Should convicted rapists be excluded from female prisons just because they have the wrong gender identity from birth? What about Hindus who are excluded from membership of the College of Cardinals and are thus denied the opportunity to become Pope?
The answers to these questions is- yes. Excluding the ineligible is generally a good thing. Failure to exclude rapists from female jails- or crazy Hindu peeps like me from high positions in the Catholic clergy- would be highly reprehensible.
For a club or venue to be considered 'exclusive' is a good thing. The notion is that there is excess demand among the best people for a superior product or service. Exclusivity then becomes a driver for an evolutionary arms race, or positive feedback loop, involving superior production and superior reception and enjoyment. This is a 'separating equilibrium' or else a 'discoordination game'. It turns out there is negative externality from relaxing exclusivity because including the mediocre leads to a larger than proportional fall in over all performance. Don't forget 'exclusivity' breeds Tardean mimetics- i.e. imitation of the superior and some new enterprises attempting to become 'exclusive' may end up becoming better than the established ones.
At the same time as exclusivity obtains, there are Churches and other such Religious or Ideological or other similar social formations which claim that there is a positive externality involved in participation and that Society maximally benefits if everybody is included in the practice. This is a 'pooling equilibrium' based on 'cheap talk'.
However, Inclusivity is seldom a good thing. It is likely that a superior alternative to a particular good or service is available for some proportion of the population. There is also the problem of repugnant and nuisance goods. Drug pushers may want everybody- especially little kids- to become addicted to their product. Something similar happens when the producer of a scarce, rival & excludable, good suggests that we should pay so that their product can be provided to everybody. We must politely but firmly tell that they have shit for brains.
To conclude, speaking generally, we think Social Inclusion to be desirable only if a positive consumption externality is involved and the good is 'non-rival' or has zero marginal and trivial average incremental cost.
For this reason, rather than having to do with the distribution of goods or services, promoting Social Inclusion has come to mean a proactive attitude so as to ensure that people eligible for and who would benefit from participation in a certain social activity are not prevented from so doing by some handicap or obstacle. In some cases- more particularly if there are economies of scope or scale or positive externalities of some other type- removing the obstacle in question generates more social benefit than cost and thus is better for everybody in the medium to long term.
Social Exclusion, on the other hand, can be understood as an obstacle or handicap specifically created to keep some eligible people from participating in a utile social activity for some snobbish or bigoted or mercenary reason. Tackling it, may require substantial legislative and administrative action depending on its cause.
Speaking generally, there are three sources of Social Exclusion
1) There is some coalition which is able to enforce price, wage, service-provision or other such discrimination so as to extract more 'economic rent'. This may occur because elasticities differ between different segments of the market and there is a costly-to-disguise signal permitting a 'separating equilibrium'.
2) There are statistically significant differences in traits between sections of the population and this correlates with costly-to-disguise public signals- e.g. race, gender etc.
3) Structural Socio-economic shocks may reduce mobility giving rise to (1) or else particular infections or mimetic patterns become endemic in particular population groups giving rise to (2) .
It is possible that, if there is a sudden increase in pathogen load, a sort of caste system based on a primitive pathogen-avoidance-theory may spring up. However, this could also happen in connection with a military or political shock- increased uncertainty and risk aversion cause kin selective clustering and increased xenophobia.
Strong Governments or increased capacity and improved responsiveness of a Judicial/Administrative type can tackle the problem of Social Exclusion while remaining focused on improving the collective economic and security situation. There may be separate policy instruments for particular types of Social Exclusion on the grounds that they have a bigger 'multiplier' effect.
All this became obvious for Western countries over the course of two World Wars and the Cold War which succeeded it.
India had a lot of 'Social Exclusion' on the basis of caste, creed, gender, language, educational credentials, kinship or other ties with administrative or political elites, citizenship, right of abode as well as economic and biological considerations- e.g. having lots of foreign exchange or being a social leper by reason of actually suffering from Hansen's disease.
Reducing Social Exclusion by directly tackling Economic, Sociological, Theological, Legal and Medical causes of exclusion, is highly utile. India had benefitted a lot from targeted initiatives reducing such exclusion though, because of low per capita Income, the scale of the problem may, in certain instances be increasing- e.g. falling participation rate for women in low skilled or menial occupations without any corresponding absorption into more salubrious, knowledge based, service sector employment.
