the market where they exchange what they are carrying for what some other guy is carrying. 

He can do this exchange either through trading, or through production,

in which case there is no 'exchange' or transfer or ownership 

or through a combination of the two. The set of all the alternative bundles of commodities that he can acquire in exchange for what he owns may be called the 'exchange entitlement' of what he owns.

It is unknowable. There is no point talking about it.  

The 'exchange entitlement mapping' is the relation that specifies the set of exchange entitlements for each ownership bundle.

It does not exist because it goes from an unknown to an unknown in a manner itself unknown. One may arbitrarily stipulate that such a relation exists but this is like stipulating that chanting some unknown sequence of Latin hexameters will cause the Devil to appear.  

This relation—E-mapping for brevity—defines

nothing at all. At best we can say it is itself a Tarskian primitive. It can't be a relation between Tarskian primitives save by arbitrary stipulation. No doubt, in an Arrow Debreu universe with perfect futures markets, there is an existence proof for the thing. But we don't live in that Universe. 

the possibilities that would be open to him corresponding to each ownership situation. A person will be exposed to starvation if, for the ownership that he actually has, the exchange entitlement set does not contain any feasible bundle including enough food.

This is nonsense. A penniless refugee will be fed. A wealthy guy trapped in his own panic room may starve to death.  

Given the E-mapping, it is in this way possible to identify those ownership bundles—call them collectively the starvation set— that must, thus, lead to starvation in the absence of non-entitlement transfers (e.g. charity).

Nope. You have to also consider the ways in which a person or a class may be prevented from buying and selling or otherwise accessing nutrition. The other side of the coin is that most jurisdictions have conditional rights and immunities- e.g you can break into an empty house and eat the food you find there if that is the only alternative to your dying of hunger and cold.  

Human beings evolved on a fitness landscape in which starvation featured very heavily. The eusocial strategy is to be mobile enough to maintain access to several types of nutrition. Restricting mobility through slavery, serfdom, or false promises of relief in bad times, can cause very high excess mortality from food availability deficit. 

 The landless labourer will be employed in exchange for a wage, while the share-cropper will do the cultivation and own a part of the product. This difference can lead not merely to contrasts of the levels of typical remuneration of the two, which may or may not be very divergent, but also to sharp differences in exchange entitlements in distress situations. For example, a cyclone reducing the labour requirement for cultivation by destroying a part of the crop in each farm may cause some casual agricultural labourers to be simply fired, leading to a collapse of their exchange entitlements, while others are retained.

It may have the opposite effect. If the share-cropper has to run away to the City to avoid starvation, then you take back title and put in landless laborers for cash-crop production. Thus you feed the landless laborer so as to increase your control rights over property. Sen, poor fellow, didn't know what was happening in his own country.  

In contrast, in this case the sharecroppers may all operate with a lower labour input and lower entitlement, but no one may become fully jobless and thus incomeless. Similarly, if the output is food, e.g. rice or wheat, the sharecropper gets his return in a form such that he can directly eat it without going through the vagaries of the market. In contrast, the agricultural labourer paid in money terms will have to depend on the exchange entitlement of his money wage.

This is silly. It is obvious that you have an interest in feeding your own laborers because that directly affects productivity. The people you want rid off are the tenant-farmers who may have recently been granted better protection against eviction. But this also means the tenant-farmer, the sharecropper and the rising 'kulak' want the landless laborer (who may be a 'low caste' migrant) to starve and die so that the power of the big landlord decreases. An unpleasant aspect of both the Irish famine and the Bengali famine was that both increased the power of the lower-middle class indigenous stock albeit at the expense of those at the bottom of the heap.  

When famines are accompanied by sharp changes in relative prices— and in particular a sharp rise in food prices—there is much comparative merit in being a share-cropper rather than an agricultural labourer, especially when the capital market is highly imperfect.

Fazl ul Haq's reforms, together with the threat of Jap invasion meant that the landless laborer working for the Permanent Settlement 'zamindar' became more vulnerable to starvation. Why? The landlord could not borrow on his holdings or put the squeeze on the tenant or sharecropper. But this also affected 'service castes' in the village who may have hoped that some tatters of the traditional 'moral economy' had survived into the age of Democratic politics.  

