Poverty and Famine The variety of information on which social welfare analysis can draw can be well illustrated by the study of poverty.
The poverty of 'poverty studies' is not down merely to the varieties of information on which it draws but arises because it is done only by shitheads. If you understand why a person is poor, you can make money from that understanding. If poverty persists it is because somebody is being prevented from making money by reducing its incidence.
Poverty is typically seen in terms of the lowness of incomes,
No. It is seen to correlate with a low material standard of living and the absence of savings or other sources of wealth.
and it has been traditionally measured simply by counting the number of people below the poverty-line income; this is sometimes called the head-count measure.
But the poverty line is drawn so that not too many fall underneath it. If everybody is poor, nobody can be the Mother Theresa of Economics.
. A scrutiny of this approach yields two different types of questions. First, is poverty adequately seen as low income?
No. People on high income can be poor because they have large debts or many dependents or an expensive drug habit.
Second, even if poverty is seen as low income, is the aggregate poverty of a society best characterized by the index of the head-count measure?
No. Don't be silly.
I take up these questions in turn. Do we get enough of a diagnosis of individual poverty by comparing the individual's income with a socially given poverty-line income?
No. That's why the baby of a billionaire is not described as poor.
What about the person with an income well above the poverty line, who suffers from an expensive illiiess (requiring, say, kidney dialysis)? Is deprivation not ultimately a lack of opportunity to lead a minimally acceptable life,
No. Having to titty-wank your boss to keep your job is not an acceptable fucking life. I'm not saying that's what I have to do. It's this other bloke I know.
which can be influenced by a number of considerations, including of course personal income, but also physical and environmental characteristics, and other variables (such as the availability and costs of medical and other facilities)?
Why stop there? Is it not deprivation not to have a Mummy who is the Queen of Engyland and a Daddy who is the Pope?
The motivation behind such an exercise relates closely to seeing poverty as a serious deprivation of certain basic capabilities.
But poverty does not deprive you of any capabilities whatsoever. It may deprive you of remunerative use of those capabilities but that may be because you prefer to titty-wank your boss who, because you are self-employed, doesn't even pay you minimum wage. What you should be doing is seeking better paid employment.
This alternative approach leads to a rather different diagnosis of poverty from the ones that a purely income-based analysis can.
An income based analysis says 'this dude is poor coz his income is very low'. That's perfectly sensible. The alternative approach would be to say 'lack of facilities to enhance titty-wanking capabilities amongst self-employed socioproctologists may contribute to their being as poor as shit'.
This is not to deny that lowness of income can be very important in many contexts, since the opportunities a person enjoys in a market economy can be severely constrained by her level of real income.
Consumption opportunities- sure. But, in a market economy, there will be competition to secure the labor power of those on low incomes.
However, various contingencies can lead to variations in the "conversion" of income into the capability to live a minimally acceptable life,
or a so maximally opulent as to be morally repugnant life. Sen forgets that variations in 'conversion' are independent of Income. They cancel each other out within every class. On the other hand, richer people suffering a 'conversion' deficit, are likely to spend money on programs which also help poorer people like themselves. We are welcome to support or even initiate such programs.
and if that is what we are concerned with, there may be good reason to look beyond income poverty.
This already happens. Special facilities and programs seek to help people with different types of disabilities. It is likely that they receive higher transfers or tax allowances on this basis.
There are at least four different sources of variation:
there is only one. People differ from each other. The reason why they may do so could be environmental or sociological or historical. But evolution would ensure it happened anyway.
(1) personal heterogeneities (for example, proneness to illness),
which may be genetic or environmental
(2) environmental diversities
which cause personal heterogeneities.
(for example, living in a storm-prone or flood-prone area), (3) variations in social climate (for example, the prevalence of crime or epidemiological vectors),
ditto
and (4) differences in relative deprivation connected with customary patterns of consumption in particular societies (for example, being relatively impoverished in a rich society, which can lead to deprivation of the absolute capability to take part in the life of the community).^
ditto
There is, thus, an important need to go beyond income information in poverty analysis
no there isn't, ceteris paribus. Only if there is some structural change such that it is likely that capability improvement isn't cancelling out capability reduction would we need to do any such thing. But, even then, there would be little point if the cause was obvious.
, in particular to see poverty as capability deprivation.
but wealth may arise from 'capability deprivation'. Singapore got rich coz kids there could not exercise their capability to take drugs and burn busses and run amok the way kids at Presidency College Calcutta did in the late Sixties.
However (as was discussed earlier), the choice of the informational base for poverty analysis cannot really be dissociated from pragmatic considerations, particularly informational availability.
There is no information available about capability. I genuinely didn't know I was incapable of being a mathematician till I went to Collidge.
It is unlikely that the perspective of poverty as income deprivation can be dispensed with in the empirical literature on poverty, even when the limitations of that perspective are entirely clear. Indeed, in many contexts the roughand-ready way of using income information may provide the most immediate approach to the study of severe deprivation.
