In mathematics, the axiom of choice has a magic property. By the Banach-Tarski paradox, using the axiom, you can turn one thing into two identical things and then double them again ad infinitum. A type of mathematical econ which uses the axiom of choice can degenerate into nonsense such that one identity can be infinitely deformed and filled in so that everybody has multiple identities. This would be cool coz if, like Sen you are a Hindu and the Muslim majority wants to kill you, your identity as an atheist survives because it is only the Hindu who gets killed. In this way, Sen's family wouldn't have had to run away from Dacca. But Sen doesn't really think having multiple identities means you can't be killed and thus violence is rendered unnecessary or futile. He is just writing nonsense so as to fool gullible Whites into thinking maybe he has supernatural powers- like the now Canonized Mother Theresa.
Prof. Antoinette Baujard has a paper which claims that Amartya Sen has multiple identities. She is not saying that Sen is a criminal engaged in fraud of some type or else a secret agent or super-hero who maintains a number of 'cover' identities. She is making a more remarkable claim- viz. that Sen is super human. He can exist in more than one body at the same time. Similarly, Hindus believe that God can be Jesus and Krishna and Buddha simultaneously. Baujard, it seems, is convinced that Sen is Divine because he too can have multiple simultaneous incarnations. Let us hear from this Gallic votary of our Sen-tentious pundit.
Abstract. This paper reviews Amartya's Sen autobiography, Home in the World. A Memoir focused on his thirty first years of life.
Did he have a single identity during that time? If not, there must be another person he is identical with who could write 'Not at Home in this World. A Memoir of my life on another planet.'
I show that the book emphasizes how Sen values discussions and reason, the voice of each human being in their plurality, and their capacity to act in and on the world.
Sen's family had to run away from East Bengal because they were Hindus. Discussion and reasoning played no part in this. Either they ran or their throats would have been slit.
I also support that, in this memoir, Sen succeeds in circumventing the standard misunderstandings of his major contributions, by taking seriously the different potential interpretations of the thinkers who influenced his line of thinking, and defending the one he considers valid.
Sadly, this is not true for readers from Sen's part of the world.
I illustrate this claim with five cases which, by highlighting his multiple identities, avoid associating Sen to a misguided tag.
Sen is a useless tosser. That's the tag his own people give him.
(Sen) has two main objects in view in surveying his personal trajectory and the influences on him up to his thirties. First of all, the memoir overcomes the limitations in the reception of his work arising from
intellectual affirmative action. Whites assumed Sen was reflecting the genuine stupidity and ignorance of his people- who were either starving or being ethnically cleansed.
the partiality of commentary on it, whether by social choice theorists, standard economists, sociologists, leftists, Occidentals, or white males; too often such misreadings have led his readers to miss the major points he intended to make.
His point was that he should receive lots of prizes and be fussed over for being brown and having gotten away from a shithole country.
Secondly, there is a constant reminder of his core propositions, notably that all women and men have plural identities,
only fraudsters or secret agents do
not one single, unchanging identity; and that only the consistent use of reasoned argument in an open democracy can guarantee respect for human agency (the value of the voice of each human being in their plurality, and their capacity to act in and on the world).
even though no democracy has succeeded in guaranteeing anything. Human agency is not respected because most humans can't do shit for themselves. That's why democracies tend to become welfare states.
...reinterpreted to fit the preoccupations of others, or as if a theory had been summarized in "a one-line slogan" (which Sraffa urged Sen not to do, as we learn in chapter 16, p.261).
Sen is nothing but a bunch of Sen-tentious one line slogans like 'people have multiple identities' or 'No Famine can happen in a Democracy with a Free Press'.
Muriel Gilardone and I did so regarding Sen's capability approach (Baujard and Gilardone 2017). Starting from his disregarded claim that he was not a capability theorist, we argued Sen had introduced the capability approach as a strategy to extend the consideration of the persons' advantages and disadvantages beyond the problematic confinement of welfarism – according to which social welfare just depends on individual utilities, as we measure them in economics. But from the perspective of readers biased by a welfarist framework, this line of argument is unfortunately straightforwardly reinterpreted as a capability theory, hence as a refinement of welfarism. Regrettably, a capability theory permits the substitution of the demanding requirements of thinking and listening in particular contexts – which was Sen's target – by a systematic appeal to standard statistics – however richer than the previous version of welfarism that might be.