The greater production risk of the sharecropper compared with the security ofa fixed wage on the part of the agricultural labourer has been well analysed (see, for example, Stiglitz, 1974); but a fixed money wage may offer no security at all in a situation of sharply varying food prices (even when employment is guaranteed).

Not for farm work. The landlord knows he has to feed the laborer well so as to get more work out of him. The question is whether he can get a 'Speenhamland' type subsidy from the local government. That's what rural politics was about. Fazl ul Haq had tilted the balance in favor of the tenant. But this also put a target on the backs of Sen's own class- i.e. educated Hindu landowners who were no longer willing or able to sit in their ancestral mansion ordering their musclemen to knife their rivals in the Districts.  

In contrast, a share of the food output does have some security advantage in terms of exchange entitlement.

Only if that share is linked to productivity. To rise up, you have to cruelly eject the elderly great-aunt or other such distant relative whose services are no longer considered worthwhile because food prices have risen.  

Similarly, those who sell services (e.g. barbers or rickshawpullers) or handicraft products (e.g. weavers or shoemakers) are—like wage labourers—more exposed, in this respect, to famines involving unexpected rises of food prices than are peasants or share-croppers producing food crops.

It is rational for villages to invest grain surpluses in handicrafts and other such services. But those castes have traditionally been highly mobile. They flee when the first signs of dearth appear. Sadly, bogus 'entitlements' promised by populist politicians can fool them into staying put.  

This is the case even when the typical standard of living of the latter is no higher than that of the former. In understanding general poverty, or regular starvation, or outbursts of famines, it is necessary to look at both ownership patterns and exchange entitlements, and at the forces that lie behind them.

No it isn't. Just focus on growing way way more food using fewer and fewer workers.  Feed the surplus to goats and chickens in good times. Also, improve transport and let evil Capitalist bastards find ways of exploiting non-farm labor to the hilt. Then you can get poor people to send kids to skool- sometimes, as in Travancore, you have to initially pay them to do so- and then sit back and wait for demographic transition. That's how you stop being an involuted Malthusian shithole. 

This requires careful consideration of the nature of modes of production and the structure of economic classes as well as their interrelations.

Which Sen was way too stupid and deracinated to do. But there was no point doing it. If productivity did not rise, some exogenous shock would always cause 'entitlement collapse'- i.e. the pretense that the poor would be helped would be quietly dropped.  

 Given a social security system, an unemployed person may get 'relief, an old person a pension, and the poor some specified 'benefits'.

These disappear when the shit hits the fan but they would never have been very large to begin with because the productive class exits or otherwise avoids taxation so as not to pay for parasites.  

 The reason why there are no famines in the rich developed countries is not because people are generally rich on the average.

Yes it is. Also they have nukes and so don't get invaded.  

Rich they certainly are when they have jobs and earn a proper wage; but for large numbers of people this condition fails to hold for long periods of time, and the exchange  entitlements of their endowments in the absence of social security arrangements could provide very meagre commodity bundles indeed.

But if a country is rich and you are unemployed, you can generally get enough cash to move to somewhere jobs are available. In poor countries, this is less possible because the rich countries are stingy about handing out visas.  

Sen may not have been aware that the England in which he was writing this shite had been paying its poor to fuck off to Australia or other such places. Indeed, the Ozzies and Kiwis themselves supported this scheme. The 'ten pound Pom' scheme reached a peak in 1969 when 80,000 migrated. It only ended in 1982. 

With the proportion of unemployment as high as it is, say, in Britain or America today,

it was only high because of historically high 'replacement rates' (i.e. benefit to wage ratios) which were themselves the product of 'fiscal drag'. Sen knew no macro-econ whatsoever. 

but for the social security arrangements there would be widespread starvation and possibly a famine.

No. Churches and other voluntary organizations would step in. But, the migration of the 'reserve army of unemployed' would have put upward pressure on wages and downward pressure on rents and profits. This would have dramatic political consequences. Reagan and Thatcher prevailed by standing up to an arrogant 'labor aristocracy'- air traffic controllers in the former case and, more sadly, coal miners in the latter.  