No shit, Sherlock! Still, back in the Seventies, some brown monkeys thought they were being very patriotic by pretending that Americans were much worse off than Cubans while Bangladesh was the earthly Paradise.
For example, the causation of famines is often best seen in terms of
food availability deficit. Curing famine involves bringing in lots of food and medicines and delivering it to the starving. Herbert Hoover found that out. Sen's own relative- B.R Sen did a good job, as head of FAO, in persuading the world that Famine could be eradicated.
a radical decline in the real incomes of a section of the population, leading to starvation and death (on this see Sen, 1976d, 1981).
Real income can increase (because of price controls) but starvation will still happen because excess demand for food is not being met due to FAD.
The dynamics of income earning and of purchasing power may indeed be the most important component of a famine investigation
Not if there are price controls on food. Some may get their quota. Others may find that they are shit out of luck.
. This approach, in which the study of causal influences on the determination of the respective incomes of different groups plays a central part, contrasts with an exclusive focus on agricultural production and food supply.
This silly man is assuming free markets for food. But, if there are price controls, food prices don't change. Indeed, real wages may appear to have risen. But there is excess demand.
he last concern—that a relative deprivation of income can lead to an absolute deprivation of a basic capability—was first discussed by Adam Smith (1776).
No. It had been discussed in ancient Sumer and Egypt and so forth. There is nothing new under the Sun of FAD.
Adam Smith's claim that "necessary goods" (and correspondingly minimum incomes needed to avoid basic deprivation) must be defined differently for different societies also suggests a general approach of using a parametrically variable "poverty-line" income.
Smith was simply saying that a Scottish dude with a thousand pounds a year was a very rich man who lived in a castle with plenty of servants whereas a London merchant with a thousand a year couldn't even afford to keep his own carriage.
The good news was that the London merchant could make bigger profits by investing in Scottish factories because wages were lower there. As Dr. Johnson remarked, in England oats was fed to horses. In Scotland, men ate oats and, in general, were as healthy and strong as horses.
Such variations can be used to reflect the disparate conditions of different persons (including, for example, proneness to illness).
Which may actually be greater among the better off because workers who are not hardy tended to die quickly.
Under certain conditions, the definition of poverty as having an income below the parametrically determined "poverty line" will be congruent with the characterization of poverty as capability deprivation
No. It will be congruent with poverty. Capability deprivation is unknowable. Could I have been better at twerking than Beyonce? We will never know.
(if the parametric variations are firmly linked to the income needed to avoid specified levels of capability deprivation). '
Nobody knows what that income is. Many a marriage has come unstuck because hubby and wifey assume that their income is enough to live as their neighbors do. Then they find themselves running into debt. Keeping up with Joneses is costlier than they had guessed. They are not capable of sustaining the life-style which they thought they were entitled to. But this can happen to whole classes of people. Before the Great War, the Russian nobility and the French rentier class and the German bildungsburgertum thought they could live in their accustomed manner. Then they discovered they had no such capability. Even the English 'milord' had to give up his valet and his butler. Sad.
The shift in informational focus from food supply to entitlements (involving incomes as well as supply, and the resulting relative prices) can make a radical difference, since famines can occur even without any major decline—possibly without any decline at all—of food production or supply.
Rubbish! This stupid cunt thought a big famine might occur under Mrs. Thatcher. The plain fact is, if a famine is likely in an area then there aint no fucking reliable statistics there. The 'informational focus' is on not knowing shit about the place. Just turn up with lots of food and trucks to deliver it to the starving. You may have to pay off warlords so bring plenty of US dollars and Johnny Walker Whiskey.
If, for example, the incomes of rural wage laborers, or of service providers, or of craftsmen collapse through unemployment, or through a fall of real wages, or through a decline in the demand for the relevant services or craft products, the affected groups may have to starve, even if the overall food supply in the economy is undiminished.
Unless they fuck off to the cities and get jobs there- or, if no jobs are available, they put pressure on the Government till soup kitchens etc. are opened. Syria could have had as big a famine in 2012-13 as in 1915, but people moved to where they could get fed.
Starvation occurs when some people cannot establish entitlement over an adequate amount of food, through purchase or through food production,
lots of peeps don't produce food or have any money. They get fed by charity or government or international programs. Most then get jobs and become economically productive.
and the overall supply of food is only one influence among many in the determination of the entitlements of the respective groups of people in the economy.
Nope. Overall supply of food is all that matters. If there isn't enough, there has to be rationing. However 'tightening the belt' may actually improve health outcomes- as happened during the 'Cuban famine'. The North Korean famine, which occurred for the same reason, however, was quite horrible. The solution was for the State to loosen up the economy and then tax the surplus in gangster fashion.
Thus, an income-sensitive entitlement approacti can provide a better explanation of famines than can be obtained through an exclusively production-oriented view.
This turned out to be wholly untrue. All that the capabilities approach did was permit ignorant female professors to sit on UN or other committees and say things like 'Women receive the smallest share of the family's food. We must raise awareness of LGBTQ practices to save them from starvation'. Scotland was foolish enough to invite a UN Special Rapporteur on Food who said that Scottish women faced food insecurity because they lacked adequate access to arable land to raise turnips and thus feed their wee bairns!