So, instead of helping people, we should listen to them till they get angry and tell us to fuck off. But who will pay us to do so?
We cannot deny that this reception represents progress in the measurement of welfare, but it is fair to say that the message Sen wanted to send has only been partly received.
Measuring welfare costs money. Who will pay for it? The opposition party will hire some guy to say 'welfare has fallen. People have been reduced to cannibalism.' The ruling party will hire someone else to say that welfare has risen by leaps and bounds.
When the thinker is still alive, there is a third alternative for ensuring that the reception of his works coincides with his original intention, and Sen makes use of this in his memoir.
No. Sen's memoir is only interesting because of what he does not reveal. The fact is, his dad was a soil scientist who held high positions with the Government. His aim was to raise soil fertility and hence agricultural productivity. This was useful work. Sen was also, albeit distantly, related to B.R Sen who was the senior official in charge of Food policy at the Center during the Famine. BR Sen knew it was caused by food availability deficit though the problem was compounded by corruption and Muslim misrule. Sen was the head of the FAO and did a lot of useful world in tackling the problem of famine. Amartya chooses to ignore both his dad and BR Sen (though he does mention that he was not helpful in getting a Communist cousin out of jail and that, in Rome, he'd have an assistant carry his briefcase for him)
The fact is India needed scientists and technocrats to end food availability deficit and reliance on Uncle Sam to avert Famine. Sen and Sukhamoy's mathsy development econ was useless. There was little point evaluating projects if one did not know how to initiate them. The opportunity cost of a project is some other project. 'Shadow prices' have to do with that alternative. There is no a priori way to arrive at it. There is a paper on the Durgapur fertilizer project which Sen wrote with his best friend from Shantiniketan. The thing reads as pure farce. The two phoren educated Bengalis are sniggering as they write what they themselves acknowledge is just a pro-forma appraisal. They should take the shadow price of foreign exchange as the black market rate. Instead they just put in whatever value helps them get to the answer required of them.
A couple of years later Sen ran away with his best friend's wife to do 'Social Choice' of an utterly absurd and stupid type in the West. His new wife was well connected being related to both Sraffa and Gramsci and A.O Hirschman. But Emma Rothschild was even better connected. On the other hand Partha Dasgupta went one up on Sen by becoming James Meade's son-in-law. Still, Sen had the last laugh by moving to America. Meanwhile, back in India, Sen's ex-bestie was telling Abhijit Bannerjee that Sen had once set off eagerly to stay with a farming family in Punjab so as to learn about the actual problems of the peasants. But, after a couple of days, he ran back to Delhi. Bengali buddhijivis understand that they can't bear very much reality. They should merely pretend to care about the great unwashed rather than spend any time listening- or even simply smelling- them.
He describes, in varying details, their intellectual legacy (e.g. his grandfather Kshiti Mohan,
who was a Theist. Sadly, he doesn't seem to have taught Amartya the difference between nyaya (justice) and Niti (policy).
or his mentors Maurice Dobb and Piero Sraffa).
Useless Marxist nutters.
He unequivocally highlights the different potential interpretations of each of these thinkers (e.g. Tagore, Marx) who have been most influential for him.
He won't admit that Tagore was the head of a religious sect. He doesn't even understand his own name- which was chosen for him by Tagore. It means one who is drinking the elixir not 'unlimited'.
Sen's ignorance of Marx is more surprising. I think he is attributing some stupid shite he wrote much later on to his younger self.
Among these he introduces his own interpretation for example, how Sen receives Tagore or Marx, by contrast with the way that Europeans read Tagore,
Europeans understood that the guy ponced around in a kaftan coz he was the head of a religious sect. Sen pretends he was actually pro-Muslim though the guy kept saying 'Muslims will cut our throats! We must unite against them or at least keep the Brits around to protect us.'
how leftists or rightists read Marx compared with what Sen was himself most impressed by. If the reader had a different interpretation (of Tagore, or of Marx), they would certainly misunderstand Sen.
Only if Sen was incapable of expressing himself clearly.
Hence this memoir readers indirect evidence to guide or realign their reading. Let me enumerate five significant potential misinterpretations highlighted in the memoir.
What the author will highlight is her own stupidity.
1) First, Sen admits he is an Indian.