This highlights the paradox that inequality and 'exclusion' (e.g. illiteracy) may have to rise before there is a productivity leap such that the great mass of people enjoy a decent standard of living and thus feel secure in their dignity. Take the example of England & Wales, which saw a fall in literacy and real wages for large sections of the population during the first half of the nineteenth century before these trends were reversed.
Some twenty five years ago, the increasingly useless Asian Development Bank- which should tackle Social Exclusion of groups denied access to long term, low interest lending, through targeted programs- paid the utterly useless Amartya Sen to write worthless shite which completely ignores all of the above. Instead of addressing what is Exclusion or how it can be reduced, Sen prefers to
to scrutinize the nature, relevance, and reach of the idea of social exclusion.
This is crazy shit. If you are bleeding to death you don't want your Doctor to ponder the idea of fatal exsanguination. You want him to staunch and dress and bandage the wound and maybe give you a blood transfusion.
The ADB did look at schemes in India whereby specific groups were targeted by Nationalized Banks and other Financial intermediaries such that they gained access to credit and were helped to grow their enterprises. Sen, of course, was completely ignorant regarding the problems and potential of these schemes.
Sen didn't understand that India has had policies to identify and tackle different types of Social Exclusion long before France had any similar policies. Indeed, Indian women got the vote twenty years before French women did. Tagore, the founder of Shantiniketan, had been active in Cooperative banking for small tenants and even landless agricultural laborers.
Furthermore, even in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century England there was a concept corresponding to the 'circle of deprivation' and some targeted policy responses- e.g. Apprenticeship schemes for orphans, 'Workfare' schemes for widows, etc.
However, these could be punitive- e.g. confinement in the Work House or forcible resettlement in far away Australia. Indeed, the Charity Organization Societies which came into existence circa 1870, which pioneered the strategy of individual case work and which sought to identify and break 'the circle of poverty' had, as its original motivation, the desire to reduce 'outdoor relief' (i.e. means tested welfare payments).
The post War managerial state did develop a more liberal and humane approach but it must be said that patronizing assumptions about the proletarian or 'Negro' family were counter productive. Thus the approach of Keith Joseph in England and Daniel Moynihan provoked a reaction from those they claimed to wish to help. The French, quite naturally, jumped on this bandwagon of stupidity just when it was becoming mischievous.
I must also try to connect the notion to concepts that have been articulated earlier and to which the idea of social exclusion relates in a reasonably close way. We have to see what it has added and why the addition may well be important. I shall also critically examine the possibility of using this idea in contexts other than the French—and more generally European—conditions in which it has been originally championed.
India had been very actively tackling vastly greater problems of Social Exclusion. Why the fuck bother with France which is an advanced economy? France aint in Asia. The Asian Development Bank should be looking at developing nations in South Asia where there is a big problem of Social Exclusion. Which policy interventions have proved successful. Why has there been 'Agency Capture' by elites of other such schemes? How can this be avoided?
In terms of usefulness of the idea, we have to scrutinize and examine critically what new insight—if any—is provided by the approach of social exclusion. Does it contribute to our understanding of the nature of poverty? Does it help in identifying causes of poverty that may be otherwise neglected? Does it enrich thinking on policy and social action in alleviating poverty? How would our understanding of poverty be any different if we were to ignore the literature of social exclusion altogether? How would the policies chosen be any different? These critical issues are central to an appropriate evaluation and assessment of the idea of social exclusion.
No. They are wholly irrelevant. France and Germany may be worried about drug addicts and kids from broken homes who 'drop out' and inhabit a 'counter culture'. They may also fear- quite unfoundedly, that darker skinned French people will, sooner or later, put bones through the noses and revert to cannibalism or jihad or whatever. But these are not the problems facing Developing countries in Asia.
Poverty, Capability Deprivation, and Social Exclusion
Indians know that a Dalit girl denied an education and forced into an early and abusive marriage nevertheless has the capability to create and run a billion dollar enterprise supplying steel pipes etc.
A small loan from the public sector did help Kalpana Saroj at the start of her entrepreneurial career. The Asian Development Bank could earn good profits by finding ways to connect to the millions of potential Kalpana Sarojs who exist across the region.