It can also yield a more effective approach to the remedying of starvation and hunger (on this see particularly Drfeze and Sen, 1989).
Very true. Conferences involving the Capabilities approach tend to have excellent catering arrangements.
The nature of the problem tends to identify the particular "space" on which the analysis has to concentrate.
Very true. The nature of the problem of defecation tends to identify the particular 'space' where one can have a quiet shit.
It remains true that in explaining the exact patterns of famine deaths and sufferings, we can get additional understanding by supplementing the income-based analysis with information on the conversion of incomes into nourishment, which will depend on various other influences such as metabolic rates, proneness to illness, body size, etc.
This is silly. The big question is whether the lazy sods you are giving charity to will trade their food stamps for drugs.
As empirical studies of famines bring out, some actual famines have occurred with little or no decline in food production (such as the Bengal famine of 1943,
caused by massive food availability deficit as BR Sen- but also Sen's daddy- knew very well
Che Ethiopian famine of 1973,
drought caused food availability deficit which, for some reason, the Government did not publicize. That is why the regime fell.
or the Bangladesh famine of 1974),
massive food availability deficit. America wouldn't supply food and India couldn't. The global food market was tight. America was sending the signal that it had a 'food weapon' just as the Arabs had an 'oil weapon'. Bangladesh quadrupled food production after 1974. East Bengalis are sensible people. Maybe that is why they got rid of Hindu buddhijivis like Sen.
whereas others have been infiuenced substantially by declines in food production (on this see Sen, 1981). '' An important further issue is the distribution of food within the family, which may be influenced by several factors other than family income.
Daddy eats all the food. Mummy starves. We must teach Mummy Queer Theoretic approaches to intersectionality within an appropriate framework of Gramscian Grammatology.
Issues of gender inequality and the treatment of children and of old people can be important in this context.
But the guys with the food can do nothing about such issues. Afghanistan or Yemen might have FAD right now. But them guys aren't going to abandon their ancestral religion and become Transgender activists in return for sacks of wheat.
Entitlement analysis can be extended in these directions by going beyond the family income into the conventions and rules of intrafamily division.
It can become even more useless- that is true enough. Still, the fact is, people doing Famine Relief already knew that you have to adopt different policies to help different classes of people. ICS officers like BR Sen knew all about this.
undoubtedly important for investigating the incidence of nutritional failures, morbidities, and mortalities. However, in a general analysis of the occurrence and causation of famines, affecting large groups, these additional matters may be of secondary importance. While I shall not enter further into the famine literature here, I would like to emphasize that the informational demands of famine analysis give an important place to income deprivation which have more immediacy and ready usability than the more subtle—and ultimately more informed—distinctions based on capability comparisons (on this see Sen [1981] and Dreze and Sen [1989]).
This is nonsense. Dreze did some work and Sen put his name to that shite. But it was worthless. Only because there was a buffer stock rotting away, did Governments implement various food distribution schemes.
I turn now to the second question. The most common and most traditional measure of poverty had tended to concentrate on head counting.
Sen thinks people have multiple identities. Like Ravana, poor people have ten heads. Why are they all not being counted?
But it must also make a difference as to how far below the poverty line the poor individually are,
If people can survive way below the poverty line, then the poverty line can be lowered. Still, for some purposes- e.g. Free Higher Education- having the 'BPL' tag even if your people are comfortably off can be advantageous. But then, by Goodhart's law, the measure becomes useless because it is being gamed. Suddenly everybody discovers that they are actually a disabled, Dalit, Lesbian with negative Income.
and furthermore, how the deprivation is shared and distributed among the poor.
Individual deprivation can't be shared or distributed. Wealth can, deprivation can't.
The social data on the respective deprivations of the individuals who constitute the poor in a society need to be aggregated together to arrive at informative and usable measures of aggregate poverty.
Only if that is what you are paid to do. But nobody really cares about that shite because they assume you are lying your head off.
This is a social choice problem, and axioms can indeed be proposed that attempt to capture our distributional concerns in this constructive exercise (on this see Sen, 1976b).'
Very true. Society can choose, provided it has nice axioms, that everybody should own a Superyacht and enjoy holidays on nearby planets with good amenities for disabled Dalit Lesbians suffering social exclusion due to they iz as poor as shit.
Several distribution-sensitive poverty measures have been derived axiomatically in the recent social choice literature, and various alternative proposals have been analyzed.
They are all useless. By the time Sen got his Nobel, people understood that big countries like China and India could lift hundreds of millions out of poverty. There is little point measuring a turd, instead of flushing it down the toilet.
While I shall, here, not go into a comparative assessment of these measures (nor into axiomatic requirements that can be used to discriminate between them), elsewhere I have tried to address this issue, jointly with James Foster (Foster and Sen, 1997).*' However, I would like to Vaughan (1987), Drfeze and Sen (1989), Barbara Harriss (1990), Bina Agarwal (1994), Nancy Folbre (1995), Kanbur (1995), and Nussbaum and Jonathan Glover (1995), among other contributions. '
What a fucking waste of time!