Because his father had the foresight to run away from what would become Bangladesh a couple of years before the blood-letting began in earnest.
But he is also a Bengali:
West Bengali.
his early life was both in Dhaka with his parents, which is today located in Bangladesh, and in Santiniketan with his grand-parents, which is today located in India.
Which tells us that Sens run away from Muslim majority areas because...urm... they have only one identity there- viz. that of a kaffir deserving death.
And he lived in Burma for a couple of years as a child.
But Burma only separated from India in 1937.
He comes from a Hindu family; his grandfather joined the Kabir Panth,
No. His grandfather started researching Kabir while teaching in Chamba, Punjab. Tagore found him useful for his own translations. Incidentally, Ezra Pound too did some shite Kabir translation.
which combined Hindu and Muslim religious ideas;
but which Muslims still consider 'kaffir'
and he describes himself as being in his youth rather a-religious.
What is he now- a Prophet or a Boddhisattva? Both perhaps. He has multiple identities.
He is not a nationalist – I believe the choice of the title of the memoir is owed to Tagore's novel 'The home and the World,' which he describes as a "'strong and gentle' warning against the corruptibility of nationalism" (p.92).
It ends with Muslims killing Hindus and looting their 'toshkhanas' (treasuries) and defiling their women. Tagore was saying exactly the same thing as his grandfather- viz. if the Brits leave, us Bengali Hindus will be killed and our land will be grabbed by Muslims. Incidentally, A.O Hume- the founder of the Indian National Congress- wrote a book about the need for Agricultural reform in 1879 where he remarked the 'turbulent pugnacity' of the East Bengali Muslim. He also wrote much about the need for soil conservation and enrichment- the field Amartya's father went to England to study. But it was Hume's advocacy of cow protection which was taken up by Congress and which gave it a mass base. Hume ultimately became an orthodox Advaitin.
Amartya Sen studied at the educational institution created by Rabindranath Tagore called Visva Bharathi, which means "uniting the world"
Nope. Bharati is another name for Sarasvati- goddess of learning. Visva Bharati means Sarasvati in her global aspect.
and which was formed by the best of the world’s cultural heritage.
Nope. It started as a Brahmo religious school before branching out a little artistically. Sen pretends it was secular.
A great deal of the book refers to his many other geographical identities; and it is fair to say that already back in 1963, Cambridge UK and Cambridge USA are just two among many.
Sen's 'geographical identity' was 'Indian'. His geographical location could be in the US or UK or Italy or wherever.
He could hardly answer the journalist’s question presented as the opening of the first chapter: "Where do you consider to be your home?"
If he said America, he would lose an portion of affirmative action which would otherwise come to him by reason of his country being a shithole.
This would probably mean something different in English for Americans ("where do you normally live?"), or for Bengalis ("Where is/are your families from?”). In any case, the answer would not be straightforward.
It would, for the tax man. If Sen is paying Income Tax in the US, that is where he is domiciled. If he is paying Income tax in India, India is where his home is.
Sen not only comes from many places in the world, he wishes that his home were not restricted to any specific parish.
Lots of people who don't want to pay Income tax anywhere feel the same way. Still, the fact is, you are eligible to pay Income tax in your State or country of domicile. Had Sen taken American citizenship, he'd have to pay Federal Income tax even if he lived in India. That's the reason BoJo gave up his American passport.
Second, Rabindranath Tagore has been a great influence upon Amartya Sen –
No he hasn't. Sen is an atheist, not a Brahmo. Still, it is prestigious to claim to have been influenced by that great big beardie.
Tagore was a close friend of his mother's family,
He employed his mother's father as a teacher.
but it was only after his death that Amartya began to recognize his major importance.
He had warned the Bengali Hindus not to get rid of the Brits. Niradh Chaudhuri made this point more eloquently. He begged for any type of Whitey to return and rule over Bengal. The French made much of him till the Brits finally decided to do something more substantial for their sycophant.
Sen devotes at least four chapters to Tagore's thinking.
He distorts it completely.
He recalls that, when Tagore received the Nobel prize for Literature, the Europeans and the Americans presented him as a romantic dreamer, an attractive eastern Indian poet; they admired his alleged mysticism and his rejection of reason.