What prevents that is not the high average income or wealth of the British or the general opulence of the Americans, but the guaranteed minimum values of exchange entitlements owing to the social security system.

which is predicated on high average income- without which there would be no high tax or national insurance yield. Sen is as stupid as shit. He thinks the social security fund just appears by magic. Nobody pays for it.  

Similarly, the elimination of starvation in socialist economies —for example in China—

back in 1981, Sen thought Mao had been very sweet and kind to the peasants! What a loser!

seems to have taken place even without a dramatic rise in food availability per head, and indeed, typically the former has preceded the latter. The end of starvation reflects a shift in

the economic regime towards free market policies not 

the entitlement system, both in the form of social security and—more importantly—through systems of guaranteed employment at wages that provide exchange entitlement adequate to avoid starvation.

But these collapse when Governments run out of cash. Free market policies boost the tax yield which means some money can be spent keeping the poor alive to vote for you.  

 

1.5 FOOD SUPPLY AND STARVATION There has been a good deal of discussion recently about the prospect of food supply falling significantly behind the world population.

Nope. That was at the end of the Sixties- the Club of Rome etc. By 1975, there was a concerted, largely successful, global initiative to increase 'food security'.

There is, however, little empirical support for such a diagnosis of recent trends. Indeed, for most areas in the world— with the exception of parts of Africa

where markets had been banned or couldn't get off the ground because of war 

—the increase in food supply has been comparable to, or faster than, the expansion of population.

Which is why Sen's relative, B.R Sen, as head of FAO, was able to get everybody to see that Famine was avoidable. In 1920, Keynes thought there were diminishing returns to global agriculture. He said America was probably already a net food importer. He was completely wrong. By 1960, statisticians at the FAO and elsewhere could prove what people in the West could already see for themselves. There was no 'guns/butter' tradeoff. You could have more nukes and more burgers. Moreover, to support agribusiness, it was remunerative to ensure famine never happened anywhere because the capacity to deal with famine itself had positive externalities.  

But this does not indicate that starvation is being systematically eliminated,

Yes it does- provided the starving are in a country that doesn't hate the donor countries too much or hasn't pissed them off in some way. 

since starvation—as discussed—is a function of entitlements and not of food availability as such.

Was the North Korean famine of the Nineties a function of 'entitlements'? Nope. Food was not available. First Russia pulled the plug. Then in 1993, China too faced food shortage and it too pulled the plug. Hundreds of thousands died. Then it turned out the Food Minister was a CIA agent. He had deliberately starved his own people! He was shot. That made everything better. 

Indeed, some of the worst famines have taken place with no significant decline in food availability per head.

Very true. It is all the fault of the CIA.  

To say that starvation depends 'not merely' on food supply but also on its 'distribution' would be correct enough, though not remarkably helpful.

Raise food supply using one set of methods involving agronomists. Improve distribution by using another set of methods by involving guys who know about transport and storage and logistics and so forth. That's helpful. Gassing on about entitlements is useless.  

The important question then would be: what determines distribution of food between different sections of the community?

It is too easily answered. For poor peeps in India the answer was 'public distribution system' and is now 'transfers' using Aadhar card etc. In case of an emergency caused by a 'supply shock' the more advanced the country the better the rationing system will be till the horizon clears and the strategic stockpile is expected to be quickly replenished. Something like this is now happening in the energy market because of the Ukraine war.

 In so far as food supply itself has any influence on the prevalence of starvation, that influence is seen as working through the entitlement relations.

But, historically speaking, no country had any entitlement system and yet few suffered demographically significant famine. Indeed, it is the belief that entitlements exist which can cause people to become immobile and thus vulnerable to famine. However, there is a broader question of artificial restrictions on mobility by reason of 'serfdom' or internal passports etc.  

If one person in eight starves regularly in the world, this is seen as the result of his inability to establish entitlement to enough food; the question of the physical availability of the food is not directly involved.

Yes it is. Nobody is starving to death while lots of grub is physically available to him.  