The so-called "Sen measure of poverty"
could be useful for politicians asked to explain why growth has fallen behind that of one's neighbors. You say 'ah! but as Nobel laureate Sen has shown, what really matters is some other measure of happiness in which, by coincidence, my administration has performed best. '
can, in fact, be improved by an important but simple variation illuminatingly proposed by Anthony F. Shorrocks (1995). I have to confess favoring the "Sen-Shorrocks measure" over the original "Sen index."
But that type of index is actively mischievous! It would lead us to conclude that Chavez's Venezuela was the country everybody should emulate!
Sen's axiomatic approach is based on 'a focus axiom' which states that any poverty measurement must be independent of those above the poverty line.
This is foolish. Rich people give charity and create jobs for poor people. Only if there is some strong economic barrier between the poor and the rich- e.g. if they belonged to different, antagonistic, species- would this axiom be justified.
There is also a ' monotonicity axiom' which states that an increase in income below the poverty line must reduce poverty.
The problem here is that income is defined as what you can spend without reducing wealth while wealth is defined as the stock of assets used to generate a given level of income. Income can rise while wealth falls because what we are doing is imprudent. This is particularly the case where the income is from an 'incentive incompatible' activity. Thus, if workers steal everything from their place of work and sell it, though their income has risen, they have actually increased their own poverty.
Sen also has a 'transfer axiom' which states that a transfer of income from someone below the poverty line to anyone who is richer will result in an increase in poverty.
This is obviously false. Mummy send her daughter a little money which the daughter uses to get a diploma in IT. Poverty has fallen coz daughters love their Mummies and will make sure they can enjoy their 'golden years'.
The truth is that Nations rise out of poverty by pushing marginal producers out- thus raising poverty- before reemploying them in more productive sectors. Sen and his ilk protested against the smashing of China's 'iron rice bowl' but that was a vital step in that Nation's rise.
There is little point pretending the poor are a separate species from us whom we must look after in the same manner that we look after Tigers and Elephants and Pandas.
. To axiomatize exactly a particular poverty measure, we
take the stupidest and most bigoted idea we can possible have and pretend it is always true.
shall have to indulge in the "brinkmanship" of which I spoke earlier (Section V), by adding other axiomatic demands until we are just short of an impossibility, with only one surviving poverty measure. X.
Fuck does this mean? I suppose Sen is saying 'guys, if we continue to go down this stupid road, we will reach a point where we have proved that all billionaires are actually starving to death and thus deserve massive welfare checks. Our axioms have mathematically proved that nobody can be not very very fucking poor.'
Comparative Deprivation and Gender Inequality
Wimmin be very deprived- especially if they have to marry billionaires so as to be able to live the high life. Why can't Melania marry a disabled BPL Dalit Lesbian and enjoy the same standard of living as Donald Trump can offer her?
At one level, poverty cannot be dissociated from the misery caused by it,
Nor Wealth disassociated from the guys who have it coz they will fuck you up if you try to rob them.
and in this sense, the classical perspective of utility also can be invoked in this analysis.
Misery is disutility. It persists so long as there is no opportunity cost to it- i.e. no better alternative.
However, the malleability of mental attitudes, on which I commented earlier, may tend to hide and muffle the extent of deprivation in many cases. The indigent peasant who manages to build some cheer in his life should not be taken as nonpoor on grounds of his mental accomplishment.
Nor should the billionaire. Come to think of it, billionaires are constantly complaining that they haven't doubled their wealth this financial quarter.
This adaptability can be particularly important in dealing with gender inequality and deprivation of women in traditionally unequal societies.
It can also be particularly important in dealing with penis size inequality and the deprivation experienced by needle dick people in traditionally promiscuous societies.
This is partly because perceptions have a decisive part to play in the cohesion of family life,
Sen's family life suffered when he perceived his best friend's wife as more attractive than his wife. This caused him to have to move to Engyland.
and the culture of family living tends to put a premium on making allies out of the ill treated.
Very true. I would make an ally out of the cat any time my baby son beat me up. Sadly, the cat escaped.
Women may—often enough— work much harder than men (thanks to the rigours of household chores), and also receive less attention in health care and nutrition, and yet the perception that there is an incorrigible inequality here may well be missing in a society in which asymmetric norms are quietly dominant.
Equally, it may be present. That's why many civilizations placed so much importance on getting in slaves so Mummy is spared noisome labor.
This type of inequality and deprivation may not, under these circumstances, adequately surface in the scale of the mental metric of dissatisfaction and discontent.
Or it may surface there in spades. The fact is plenty of needle-dick dudes have a mental metric of dissatisfaction and discontent which rivals that of even the most virulent feminist who hates God coz she can't pee standing up. So what? There is a penis enlargement industry to cater to such people- or so I have heard.
The socially cultivated sense of contentment and serenity may even affect the perception of morbidity and illness.
Or it may do no such thing.