The Europeans and Americans knew that Tagore was an aristocrat who was the hereditary leader of an important Hindu sect which, at one point, was on the brink of merging with the Unitarians. Brahmoism affirms the immortality of the soul and its reunion with the Godhead. Thus, it provided the consolation of religion to a Continent which had turned into a charnel house.
Sen is emphatically surprised by how unlikely and ill-informed this reception was, without denying or ignoring the beauty of Tagore's literature, poetry, theater, music and painting. Sen insists that Tagore had an open mind, he primarily devoted his life to reason and freedom, implying his full respect for scientific methods, and the importance of disentangling ethics from science.
Tagore did try to pursue scientific agriculture- he sent his son to study agronomy in America- but this experiment was a failure. Thus Tagore doubled down on Spirituality and the Arts.
Third, Sen presents himself as a leftist, given his major commitment to the reduction of poverty, inequalities and his certitude that the wider provision of health and education is central for development.
He was an 'improving landlord', nothing more. But the writing was already on the wall for the 'Zamindars' created by 'the Permanent Settlement'. One of Tagore's grand nephews did become a Communist. Sadly, in 1957, this Tagore joined an opposition coalition which featured the Hindu Mahasabha.
He devotes a specific chapter to the reinterpretation of Marx, and describes in detail what he does and does not take from him. He retains Marx's focus on needs,
There is no such focus. Marx said 'to each according to his contribution'. You must get paid for what you produce even if you have no dependents whereas your colleague has to support his aged parents and disabled siblings and a brood of his own kids. After Scarcity disappears, everybody can just take as much as they like of anything coz that's how fairy tales end- right?
which may explain, he suggests, the welcome creation of the NHS and of the welfare state in many European countries.
Two terrible Wars caused Europe to invest in their populace for a purely military and strategic reason.
He appreciates the discussion of objective illusions:
which is Engelian not Marxist
one may believe workers and capitalists participate in free exchange, but you may perceive things differently when considering the bargaining power of the worker – whether a poor worker is actually "free" to decline a job.
But the Common law already had a concept of unconscionable contracts. The French call this by some other term but the solution is always to increase elasticity and crack down on restrictive practices. There can be no appropriation of rent, if no economic rent exists.
A stark illustration of the illusion of freedom is given by a traumatic experience Sen had as a child. Sen witnessed a man almost dying from a stab wound in his garden. Kader Mia was a Muslim man. Despite the dangerous tensions between the communities in India he was formally free to stay home, or to go and work in the Hindu area. As a father, his desire to feed his family more than anything else, including his own security, almost got him killed.
The Hindus in Dacca were slaughtered if they hadn't, as Sen's family had, already run away. Kader Mia died because this plan on the part of his co-religionists was common knowledge to all but Amartya.
In this example, Sen also shows that those killed in the Hindu-Muslim riots of the 1940s shared a class identity (the workers and dispossessed) although they differed in their religious or communal identity.
But it wasn't their class identity which got them killed- was it? Still once the Hindus were safe in West Bengal, some of their intellectuals started clamoring for a class war in which their own throats would be slit. It is no wonder, Sen ran away to England- taking with him his best friend's Italian wife (she had been previously married to an important Italian economist/politician) to assure his welcome.
Whilst freedom can be an illusion, it is important per se, and Sen does say that Marx was sometimes badly interpreted in this regards. He quotes a passage of The German Ideology
a book which says that ideology is stupid shit. All that matters is innovation and industry and extending the division of labor- i.e. technocratic stuff of the sort Sen ran away from. It was published in 1932 in Moscow by a guy who had already fallen victim to Stalin's purges. Perhaps, the book was prepared when Stalin was backing American style (and America assisted) industrialization and 'Taylorism'. By the time it came out, the tide had turned. Or maybe the truth is simpler. The best Old Bolshevik is one with a bullet in the back of his head.
which Sen says most authors "often tended to miss": Marx is positive about "bringing 'the conditions for the free development and activity of individuals under their own control'"
through Science and Technology
(p.212), including the ability to "criticize after dinner" – a passage which, we might admit, leaves us with the impression that liberty of choice and freedom of expression might be important but that there is little to be found in Marx with which the sentiment might be defended.