It is useful to begin with the recognition that the idea of social exclusion has conceptual connections with well-established notions in the literature on poverty and deprivation,
that 'literature' is worthless shit. By contrast there is a great mass of empirical evidence on the effectiveness of different strategies- Gandhian or 'voluntarist', Ambedkarite or 'Law & Econ' based, Nehruvian or 'Developmental', Activist NGO & Micro-Finance based etc.- to tackle the underlying problems.
and has antecedents that are far older than the specific history of the terminology might suggest. Indeed, I would argue that we can appreciate more fully the contribution made by the new literature on social exclusion by placing it in the broader context of the old—very aged—idea of poverty as capability deprivation. That connection with a very general approach will help us to appreciate the particular emphases and focal concerns that the specific idea of social exclusion helps to illuminate. So let us start far back—in the realm of concepts and ideas. First, consider the characterization of poverty as simply shortage of income, which is, of course, very ancient and still fairly common in the established literature on deprivation and destitution.
This is nonsense. Poverty meant bare subsistence. It existed more extensively in non-monetary economies or situations where there was scarcely any trade or industry. However, it could also signify a pious type of 'non-possession' such as is thought to characterize the life-style of monks and nuns.
Poverty can be a source of Social Exclusion. There may be a Wealth or Income threshold for participation in certain Socio-political activities. It is tackled by raising productivity and thus Income. A collective insurance scheme can be funded by raising productivity so that the unfortunate have a safety net.
This view, which is rather far removed from the relational notion of social exclusion, is not, however, entirely without merit, since income—properly defined—has an enormous influence on the kind of lives we can lead. The impoverishment of our lives results frequently from the inadequacy of income, and in this sense low income must be an important cause of poor living. And yet—as the last argument itself suggests—ultimately poverty must be seen in terms of poor living,
No. A rich miser may exemplify 'poor living'. A poor man may have a good life. The trouble is, he has borrowed money from loan sharks who will break his legs and force his daughter into prostitution.
rather than just as lowness of incomes (and “nothing else”). Income may be the most prominent means for a good life without deprivation, but it is not the only influence on the lives we can lead. If our paramount interest is in the lives that people can lead—the freedom they have to lead minimally decent lives—then it cannot but be a mistake to concentrate exclusively only on one or other of the means to such freedom.
Fuck off! If our paramount interest is in doing something useful for other people, we must concentrate exclusively on raising productivity- if we are economists. If we are lawyers, we could work on bringing law suits against landlords or employers who discriminate against certain communities. Sen is merely recycling his own vomit because he gets paid to do so.
Sen 'suggest that it is useful to investigate the literature on “social exclusion” using this broadly Aristotelian approach.'
If this is so, how come the ancient Greeks or Romans or anyone else who read Aristotle didn't take that approach? The answer was given by the Epicurean economists more than 2000 years ago. Aristotle had shit for brains. Do portfolio diversification and then you have the peace of mind to enjoy yourself rather than sweating the small stuff.
The connections are immediate. First, we have good reason to value not being excluded from social relations,
As Socrates pointed out, we have equally good reasons to value being excluded from that boring, often mischievous, shite
nd in this sense, social exclusion may be directly a part of capability poverty.
or directly a part of capability wealth. The kid who doesn't get invited to parties, masters an arcane discipline and rises in the world. Being as rich as fuck means you don't have to be sociable or popular or handsome or witty. 'Money is honey, my dear sonny/ and a rich man's joke is always funny'.
Indeed, Adam Smith’s focus on the deprivation involved
not focusing on it at all. He wrote a book called 'the Wealth of Nations' which was about helping your country get rich. He didn't write a book called 'Let's all help the Poor.'
in not “being able to appear in public without shame” is a good example of a capability deprivation that takes the form of social exclusion.
Fuck off! What Smith meant was that upwardly mobile Scots dudes needed to spend money on following the current fashion so as to get invited to the right drawing-rooms. Once they had become as rich as fuck, they were welcome to prance around in kilts- which is precisely what did happen even to Lowland Scots who never had a clan tartan.
food is often used—especially in many traditional societies—as a means of social intercourse
not in Sen's Bengal where 'inter-dining' was frowned upon. Tagore shows the ultra-orthodox as having to consume their food in isolation for fear of incurring ritual impurity.
(celebrations, mournings, or even standard communications may depend on food being served to guests),
or it may not.
a family may suffer from food shortage precisely because of the constitutively relational role of exchange of food.