When, many years ago, I was working on a famine-related study of postfamine Bengal in 1944,1 was quite struck by the remarkable fact that the widows surveyed had hardly reported any incidence of being in "indifferent health," whereas widowers, complained massively about just that (Sen, 1985a Appendix B).
Whereas female investigator found the opposite effect- more particularly if they were talking to their granny.
Similarly, it emerges in interstate comparisons in India that the states that are worst provided in education and health-care facilities typically report the lowest levels of perceived morbidity, whereas states with good health care and school education indicate higher self-perception of illness (with the highest morbidity reports coming from the best provided states, such as Kerala).
Sadly, this only emerged after everybody had acknowledged that Indian statistical surveys were completely shit. I remember one survey which showed villagers who didn't have a clock or a radio yet reporting their exact time of waking up or going to sleep. I own plenty of gadgets but I can't say whether I went to sleep at eleven o'clock or twelve o'clock. Indian surveys could give this information because those involved simply invented the results they reported.
On the other hand, it is true that if you think illness is caused by witch-craft, you might not mention this to a stranger- just in case the guy is the head warlock.
Mental reactions, the mainstay of classical utility, can be a very defective basis for the analysis of deprivation.
Classical utility was just a theory. It was never applied. Later, a little money was wasted in this way. Maybe such Stats can be useful for Market Researchers.
Thus, in understanding poverty and inequality, there is a strong case for looking at real deprivation and not merely at mental reactions to that deprivation.
But mental reactions to deprivation drive economic behavior. I feel hungry. Food deprivation is what causes me to go to the kitchen to fix myself a sandwich. But the larder is bare. Fuck it, I'll have to get a job and spend the money I earn on food. Sad.
There have been many recent investigations of gender inequality and women's deprivation in terms of undemutrition, clinically diagnosed morbidity, observed illiteracy,
getting chopped into pieces by their 'Food blogger' lover, farting continually while watching Avatar, the list is endless.
and even unexpectedly high mortality (compared with physiologically justified expectations).''^ Such interpersonal comparisons can easily be a significant basis of studies of poverty and of inequality between the sexes
as can rating women on their propensity to flatulence
They can be accommodated within a broad firamework of welfare economics and social choice (enhanced by the removal of informational constraints that would rule out the use of these types of data).
No. Useless shite can only be accommodated by useless shitheads.
XI. The Liberal Paradox This lecture has included discussion of why and how impossibility results in social choice can be overcome through informational broadening.
This is not true. However much information you have, Social Choice will still be arbitrary if not non-deterministic. There can be no 'neutral algorithm' for Social Choice. Nor should there be, because of Knightian Uncertainty.
Axiomatic approaches don't have to have impossibility results. One can have a 'Revelation Principle' and assume that there is always some result which everybody would accept as optimal. Nothing can be proved either way. It is impossible to disprove the Liebnizian conclusion that whatever happens, happens for the best, nor to disprove the alternative conclusion, that the best outcome is never computable or implementable.
The informational widening considered so far has been mainly concerned with the use of interpersonal comparisons.
Which are arbitrary- not to say stupid and bigoted.
But this need not be the only form of broadening that is needed in resolving an impasse in social choice. Consider, for example, an impossibility theorem which is sometimes referred to as "the liberal paradox," or "the impossibility of the Paredan liberal" (Sen, 1970a, b, 1976c). The theorem shows the impossibility of satisfying even a very minimal demand for liberty when combined with an insistence on Pareto efficiency (given unrestricted domain)."
But, with unrestricted domain, nobody would permit unrestricted domain! Either liberty exists- in which case there is no Social Choice or else there is no Liberty- in which case it is foolish to speak of Society choosing anything.
Since there have been some debates on the content of liberty in the recent literature, perhaps a quick explanatory remark may be useful.
Liberty only exists if it has the power to continue to exist. Otherwise, there is merely a permission of a certain sort which may be withdrawn at whim.
Liberty has many different aspects, including two rather distinct features: (1) it can help us to achieve what we would choose to achieve in our respective private domains,
This is not true. A guy being held captive by lusty super-models who feed him delicacies does not enjoy liberty. Indeed, he may be greatly displeased if anybody kills those super-models and sets him free to starve.
Liberty may not help us achieve anything in our respective private domains. It may involve, as the valorous people of Ukraine are demonstrating, sacrificing your life for your Nation.
for example, in personal life (this is its "opportunity aspect"), and (2) it can leave us directly in charge of choices over private domains, no matter what we may or may not achieve (this is its "process aspect").
There is no such difference when it comes to Liberty. We are welcome to delegate choices in the private domain both in terms of what is chosen and who implements that choice.
In social choice theory, the formulation of liberty has been primarily concerned with the former, that is, the opportunity aspect.
But a slave master or a jailor may leave a 'private domain' to his slave or prisoner. Equally, one may exercise one's liberty such that no private domain is left.