Marx described the 'happy citizen' “hunting in the morning, fishing in the afternoon, rearing cattle in the evening” and, finally and best of all, “ciriticizing after dinner,” perhaps with a bottle of wine on the table. The man was, after all, German. Plenty of rich Germans could do all or some of these things. In a world without scarcity, I suppose everybody could have a nice castle and a grouse moor and a stream for angling and lots of wine to accompany a five course dinner.
Sen observes that Marx did not in his claim regarding the "dictatorship of the proletariat" discuss what the proletariat's demand would be and could mean – for lack of a social choice approach.
Lenin and Stalin supplied the answer. Kill the fucking kulaks and take their cows and hens and stores of wheat. Also kill anybody else who might have some cool shiny stuff.
Not only was this absence "rather disappointing", Sen overtly charges Marx responsibility for the authoritarian consequences of his lack of serious consideration of freedom and democratic issues.
Also Marx should have paid more attention to problems of social inclusion for disabled people of color from the LGTQYXZ community within Departments of Social Choice located in public lavatories in Third World Countries.
Sen recalls in several chapters that he was always dubious of Soviet practices (notably the show trials),
which happened when he was about 4 years old. His Mummy used to say 'stop being so fucking dubious you little pissant' but Sen was obdurate. He was too polite to tell Stalin not to be such a big fat meanie, but his disapproval was palpable. That's one reason Stalin stayed the fuck away from India.
insisting on the primary importance of democracy and freedom of speech.
Which in East Bengal led directly to famine and the ethnic cleansing of Hindus.
Fourth, one of his identities is related to Trinity College Cambridge, renowned for its great intellectuals and its leftist tendencies.
No. A predicate applied to him has this property. It is not the case that there is an Amartya at Trinity, who wears a bow tie, who is different from the one at Harvard who chews gum and wears a baseball cap.
But when there he did not believe in the standard opposition between schools of thought that accompanied his years in Cambridge.
But he did believe he'd gotten the fuck out of India and was very happy at this outcome.
Among the opposing camps there were neoclassical so-called mainstream economists and the neoKeynesians rejecting the adequacy of the market economy – and also the Marxists: "The divisions between schools of economic thought seemed to play a mesmerizing role in Cambridge rhetoric, particularly in classifying economists into two distinct categories: friends or foes."
Sen has spent the last 40 years pretending all other economists are very evil and stupid. However, previously, he flattered all and sundry in order to rise.
However Sen, along with a few others, appears very distant from this never ending academic battle.
Because they were careerists wholly uninterested in ideas of any sort.
On the one hand, none of these camps would take seriously the fundamental issues he wanted to work on: poverty, inequality, the wider provision of health and education.
Sen has not reduced poverty or inequality nor has he increased provision of health. He has merely taught useless shite to budding academo-bureaucratic careerists with low IQs.
These issues were "seen as a non-subject" either way, and everybody recommended that he not work on social choice theory and welfare economics.
Why? Because British professors knew that India was a starving shithole. There was no point doing welfare econ in a country without a tax base. As for 'social choice theory', fuck was the point in a country of illiterate peasants with a strong sense of loyalty to some shitty dynasty or the other?
Joan Robinson would assert something that Sen calls the most profound error in development thinking – that "in terms of priorities, what you have to concentrate on is simply maximizing economic growth"; then "you can turn to health care, education…" ).
Joan had lived in India. She knew it was a shithole. Gandhi had thought India could afford 'Basic Education'- by getting kids to spin cotton so as to pay for their own education- and 'Naturopathy'- i.e. mudpacks as a cure-all- instead of 'Allopathic' Medicine. But Basic Education cost the tax-payer more than proper Education while Naturopathy was wholly useless.
Sen concluded that leftist heterodox economists did not think so very differently than mainstream economists did on the issues he thought were essential. In passing, he makes the scathing observation that the most intelligent Professor of Economic Development he met in Cambridge, Peter Bauer, happened to be a rightist conservative neo-classical economist.
Peter Bauer wasn't at Cambridge. He was in the private sector till becoming a Professor at the LSE in 1960. Sen must have met him in the Seventies when too was at the LSE.
On the other hand, let me provide a second explanation for the acrimony we feel between the lines when Sen mentions Joan Robinson.
Whom he slavishly flattered and followed till the mid Seventies- i.e. so long as her frown could hurt his advancement.