The approach of entitlements used in this work is very general and—I would argue—quite inescapable in analysing starvation and poverty.

Though starvation and poverty had already been tackled without Sen's stupid shite. People like Herbert Hoover, after the First and Second War, worked out how to get food from surplus countries to the starving. These operations became more and more sophisticated. By contrast no one can agree whether or not there was an Iraqi famine or, indeed, whether Iraq now is one of the 'seven most hunger prone countries in the world'. What is fact and what is propaganda? None can tell. But growing more food and getting it quickly to more hungry people is something which can be measured and quantified. Hoover became President on the US at least partly because of his contribution to combatting famine. The irony was that macro-economic policy mistakes caused nutritional standards to decline for many Americans. Thus macro is too important to be left to economists. Common sense must prevail. 

Sen, it seems, was entirely ignorant of everything B.R Sen had been doing- or indeed everything that had happened in the world over the last 100 years. 

If, nevertheless, it appears odd and unusual, this can be because of the hold of the tradition of thinking in terms of what exists rather than in terms of who can command what.

This tradition, in India put an end to famine by about 1900. What exists and how fast it can be transported to where it is needed is all that matters. Who commands what may matter to the guy in charge of commandeering stockpiles and transporting them. It is not an academic or nomothetic question. It is purely ideographic. You send your guys to the warehouse and they issue a requisition order. Maybe you gave it to the wrong guy.  Let the right guy bring a claim. That's what Courts are for.  

The mesmerizing simplicity of focusing on the ratio of food to population has persistently played an obscuring role over centuries,

This cretin does not get that it is only very recently that anybody had any idea of what the population was or what aggregate food supply might be. Yet, even ancient Empires knew how to deal with problems of dearth.  

and continues to plague policy discussions today much as it has deranged anti-famine policies in the past.

This is nonsense. USAID and Oxfam and the FAO and so forth did a good enough job. Sen added no value whatsoever. Indeed, his work was mischievous. It encourages people to think 'entitlements' matter even though the obligation holder, as a sovereign entity, can't be forced to provide any such thing. 

Moving on to he problem of 'aggregation', we find that for any specific purpose, it can be solved rough and readily enough. Apple wants to know what types of people buy its phones. It also needs to know how many belong to each category of customer. So it gathers data according to multiple criteria and aggregates that data for specific purposes. How many will buy the budget version? Some effective demand comes from my class of poor bastids but there will also be demand from rich guys who buy the premium version for themselves. Why? They need second phones or phones to give to their butlers or whatever. What is true of i-phones is true of poverty. 

Sen takes a different view-

There is the problem of aggregation— often important—over the group of the poor, and this involves moving from the description of the poor to some over-all measure of 'poverty' as such.

Sen doesn't know that Accountants use the same data set to prepare different types of reports for different purposes. Statisticians have a wide variety of methods of aggregating over their data set. Different horses for different courses- as the saying goes.  

In some traditions, this is done very simply by just counting the number of the poor, and then expressing poverty as the ratio of the number of the poor to the total number of people in the community in question.

But to get this crude measure you still need quite a rich data set and associated methods of simulation or extrapolation. So for any given question, the same guys can give you a more useful answer. 

 This 'head-count measure'—H for short—has at least two serious drawbacks.

Only if wielded by the ignorant. But the guy who prepares the Head count can also calculate other measures for different purposes. 

First, H takes no account of the extent of the short-fall of incomes of the poor from the 'poverty line': a reduction in the incomes of all the poor without affecting the incomes of the rich will leave this head count measure completely unchanged.

But the guys who prepared the H estimate can use the same data to prepare another estimate more useful to you.

Suppose Sherlock Holmes phones Scotland Yard and says 'the bounder Moriarty is staying in Room 101 of the Strand Hotel. Kindly arrest him'. Scotland Yard fails to do so and then issues a Press statement saying 'Sherlock's input fell short in two serious ways. Firstly he neglected to tell us if Moriarty was a man or woman. Secondly he did not specify he meant the Strand Hotel which is actually on the Strand rather than the one which is in Witwatersrand.'  This is clearly bonkers. Scotland Yard could have asked Sherlock these questions. He'd have happily supplied the information. The only shortcoming here is in Sen's intelligence. 