No. Some members of a family may feel hard done by coz Mummy is refusing to let us eat all the nice dishes she has prepared for tonight's dinner party. But, though we loudly complain that we are starving to death, this isn't really true. No doubt, there were some stupid PWA theater productions in which the proletarian empties his larder to provide a banquet for the Capitalist Vampire who then rapes his entire family to death while saying mean things about Comrade Stalin's moustache. But, shit like that didn't really happen. There may have been 'sumptuous consumption' from time to time but Nehru and his ilk were wrong about the peasant being improvident or the proletarian being addicted to drink.
Second, even in having enough food for consumption within the family, causal influences may relate to relational features in a significant way. For example, when some groups are made to go hungry when other groups command most of the food (through bureaucratic arrangements or through superior market power), then there is a sense in which the idea of exclusion can be seen to be relevant even in examining a deprivation that is not constitutively of the relational kind.
No. This is not exclusion. It is the working of a particular rationing system- whether price based or administrative. I am excluded from the nightclub if the bouncers won't let me in. I can't get drunk at the nightclub if I don't buy any drinks because they are overpriced and I don't have much money. That isn't exclusion. It is a case of rational substitution. I prefer keeping my money to paying over the odds for a drink.
Such “food battles” can be an important element in the causation of hunger
No. The cause is food availability deficit. Battles don't cause War. They occur because War exists.
when supply is inflexible,
and people are making lots of money manipulating food stocks
and cases of this kind have received attention
from shitheads teaching worthless shite
in the context of studies of famines and undernourishment.
Those studies are shit.
Stupid people can take up an emotive word like 'rape' or 'exclusion' and try to make their worthless bullshit sexy.
While each of these developments can be described in the language of exclusion,
or of rape
to wit, respectively: (1) being excluded from enjoying a normal crop,
being forcibly fucked in the ass which would otherwise have shat out a normal crop
(2) being excluded from employment,
being forcibly sucked off and thus deprived of the jizz that is employment
(3) exclusion from the food market because of low purchasing power,
being skull fucked and ass fucked by entitlements failure and low capabilities
(4) exclusion from food subsidy arrangements,
being fucked in the ass by a gorilla while the posh folk are having an orgy featuring super-models on the other side of the window.
they involve quite different causal patterns, some of which are more fruitfully described in the language of exclusion than others. For example, the removal of food subsidies to
a group of people being metaphorically ass-fucked by gorillas while the elite are having an orgy featuring super-models and stars of stage and screen
an excluded group involves an active form of exclusion that is central to the development in question. On the other side, the failure of a crop from which a peasant family suffers is not easily seen as an exclusion
or a case of rape by a gorilla
—or even as a relational failure—in a significant way (no matter what liberty our language may give us to dress up any failure as an “exclusion”).
or a rape involving gorillas wrecking your rectum while koala bears skull fuck you.
Hunger resulting from unemployment raises a more difficult issue.
No it doesn't. The solution- as the Brits in Bengal discovered- is 'food for work' prgrams.
In some contexts a person’s inability to get a job may be helpfully analyzed in terms of exclusion, for example when the available employment tends to be reserved for—or allocated to—people of particular types, leaving out others.
This is not helpful at all. The fact that I am an unemployed topless dancer does not mean that I am unaware that topless dancing jobs invariably go to young women with big busts, not elderly men. Still, this does not mean I don't frequently picture myself earning big bucks shaking my ta tas and thus making my Daddy proud.
This can be important in understanding, say, high levels of unemployment of minority groups, or women, in societies which reserve the jobs—or at least the better jobs—to majority groups or to men.
This stupid cunt doesn't get that the vast majority of jobs exist because those who can do them add much more value than they receive in terms of salary. Removing barriers to entry for women, minorities, people with relevant work skills but who lack specific credentials, is good for everybody or, at any rate, there is a Hicks Kaldor improvement for the economy.
But in general, the causation of unemployment need not be seen to be resulting invariably—or even typically—from any exclusionary process.
Unless that is precisely what is happening. India would have much less unemployment if certain sorts of employers weren't excluded from the market by reason of excessive 'compliance' costs.
Whether hunger resulting from unemployment can be helpfully analyzed in terms of instrumentally important social exclusion would, thus, depend on the exact nature of the causal processes involved.