The book devotes an impressive number of lines and pages to various compliments regarding Joan Robinson, noting also how familiar she was with India, how close she and her husband were with Sen. We also learn that he was not very impressed by her work on capital theory,
all work on capital theory is shit.
but this theoretical assessment is not the central point he wants to make. Sen instead emphasizes that she never listened to any opposing arguments in any discussion, with any discussant.
She was a pucca Memsahib right enough. Still, the fact is, women who didn't stand up for themselves got short shrift back then.
Her view on the importance Sen devoted to welfare issues was a problem for him, not because he was not convinced by her arguments regarding this importance, but because she had never entered this debate in the first place.
There was nothing to debate. India got as much tax revenue as it could by hook or crook and promptly squandered every last penny on clerical wages and pensions. Everybody talked about welfare but there was no money in the kitty to actually do anything for anybody.
Sen belongs to no one camp; he belongs the argumentative tradition of Indian philosophy: "I could not help thinking that the argumentative tradition that had been so persistently championed in Indian philosophical debates, and which included careful listening,
No. There is no careful listening in Indian philosophy. There is shruti- what is heard (i.e. revealed scripture)- but it has no unique, 'natural', or canonical interpretation. The purvakasha approach is to state a logical criticism and see if it can be rebutted. This does not involve actually having an interlocutor.
could have made something of a contribution to Joan’s convictions about what makes a thesis powerful.
Joan was wrong about the Cultural Revolution, not for any theoretical reason but because she was convinced that the thing was actually working. She was an empiricist who was wrong about what was actually happening.
Her neglect of mainstream theories seemed to me to lack a reasoned defence, as did her rapid dismissal of the Marxian perspectives carefully developed by Dobb, Sraffa and Hobsbawm."
Because Communism first requires complete military control of the country after which you can take property from whomever you like and put those you dislike in Gulags. There is no point having a Marxist perspective if the Army will shoot you if you get up to monkey-tricks. That's why the Indian Communists became sweet and reasonable in the early Fifties.
For Sen, it is always necessary to provide reasoned argument in support of a thesis.
But he is too stupid to do any such thing.
A striking illustration is given in chapter 10. Sen spends pages and pages cautiously and respectfully addressing the thesis that the British Raj brought many advantages to India, before he concludes that he might not be convinced by this thesis after all.
Yet, when British rule ended, his people ran away from East Bengal fleetly enough. The advantage to the Raj was obvious to Hindus who had previously flourished in Muslim majority areas.
Should you (or Joan Robinson) find obvious or superfluous these long factual descriptions, analyses and caveats
which merely represent a thrifty re-cycling of past essays
in elaborating the appropriate counterfactuals, you (she) would definitely miss what Sen finds essential.
What he finds essential is talking incessant bollocks and then refusing to come to any conclusion.
Assertions are only obvious in a certain context and from a certain perspective; hence it is worth thinking and weighing the reasons that make sense from a diversity of perspectives.
No it isn't, if the assertion is being made by a useless tosser.
Careful listening and consideration of every claim is indispensable, including the claims of the underprivileged, regardless of your institutional status, your worthy leftist sentiments or what is currently considered to be politically correct.
Really? Then why not spend your time in a lunatic asylum listening to the claims of the nutjobs incarcerated there?
The pleasure of any "agenda-less free discussion on any topic that might come up" (p.183) – called "adda" in Bengali – is nicely illustrated in the many pages in which Sen describes how he as a child was involved in discussion with each adult of his family,
not to mention his discussions with the furniture
how while in Cambridge he spent his afternoons in cafés, in the Apostles Society, and in the socialist, liberal and conservative political clubs.
What about brothels? Why was he not listening patiently to prostitutes there?
Political and intellectual debate seems to be the most constant element of Sen's life,
but he has had zero impact on Indian politics- unlike fellow Cambridge alum Manmohan Singh.
from his very early years with his family – his grand-father in particular – and whoever he encountered in his academic or his personal lives.
Why not mention his father who was one of the first Indians to do a soil-science PhD in the UK? His dad paid for him to attend Cambridge. Perhaps he hoped his son would study something useful. Fiscal policy, Trade policy, Operations Research- anything at all save useless Social Choice shite.
Fifth, Sen uncontroversially believes in reason.
But he can't reason. He does not get that a predicate is not itself an identity. A person has one identity though many different predicates may be applied to that identity.