Second, it is insensitive to the distribution of income among the poor; in particular, no transfer of income from a poor person to one who is richer can increase this head count measure. Both these defects make the measure H, which is by far the most widely used measure, quite unacceptable as an indicator of poverty, and the conception of poverty that lies implicit in it seems eminently questionable.

This is foolish. Either the guys using the indicator are wankers- in which case it doesn't matter what they get up to- or else they are doing something useful in which case the only question is whether H is a good proxy for their purpose. Chances are, they will fine tune it as they go along. That's how econometrics works. Sen doesn't actually know econometrics at all.  

In this chapter I am not concerned with problems of measurement as such,

there is no point to any fucking measurement. The question is whether a particular statistic is helpful for your objective or whether something better can be devised. The answer is always 'we can start with something crude and then get something with lower granularity for our specific purpose'. For example, we may be interested in reducing poverty among a specific group- e.g. those more likely to become mindless thugs if they don't get enough beer to drink and sausages to eat- and will soon hit on a measure which is a good enough proxy for our purpose. 

which will be taken up in the next two chapters and in Appendix C. But behind each measure lies an analytical concept,

but no 'analytical concept' is involved in pragmatics. Meaning is only in use. It is not useful to just gas on about the poor. It is useful to target people with a particular trait who are poor so as to achieve something good for them, good for us, and good for the community. A project of this sort 'pays for itself'. Sen-tentious shite is a waste of resources.  

and here I am concerned with the general ideas on the conception of poverty.

Sen does not know what general ideas had reduced the incidence of poverty. He is concerned with something beyond his reach.  

If the preceding argument is right,

It isn't. Statistical measures available to us are proxies for the variables we are interested in. The latter represent 'analytical concepts'- i.e. can be further broken down. The former can't. There has to be a recalculation. An arithmetical mean can't be broken down by analysis such that we find the mode and the median. We have to go back to the data set.  

then the requirements of a concept of poverty must include two distinct—but not unrelated—exercises, namely ( i ) a method of identifying a group of people as poor ('identification');

This is false. We can have a concept of 'beauty' or 'genius' without having any method of identifying the beautiful or geniuses. 

and (2) a method of aggregating the characteristics of the set of poor people into an over-all image of poverty ('aggregation').

An image is not an aggregation. 

The plain fact is that we don't have to identify poor people or to aggregate them in any way in order to stop them- and therefore society- being poor. True, if only transfers from the rich to the poor are considered, this may not be obvious. But then you have the problem of the rich claiming to be poor while the starving stop spending money to prove they are actually malnourished. 

All we need to do is to get an idea as to where we can lay our hands on people we can move to more productive employment such that a virtuous circle is created. In addition, we can spot market failures- which we know to be allocatively inefficient and plug the missing or malfunctioning markets.  Collective insurance for health benefits, pensions, etc. can be allocatively efficient at a certain stage in economic development. This is the sort of stuff, kids learn in High School Economics or Social History. Sen, sadly, didn't attend a High School in an affluent country. Also he studied under Joan Robinson. So his brains turned to shit- which, admittedly, helped him gain intellectual affirmative action once he ran away from India with his best friend's wife. 

Both these exercises will be performed in the next two chapters,

by a guy who hadn't been employed in doing them and thus who didn't know how the thing was actually done. He just assumed that everybody else was as stupid and useless as himself.  

but before that we need to study the kinds of considerations that may be used in choosing the operations (both identification and aggregation). The rest of the chapter will be concerned with these issues.

They are non-issues. It is your pragmatic, practical, purpose which determines who you select and how you interpret data about them.  

Sen takes issue with the biological approach. But biology is useful. Discovering ways of getting more nutrition for less actual chewing and digesting is a good thing in itself. It has numerous applications outside the poverty field. Sen suggests that evil bastards are using a biological approach to keep the proletariat on a starvation diet. This wasn't true in England or America or any other affluent free or freeish market economy. In India and Africa etc, the biological approach was very useful because it branched out into enriching staple commodities with extra vitamins and so forth. This improved outcomes for everybody- even rich people with unhealthy dietary preferences. 