*' There is also some analytical interest in the "source" of the impossibility result involved here,
the source is unrestricted domain and the refusal to understand that nobody in their right mind would agree to being bound by a Social Choice rule with that feature. We want different rules in different contexts.
particularly since both "Pareto efficiency" and "minimal libierty" are characterized in terms of the same set of preferences of the same individuals.
Which can't be known by even that individual- i.e. the thing does not exist. Why not characterize everything in terms of the magic formula which changes everybody into flying unicorns?
This may have been adequate to show the possible conflict between the Pareto principle and the opportunity aspect of liberty
There is no such conflict. But Liberty has no necessary connection with opportunity. The King's slaves may be able to earn as much money and live as they like. But they would not have Liberty. Equally, Robin Hood and his Merry Men may have precious little in the way of 'opportunity'. Yet they are Free.
As for the Pareto principle- provided information is costless and transactions are frictionless- any Society will quickly gravitate to the Pareto frontier just by bartering.
Sen's 'Liberal paradox' ignored the possibility that 'prude' might bribe 'lewd' or vice versa. In practice, 'nosy preferences' lead to deals whereby both sides get something in return for giving up more extreme claims. But this is also why Grievance Studies flourishes. Everybody stockpiles nuisance claims of their own. You play the gender card. I play the race card. Then both of us decide we are actually Disabled Dalit Transgender Lesbians.
(on which Sen [1970a, b] concentrated), but an exclusive concentration on the opportunity aspect cannot provide an adequate understanding of the demands of liberty
Liberty demands that Sen-tentious assholes fuck off
However, social choice theory can also be made to accommodate the process aspect of liberty through appropriate recharacterization,
Why, for God's sake? I don't want to operate on myself or do my own taxes or manage my own portfolio. I want to delegate all that to qualified people.
It is also important to avoid the opposite narrowness of concentrating exclusively only on the process aspect of liberty, as some recent writers have preferred to do. Important as processes are, this cannot obliterate the relevance of the opportunity aspect which too must count Indeed, the importance of effectiveness in the realization of liberty in one's personal life has been recognized as important for a long time—even by commentators deeply concemed with processes, fiom John Stuart Mill (1859) to Frank Knight (1947), Friedrich A. Hayek (1960), and Buchanan (1986).
Which is why the first thing Zelensky did when Putin invaded was to consult Social Choice theorists on how best to protect the Liberty of his people.
The difficulties of having to weigh process fairness against effectiveness of outcomes
are self-created and wholly irrelevant to the question of preserving liberty. The difficulties of having to kill Putin's goons are what should concentrate minds. Liberty aint something Professors can conjure up for us with axioms or equations.
cannot be avoided simply by ignoring the opportunity aspect of liberty, through an exclusive concentration on the process aspect.
But sensible people don't have to bother with that shite. Opportunities exist if processes exist and vice versa. They are one and the same for the individual. An enterprise, however, might usefully distinguish the two for a Managerial purpose.
How might the conflict of the Paretian liberal, in particular, be resolved?
People do deals.
Indeed, neither the claims of liberty, nor that of Pareto efficiency, need be significantly contingent on interpersonal comparisons
Sure they can. Interpersonal comparisons are about preference intensity which people can signal by spending money or burning shit down. Putin's goons pretended they wanted to put down neo-Nazism. But they didn't really. They were mercenaries- nothing more. The Ukrainians genuinely wanted to kick out Putin's hordes. Their 'preference intensity' is prevailing.
Sen's type of Social Choice was useless because it didn't get that the way deals get done is through 'transferable utility'- i.e. paying off the other side- or transferable disutility- i.e. making a nuisance of yourself to the other side till they back off.
. The force of one's claims over one's private domain lies in the personal nature of that choice—
No. It lies in the force with which you fuck up those who try to fuck with you.
not on the relative intensities of the preferences of different persons over a particular person's private life.
Sadly, this isn't true. Mummy has very intense preferences against us turning into bums. She may speak very sweetly, but she tends to get her way- thank God!
Also, Pareto efficiency depends on the congruence of different persons' preferences over a pairwise choice—not on the comparative strength of those preferences.
Only in Sen's stupid system. The fact is, I may say I have a preference about what is happening to Lesbian goats in Guatemala. But I don't really. I'm just virtue signaling. Sen and Arrow assume that everybody has a preference over everything. But they don't really.
Rather, the resolution of this problem lies elsewhere, in particular in the need to see each of these claims as being qualified by the importance of the other
this is nonsense. A claim is qualified by the Hohfeldian incidents accruing to the claimant. Other claims are only important if they impact those incidents. My claim that Amartya Sen eats only dog shit does not qualify his claim that he eats human food.
—once it is recognized that they can be in possible conflict with each other (indeed, the main point of the liberal paradox was precisely to identify that possible conflict).
Conflict arises because of scarcity. That is why we expend scarce resources on punishing those who start conflicts of a certain sort. Collective security is the basis of Liberty or, indeed, the Rule of Law.
The recognition of the importance of effective liberty in one's private domain (precisely over particular choices) can coexist with an acknowledgement of the relevance of Paretian unanimity over any pair (over all choices—whether in one's private domain or not).