His knowledge of science,
He has none. To be fair, few of us do. STEM subjects have advanced greatly.
his practice of axiomatic and formal demonstration,
is defective. You can't define a function in a manner such that it can't be a function. What you get, if you do, is ex falso quodlibet- an explosion of nonsense.
Sen can't be blamed too much for not knowing about Gentzen and natural deduction systems. But, this silly lady, who is younger than me, should know about such things.
is one element. Theorems and data analysis
he is not an econometrician. He can't analyze data. He can merely tell stupid lies.
that he developed still play a prominent role in economics and development studies.
No. It is easy enough to say an index of such and such sort could be useful. But, in Sen's case, no such index materialized or proved of any use whatsoever.
But he is not what we could call a rationalist thinker, assuming there is a rational truth to be imposed from above.
Yes he is. He works within an Arrow-Debreu framework which abolishes Knightian uncertainty and thus is substantivist and 'top-down'.
Sen was skeptical of the idea that the relevant questions were technical: "I found it difficult to believe that the downfall of capitalism, if that were to occur, would be caused by some sophisticated mistake in capital theory rather than because of the nasty way capitalism treats human beings".
Capitalism pays people for working. That's nasty! It should beat them instead. If an economic regime collapses it is because it didn't allocate enough resources to its own preservation or, to put it another way, it's mechanism design wasn't robustly incentive compatible. That's a 'capital theory mistake' right there.
Much relevant information may arise in discussion involving a range of stakeholders, not to mention the essential participation of subalterns.
It is more likely that everybody's time will be wasted by woke nutters or crazy paranoiacs.
Not only that, sentiment is essential in these reasoned debates. Sen quotes A. C. Pigou : "It is not wonder, but rather the social enthusiasm which revolts from the sordidness of mean streets and the joylessness of withered lives, that is the beginning of economic science."
This describes Marshall who would get on trains to visit Mill towns where he'd see depressed workers shuffling past him while he pondered the works of Marx and Lasalle and other such leftists.
An illustration is given by the Bengal famine in 1943 which killed nearly 3 million people. The economic analysis of the famine was flawed.
Nope. B.R Sen was right about the famine. There was a food availability deficit compounded by a corrupt and vindictive Muslim political class. The 1943 famine, like the 1974 famine, was the price Bengal paid for transitioning to Democracy. As Civil Servants lost power, corruption increased and millions died.
Seen from London, the quantity of food was sufficient at the macroeconomic level.
Because that is what the Muslim Premier of Bengal told the Viceroy who was obliged to pass on that information to London. Incidentally, Sen says there was plenty of food. It seems this French lady either hasn't read Sen or doesn't believe him.
Eventually the political reaction of the Raj to the famine was only due to indignation on the part of the British public.
They didn't give a shit. Nor did the rest of India. Wavell took action because it was a way to build morale and also it impressed the Americans. The Govt. of India, like other allies, was already making its own bid for American largesse. That's why it needed to appear to be doing something about famine. India needed to say '100 million darkies are at risk of starvation. Even if one darkie counts as one tenth of a White Man, still we should get as much Aid as Europe.'
Information about the famine was eventually published in British newspapers, making the Bengali people closer to the English people: when Bengalis become, in their conscience and sentiments, England’s neighbors.
This never happened. Why? Lots of Brits had first hand knowledge of India. They knew about the corruption of the Bengal ministry. Ayckroyd, the leading expert, opined that each extra death had made a tidy profit for the Ispahanis and other such tycoons. Oxfam was set up during the Bengal famine. But it was concerned with Greece, not Bengal. India was an agricultural country which hadn't been invaded. Elected Indians had been running the Provinces since 1937. Quakers and such like did not want to pick a fight with the Muslim Premiers ruling Bengal. They would be accused of being stooges of the Hindus.
In the cases we have just described (and many others), Amartya Sen is not where we expect him to be, and this does not ease our understanding.
Unless we understand that he is a stupid cunt. His relative, B.R Sen was being praised for helping the World get rid of Famine. He needed to show that B.R and Swaminathan and Borlaug and so forth were all fools. There is always plenty of food. People only starve because of exchange entitlements or some other such thing Sen just pulled out of his arse.