Next Sen takes up the 'inequality approach' which voters in England and America had turned their backs on. Even the Scandinavians gave up on 'solidarity wages' during the Seventies. Still, some good-hearted, but increasingly senile- Professors wanted to bang that drum because they genuinely believed that thin little darkies like me were probably being starved by Mrs. Thatcher. I recall stumbling into a faculty Wine & Cheese in a dazed and drunken state. An elderly lady approached me and offered me a biscuit. I think she would have patted me on the head if she hadn't been afraid I might bite her. Perhaps I had escaped from the LSE Poverty lab. Professor Atkinson may have been trying to create, in vivo, a less famine prone type of darkie who could survive in Thatcher's Britain. 

Sen almost says something sensible 'Neither poverty nor inequality can really be included in the empire of the other.

But he immediately says something utterly mad. 

It is, of course, quite a dilferent matter to recognize that inequality and poverty are associated with each other,

Not necessarily. Everybody can be as poor as shit and yet some may be the slaves of others. Equally, everybody could be rich but so hugely unequal that some may have to get off the road and hide if they see a member of the aristocracy approach.  

and to note that a different distribution system may cure poverty even without an expansion of the country's productive capabilities.

This is only true if there is no disutility of labor, no entry or exit, the distribution mechanism is faultless and frictionless, pigs can fly, and vast pots of gold are easily discoverable at the end of every rainbow. 

Recognizing the distinct nature of poverty as a concept permits one to treat it as a matter of interest and involvement in itself.

So can recognizing the distinct nature of unicorns. 

The role of inequality in the prevalence of poverty can then figure in the analysis of poverty without making the two conceptually equivalent.

Or, better yet, it can be ignored altogether- just like my assertion that but for those Iyengars who conspired with the leprechauns to expel us Iyers from Iyerland, I'd be handing out pots of gold to poor peeps. Thus we must first deal with the Iyengar problem because it is Iyengars alone who cause poverty, inequality, dicks which are way too small, and rumors that I am putting garlic in the sambar. 

Sen makes similar comments about relative deprivation- which is only interesting because it helps us identify a group who may welcome more productive employment or be early adopters of a new type of consumer tech. 

 A famine, for example, will be readily accepted as a case of acute poverty

but it may be nothing of the sort. There was a war-time famine in affluent Holland as well as in shit-poor Bengal. A place may be very rich but a supply shock may cut it off from food supplies.  

no matter what the relative pattern within the society happens to be. Indeed, there is an irreducible core of absolute deprivation in our idea of poverty,

No there isn't. The fact is, there may be some technology already available which could ensure most people escape 'frailty' in old age. Not all may be eligible for it but there may be a large class of ninety year old people who are experiencing frailty and who will die just because they don't have the billion dollars necessary to access the state of the art medical technology. They suffer deprivation relative to those who have ingratiated themselves with those Iyengar-loving leprechauns I previously mentioned.  

which translates reports of starvation, malnutrition and visible hardship into a diagnosis of poverty without having to ascertain first the relative picture.

This is stupid. If everybody on 'Billionaire Island' is starving there is neither relative deprivation nor poverty. There is just lack of availability of food because the Kraken has risen and is eating ships and any aircraft which try to land.  

Thus the approach of relative deprivation supplements rather than supplants the analysis of poverty in terms of absolute ,dispossession.

So, it is useless. Still, if Professor X has done relative deprivation then he must be allowed to gas on about it till it is my turn to talk about the real problem- Iyengar influence on leprechauns and krakens. They are also saying I put garlic in the sambar. 

 The view that 'poverty is a value judgement' has recently been presented forcefully by many authors.

Poverty is a predicate. In an imperative discourse, it is a value judgment. In a positive or alethic discourse, it is extensional though perhaps unknowable at this time.  

It seems natural to think of poverty as something that is disapproved of,

not in India where Gandhians went to great lengths to appear poor- more particularly if they were anything but. 

the elimination of which is regarded as morally good.

This is not the Gandhian view. 