No it can't. There are informational and cognitive constraints. We simply don't have the time or brain power to have preferences over all choices in Society. Uncorrelated asymmetries exist such that I care whether or not I get a cheeseburger or a pizza slice. But I genuinely don't give a shit whether Mr. Jones gets a cheeseburger while Mrs. Smith got a pizza slice.
A satisfactory resolution of this impossibility must include taking an evaluative view of the acceptable priorities between personal liberty and overall desire fulfillment, and must be sensitive to the information regarding the trade-offs on this that the persons may themselves endorse.
Nonsense! We ought not to give two shits about any of this. The thing is simply stupid. Why not say 'we must take an evaluative view of every fart while keeping in mind the tradeoff between smelliness, loudness and the nature of the skid-marks left in Mr. Jones's chaddi.
This too calls for an informational enrichment (taking note of people's political values as well as individual desires), but this enrichment is of a rather different kind from that of using interpersonal comparisons of well-being or overall advantage."*
Sen- a little brown monkey from a shithole country- thought that the stupid shite he was teaching actually mattered! Western countries were hanging on his every word and changing their policies accordingly. This was narcissism of a breath-taking kind. By contrast, my farts fuel Democracy and Social Justice throughout the Galaxy.
XII. A Concluding Remark Impossibility results in social choice theory— led by the pioneering work of Arrow (1951)— have often been interpreted as being thoroughly destructive of the possibility of reasoned and democratic social choice, including welfare economics "
Nope. Everybody already knew that there are big problems with any given voting rule. The solution is to have different voting rules for different things. Also, invest in Constitutional 'Checks and Balances' so as to prevent the emergence of an elected Dictator. Your country may still turn to shit so try to get a second passport.
" This may, formally, require a multistage social choice exercise in the determination of these priorities,
which is what happens in Parliamentary sub-committees and other such deeply boring places.
followed by the use of those priorities in the choice over comprehensive social states
No. We can't choose social states. We can only make choices based on expected social states.
I have argued against that view.
Sen always argues against any sensible view.
Indeed, Arrow's powerful "impossibility theorem" invites engagement, rather than resignation
It invites derision. Define a Dictator as a guy who isn't a Dictator and you get- ex falso quodlibet- an explosion of nonsense.
We do know, of course, that democratic decisions can sometimes lead to incongruities.
Always, not 'sometimes'.
To the extent that this is a feature of the real world, its existence and reach are matters for objective recognition. Inconsistencies arise more readily in some situations than in others, and it is possible to identify the situational differences and to characterize the processes through which consensual and compatible decisions can emerge
Bribery. Log-rolling. Pork barrel politics. If all else fails, assassination or emigration.
The impossibility results certainly deserve serious study. They often have wide—indeed sweeping—reach, not merely covering day-today politics (where we may be rather used to incongruity), but also questioning the possibility of any assured framework for making social welfare judgments for the society as a whole.
Come to think of it the McKelvey chaos theorem is perfectly sensible. Don't make a decision space multi-dimensional. Tell Sen-tentious tossers to butt out.
Impossibilities thus identified also militate against the general possibility of an orderly and systematic framework for normatively assessing inequality, for evaluating poverty, or for identifying intolerable tyranny and violations of liberty.
No. All we can say is that there isn't a 'one-size-fits-all' solution. But kids learn that in the playground.
Not to be able to have a coherent framework for these appraisals or evaluations would indeed be most damaging for systematic political, social, and economic judgement.
Fuck off! Some mathsy cunts- who didn't understand math- thought a 'coherent framework' was possible in the Fifties. Then math itself proved this could not be the case. Evolution isn't deterministic. How can Social Choice for creatures who evolved by natural selection be deterministic?
It would not be possible to talk about injustice and unfairness without having to face the accusation that such diagnoses must be inescapably arbitrary or intellectually despotic.
Why not face that accusation squarely because it is true and what's more everybody knows it is true? Why pretend that mathsy handwaving can prove something already known to be false?
These bleak conclusions do not, however, endure searching scrutiny,
Can Sen show any non-arbitrary result? No. He says maybe interpersonal comparisons can help but such comparisons are arbitrary- not to say bigoted and ignorant.
and fruitful procedures that militate against such pessimism can be clearly identified.
No. They start arbitrary and end up arbitrary. This is not to say good enough Social Choice doesn't happen just by folk doing deals on the basis of 'transferable utility'. Smart people do 'interpersonal comparisons' and pay guys to do stuff for them. 'Hicks-Kaldor' improvement is about permitting reallocation so that the 'winners' could, if they pleased, compensate the 'losers'.
This has indeed been largely an upbeat lecture—emphasizing the possibility of constructive social choice theory,
i.e. talking bollocks
and arguing for a productive interpretation of the impossibility results.
The productive interpretation is that some non-deterministic procedure is always better than a deterministic one. Magic is cooler than Science.