Why are people so stupid as to try to grow more food? Look at Bangladesh. They now produce four times as much food as they did in 1974. But Sen had proved that Bangladesh always had plenty of food! Sheikh Hasina is a silly billy. She should have attended Cambridge and studied Development Econ the way Rahul did.
He never conforms to either side of the standard "friend or foe" opposition.
Because he runs off with his best friend's wife. Modi understands that it is better to have Sen as your foe. Hard work is better than Harvard.
To take full advantage of his body of works we must avoid confining him to labeled boxes.
and, to take full advantage of his body, this lady should chop off bits of him and put them into boxes which, however, she should not label. That way, she can play lucky-dip and surprise herself by opening a box containing Sen's ear- which will listen to her respectfully- instead of Sen's dick- which she might find disappointing.
This both implies we should accept that he has multiple identities
which is why we can each chop up a different Amartya Sen without depriving his wife of her hubby
(which this memoir very much helps to clarify), and that we need to be aware of the particular perspective and bias from which we read his works.
Sen's father, Ashutosh, was important for India because soil science is very very important for an agricultural country. Ashutosh's father was a District Judge who became the treasurer of Dacca University. Ashutosh was in Burma from 1935-38, where he set up an Agricultural Institute. He died in 1971. Sen only began pretending to know or care about Famine or Poverty after his father passed away. Ashutosh may have been proud of his son's academic achievements. But, by 1971, it was clear that Bengal's mathematical economists had fucked up the country. Let them emigrate and take their stupidity with them. In 1971, Sen and his best friend's wife moved to the UK where Sen became a Professor at the LSE.
The memoir is focused on his 30 first years of life, ranging from 1933 to 1963. That it stops somewhat abruptly after 407 pages is striking. 1963 is when Sen starts to become well-known for his contribution to poverty and social welfare issues!
Not poverty and not social welfare. His publications are second rate contributions to Indian economics of the Planning Commission type. But, after the 1962 War, it was obvious that Plans are useless if you are as poor as shit and you keep getting invaded. Sen then takes up the 'Little criterion' (like Hicks-Kaldor improvement) but had nothing interesting to say because, let's face it, India was neither able to feed nor defend itself. Why pretend it could do redistribution or, indeed, welfare of any sort? Still, while remaining in India, Sen couldn't just double down on Social Choice shite. He had to pretend to be trying to help his country develop. Then daddy died and sonny boy ran off with his best friend's wife to greener pastures where he could play the 'me starving little brown man' card to gain intellectual affirmative action.
I confess this sudden end saddened me. I would have like to read more of his reflections, about the way he looks back on his life after he began to attract wider attention for his thinking .
I would have liked to know what Ashutosh Sen thought of India's stupid agricultural policies. He was an insider- having been Land Commissioner in Delhi and then a member of the UPSC.
When I closed the book, I was eager to stay in Amartya K. Sen's delightful company.
Since he has multiple identities, the author can remain in his company by buying a puppy which I personally guarantee to be one of the many corporeal bodies simultaneously occupied by Amartya Sen
Because I learned so much of the intellectual debates in reading his memoir;
there's a wide difference between intellectual debate and an intellectual who masturbates.
because all that I have read in this memoir has opened my mind and clarified my thoughts
OMG! This dotty lady thinks Sen is a Maharishi like Tagore! Her chakras have been opened up! She is attaining nirvikalpa samadhi! Incidentally, only Yogijivas can exist simultaneously in many bodies while only great spiritual adepts like Ramakrishna can be a Muslim today, a Buddhist tomorrow, a woman the day after, before returning to a male gendered Hindu body.
about the world’s woes and possible cures; because the memoir has been as much a pleasure to read as swimming in warm open water in the light of a rising sun.
Women pee while swimming in warm open waters. Men don't. We like to whip it out and make patterns in the sand with our flow of urine.
Whether Amartya Sen will have the energy to write the sequel for our own pleasure is still an open question, as I learned from his recent interviews.
Will he tell the story of how he seduced and ran off with his best friends' wife? I don't thinks o.
However, as far as one's history sets a person's identities let us recognize that the two main objectives elaborated above have so far been met.
Reading Sen has rendered this dotty lady entirely delirious. Hopefully she will adopt a puppy- or sewer rat- in the belief that it is one of Amartya's many identities. Then she will set up a cult for the proper worship of doggy or ratty Sen. France will hail her as the new Joan of Arrack.
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