No hungry person is helped by shitheads analyzing anything at all. During the Great Depression, people lost their jobs. So, soup kitchens and other mechanisms to get food to the newly unemployed were put in place. The Federal Government was slow off the mark. It was only in 1939 that Food Stamps were introduced. Even then, the aim was to get rid of agricultural surpluses.
Back then nobody cared about Social Exclusion because it was fucking obvious that those excluded in one place needed to go to where they would be welcomed.
The inability of a person to buy enough food because of a fall in his or her real wages again requires more causal probing to see whether the idea of exclusion will be usefully employed or not in that particular context.
It won't. Don't be silly.
What made the real wages fall? Since such declines in real wages have often been causally connected even with famines, causal analysis here can be particularly important.
No it can't. Real wages are related to productivity. If there is famine, ceteris paribus, people eat less. This lowers their productivity.
To cite a particular example, the decline in the real wages of rural labourers that played a crucial part in the genesis of the Bengal famine of 1943 was closely connected with
their not being needed to harvest a non-existent crop. That is unemployment not a fall in the real wage. Since the productivity of laborers was directly linked to the food they were given on the days that they worked, the real wage stayed the same. Sadly this was literally a subsistence wage. If they didn't get it they couldn't work and thus could get no fucking food. That's what caused starvation.
the asymmetric nature of the war-expenditure-based boom in the economy of Bengal
But every part of India had a war-expenditure-based boom. Why was it only the Muslim League ruled Province which had a big famine? How come Bangladesh, but not West Bengal, had a big famine in 1974?
— a boom that boosted the incomes of many urban dwellers
it boosted the incomes of many dwellers in Mumbai and Chennai and Karachi and Lahore and Delhi and Kanpur. Why did they have no big famine? Was it because the Muslim League was not ruling in those Provinces? Did the fact that the Ipsahanis didn't get the food supply contract make a difference? Yes. Sen's daddy and his relative, B.R Sen (who was in charge of Food at the Centre in 1943) knew the truth. Sen only started telling lies about what happened after his Daddy was safely dead.
but excluded the rural labourers (on this see Sen, 1981, Chapter 6).
It excluded everybody not working in war-related industries. All real wages fell. Profits rose- but profits aren't what workers get.
The analysis of entitlement failure of rural labourers can be fitted into a reasoning in which the idea of exclusion can be given a useful part.
Only to the same extent that the idea of ass-rape by gorillas can be given a useful part.
And the same applies, to an even greater extent, to the entitlement failure of fishermen and river-based transport workers, since they suffered not only from being left out of the war boom, but also from the British Raj’s decision to sink the normally-used boats in the area, which it feared would be soon overrun by the invading Japanese army. This did not do much to hinder the already overstretched Japanese army, but it surely did actively exclude many fishermen and boat operators from carrying out their normal business.
No. It prevented a particular type of activity. I suppose when a thing is banned, we may say we have been excluded from doing it. But we could equally say that we had been ass-raped by a metaphorical gorilla every time we tried to do the thing. After all, a ban isn't just a type of exclusion, it is also a type of forcible anal intercourse inflicted by invisible gorillas.
The real relevance of an exclusionary perspective is, thus,
that you recycle any old shite and pass it off as 'scrutiny of Social Exclusion'. Similarly, if Sen was being paid to present a paper on what it is like to be ass-raped by a gorilla he could say- 'sodomy by simians is a type of capability deprivation. Thus, Bengali boatmen who were deprived of their capability to offer transport services, could be said to have suffered ass-rape by invisible gorillas intent on taking up all their time and thus preventing them from continuing to earn a living in their accustomed way.
'The real relevance of an ass-raped-by-gorilla perspective is
conditional on the nature of the process that leads to deprivation—in this case, to a sharp fall in the purchasing power of the affected population. This kind of discrimination is important to undertake in order to separate out (1) the conceptual contribution that the idea of
being ass-raped by a gorilla and consequent shame and
social exclusion can make and the constructive role it can play, and (2) the use of
ass-rape by a gorilla and subsequent
social exclusion merely as language and rhetoric. Both can be effective, but conceptual creativity must not be confused with just linguistic extension.
not to mention the extension of the gorilla up your asshole.