Going further, it has been argued by Mollie Orshansky, an outstanding authority in the field, that 'poverty, like beauty, lies in the eye of the beholder'.

But what lies in the eye of the beholder is something visible and material and objective. Thus what is being asserted here is that people have different preferences or standards of judgment. When I was young, I thought I'd be attractive to the opposite sex if I removed my glasses. Indeed, I appeared so to my own myopic eyes. Then a friend snapped a polaroid of me without my glasses ogling some girls at a party. I hadn't known that my eyes cross over when I'm not wearing specks. I looked more horrible, not less so, without them. 

The exercise would, then, seem to be primarily a subjective one: unleashing one's personal morals on the statistics of deprivation. I would like to argue against this approach. It is important to distinguish between different ways in which the role of morals can be accommodated into the exercise of poverty measurement.

You could omit those whose morality you disapprove of- e.g. drug addicts, the work-shy etc etc- but that isn't what Sen means.  

There is a différence between saying that the exercise is itself a prescriptive one and saying that the exercise must take note of the prescriptions made by members of the community.

In which case there is a prescriptive aspect to the exercise. This follows because there is something it 'must' do. A descriptive exercise does not have to follow any prescription. True one may say Iyer's description of German industrial relations as being like his neighbor's cat is not very useful or accurate but there is nothing prescriptive about it. 

To describe a prevailing prescription is an act of description, not prescription.

But the exercise underlying that act of description was prescriptive if it was forced to include some particular item.  

Sen suggests that stipulating what the contemporary definition of poverty is involves no value judgment. But, the arbitrary aspect of this- i.e. the choice of one stipulation over another- encodes a value judgment or the pressure of some imperative force. 

In this context of arbitrariness of 'aggregate description', it becomes particularly tempting to redefine the problem as an 'ethical' exercise, as has indeed been done in the measurement of economic inequality.

Nothing wrong with that if we think of the 'ethical' as being 'that which changes one's ethos'. But prescriptions too have that effect- if truly prescriptive. We may say there is an action guiding element or a normative link to such action.  

But the ethical exercises involve exactly similar ambiguities, and furthermore end up answering a different question from the descriptive one that was originally asked. There is very little alternative to accepting the element of arbitrariness in the description of poverty, and making that element as clear as possible.

If there is an optimal response to any given type of poverty then there is a 'natural' or 'canonical' solution which all research programs with the same objective or telos would converge to. 

If there isn't an optimal response of this type, arbitrariness is the least of our problems. We simply don't have a consensus as to what to do. The thing would have to be imposed in some way or another. 

Since the notion of the poverty of a nation has some inherent ambiguities,

we don't know that. It may be that (if there is an optimal path) there are no ambiguities which aren't cleared up as we go along. But if this isn't the case, academic economics or philosophy has no purchase. The thing is purely political in an ideographic sense.  

one should not have expected anything else.

In other words, we should have expected a tome titled 'Poverty and Famines' to be useless. It appears the thing was commissioned by useless bureaucrats for useless academics and bureaucrats. A parasitical class was created which gained good livelihoods by pretending to be part of an already successful technocratic drive to end hunger across the Globe. B.R Sen, of the Indian Civil Service, had played a useful part in this. Amartya Sen, who was related to B.R, gained fame by a worthless and intellectually vacuous type of virtue signaling on this issue, to which he came late in life. Amartya disapproved of BR. He says BR refused to help his granny get his uncle out of jail just coz the fellow was a Commie nutcase. Also BR used to have an underling carry his briefcase. BR was too haughty and that is naughty. One should be very very humble and graciously accept Nobel prizes and Honorary Doctorates all the time. If pretending to care about Poverty and Famine helps- so be it. However, there is a line which should not be crossed. Don't write 'exchange entitlement failure among Merchant Bankers is causing them to suck off janitors so as to gain a bit of protein. Kwasi Kwarteng must scrap the cap on Bankers' bonuses lest a humanitarian disaster occur and billions of Goldman Sachs partners will starve to death.' I'm not saying this isn't what is actually happening. But pointing this out could lead to a decline in the provision of affordable fellatio to the BAME community. Intersectionality matters. The thing isn't silly at all.