Indeed, these apparently negative results can be seen to be helpful inputs in the development of an adequate framework for social choice, since the axiomatic derivation of a specific social choice procedure must lie in between—and close to—an impossibility, on one side, and an embarrassment of riches, on the other (see Section V).
but it would involve an infinite number of axioms and a non denumerable number of meta-axioms etc. Under unrestricted domain, each individual can also vote on the voting rule and this is the logical reductio ad absurdum for this type of mischegos.
The possibility of constructive welfare economics and social choice
rests solely on whether the guys doing it are being constructive as opposed to being mathsy wankers.
(and their use in making social welfare judgments and in devising practical measures with normative significance) turns on the need for broadening the informational basis of such choice.
but information acquisition and processing are costly. Ultimately, we have to make a choice between funding Sen-tentious shite and actually doing some good.
One feels some sympathy for kids who thought they could do Physics at College and then be part of Space exploration or cool stuff like that. But if you came from a shithole country, people said 'do Econ, no Physics', without realizing that Econ aint magic. Physics can make a country richer. Studying Poverty will make you poorer. Axiomatizing Social Choice won't improve the choice menu for a poor country which insists on doing stupid shit.
Different types of informational enrichment have been considered in the literature.
I myself have contributed a paper describing how classifying the smelliness of farts can enrich the informational basis of Social Choice. The fact is farts have a direct connection on Society's well-being- which is why I was expelled from the LSE India Society back in 1979.
A crucial element in this broadening is the use of interpersonal comparisons of well-being and individual advantage. It is not surprising that the rejection of interpersonal comparisons must cause difficulties for reasoned social decision, since the claims of different persons, who make up the society, have to be assessed against each other.
especially their claims that 'who smelled it dealt it'.
We cannot even understand the force of public concerns about poverty, hunger, inequality, or tyranny, without bringing in interpersonal comparisons in one form or another.
Nor can we understand the force of East Bengal's concern to get rid of Hindus.
The information on which our informal judgments on these matters rely is precisely the kind of information that has to be—and can be—incorporated in the formal analysis of systematic social choice
but this will always be a wholly arbitrary procedure. Also this 'formal analysis' stops when it discovers nobody will pay for it.
The pessimism about the possibility of interpersonal comparisons that fuelled the "obituary notices" for welfare economics (and substantially fed the fear of impossibility in social choice theory) was ultimately misleading for two distinct reasons. First,
countries realized that 'Hicks Kaldor' was fine because Government's need tax revenue. Thus do stuff which yields higher tax revenue- i.e. let the Rich get richer- otherwise your existing welfare arrangements collapse.
it confined attention to too narrow an informational base, overlooking the different ways in which interpersonally comparative statements can sensibly be made and can be used to enrich the analysis of welfare judgments and social choice.
but, if tax revenue didn't go up, there was no fucking money for Social Choice
An overconcentration on comparisons of mental states
which was impossible
crowded out a plethora of information that can inform us about the real advantages and disadvantages of different persons, related to their substantive well-being, freedoms, or opportunities.
not to mention the smelly farts people can provide
Second, the pessimism was also based on demanding too much precision in such comparisons, overlooking the fact that even partial comparisons can serve to enlighten the reasoned basis of welfare economics, social ethics, and responsible politics.
but this would be an arbitrary procedure. What Sen can do a Sharia council can equally do. But the Sharia council has superior ability in enforcing its decisions. Sen-tentious shitheads have to run away from them.
Addressing these problems fits well into a general program of strengthening social choice theory (and "nonobituarial" welfare economics).
because that is what the cunt was paid to do. But people with tenure die sooner or later. Their availability cascade collapses or turns into a branch of Grievance Studies for those with very special educational needs.
There are two distinct issues here. First, partial comparability can be very effective in generating an optimal choice (Sen, 1970a, c).
No. It can generate a choice- but it won't be optimal. Where there is optimality there may 'naturality' or non-arbitrariness. But this is unlikely to be the case for anything which evolved by natural selection.
Second, even when an optimal alternative does not emerge, it can help to narrow down the maximal set of undominated alternatives to which a maximizing choice can be confined
Only in the sense that a maximizing fart can be confined.
In general, informational broadening, in one form or another, is an effective way of overcoming social choice pessimism and of avoiding impossibilities, and it leads directly to constructive approaches with viability and reach.
Can Sen give a single example of Social Choice theory having 'lead directly to a constructive approach'? No. The thing is useless when it it is not mischievous.
Formal reasoning about postulated axioms (including their compatibility and coherence), as well as informal understanding of values and norms (including their relevance and plausibility), both point in that productive direction.
Only in the sense that farts point in a productive direction. The fact is farts can motivate actions. Social Choice Theory can motivate the same sort of actions. This involves running away from the person who produces the thing incessantly.
Indeed, the deep complementarity between formal and informal reasoning—
or farting and Social Choice theory
so central to the social sciences—
which become anti-social if you fart enough or are Amartya Sen
is well illustrated by developments in modem social choice theory.
There was no development. The thing was a wank which, however, some brown monkeys used to emigrate from shithole countries. But, had those shithole countries done sensible things, those same guys could have been rich or, at least, useful.
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