5. Social Relations: Constitutive and Instrumental Importance In this section and in the next one, I investigate two particular distinctions within the general category of
being ass-raped by gorillas which tends to lead to adverse comment and
social exclusion. Earlier on in this paper (particularly in linking the new literature on social exclusion with the earlier writings on capability deprivation), I have already had the occasion to examine—and give illustrations of—the intrinsic importance as well as the instrumental consequences of social relations of different kinds. The distinction between the two ways in which social exclusion
or being ass-raped by a gorilla
can lead to capability deprivation is worth clarifying more precisely and also worth investigating further.
by being ass fucked by a gorilla
Being excluded
or ass-raped by a gorilla
can sometimes be in itself a deprivation and this can be of intrinsic importance on its own. For example, not being able to relate to others
because gorillas are incessantly ass-raping you
and to take part in the life of the community can directly impoverish a person’s life.
but being ass-raped by a gorilla is definitely worse. Sen should investigate this further.
It is a loss on its own, in addition to whatever further deprivation it may indirectly generate.
Sen comes from a country where 'social boycott' has been practiced for thousands of years. But there has also been ethnic cleansing. His own people had to run away from their ancestral homeland.
The fact is, had France remained under Hitler's jackboot, more and more French people would have been excluded from their higher ranks of Society. The French learnt their lesson. They have provided themselves with nukes and delivery systems.
Societies which want to be able to defend themselves may exclude or otherwise discriminate against those who have a reputation for weakness or cowardice. On the other hand, there is little point trying to exclude those who will beat you and eat your lunch.
A Society may gain by excluding cowards and weaklings. Equally, such people may profit from not being required to fight. Exclusion may have advantages as well as disadvantages. If it occurs because excluded individuals want to be excluded, different policy instruments are needed.
This is a case of constitutive relevance of social exclusion
Entities or activities are constitutively relevant to a phenomenon when they are parts of the mechanism responsible for that phenomenon. What is constitutive of Social Exclusion is Society and what is constitutive of Society is Economics, Politics, the Law, Religion, historical Sociological factors etc. Exclusion is, so to speak, an emergent, or is supervenient on these more fundamental or foundational factors. However, Social Exclusion is 'multiply realizable'- thus for example changes in Media depiction of a particular section of Society (e.g portrayal of Muslims after Al Qaeda began making its presence felt) may cause Social Exclusion of a type more associated with historical factors- e.g. relations between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland.
In contrast, there are relational deprivations that are not in themselves terrible, but which can lead to very bad results. For example, not using the credit market need not be seen by all to be intrinsically distasteful. Some do, of course, enjoy borrowing or lending, while others do not feel this to be a matter of inherent importance one way or the other, while still others are happy enough to follow Polonius’s advice: “Neither a borrower, nor a lender be.” But not to have access to the credit market can, through causal linkages, lead to other deprivations, such as income poverty, or the inability to take up interesting opportunities that might have been both fulfilling and enriching but which may require an initial investment and use of credit.
This is stupid shit. Access to a thing affects what one can potentially do. What you can potentially do affects your utility and sense of well-being. I may have the potential to take one million quid out of my Bank account and this makes me feel good even if I prefer to live modestly. If I lose access to my bank account, my welfare is directly affected. My utility has decreased. That's why I may pay a penalty and transfer my million pounds from a Bank which I believe might fail to a dozen other Banks so as to take advantage of the Government's guarantee of up to 100,000 reimbursement for depositors.
In technical terms, the 'felicity function' (i.e. characterizes the utility of a given household member of consuming at any given point in time) diverges from the utility function only if people are stupid and short sighted. True, you can borrow money and go on a spending spree but there is something hysterical or febrile about your gaiety.
Causally significant exclusions of this kind can have great instrumental importance: they may not be impoverishing in themselves,
Anything which reduces your menu of choice or your potential well being is an impoverishment. On the other hand, reducing your consumption so as to save and invest and have a more prosperous future is not an impoverishment at all.
but they can lead to impoverishment of human life through their causal consequences (such as the denial of social and economic opportunities that would be helpful for the persons involved).
Felicity functions aren't utility functions. Anything which reduces your opportunities lowers utility.
Landlessness is similarly an instrumental deprivation.
No. It is a smart choice for most people. We may want to own our own homes. We seldom want to own agricultural land because we don't want to be farmers. Suppose you inherit a farm or even a patch of undeveloped urban land. If you get an offer above its valuation, you sell it and invest the money in the Stock Exchange. Only if you have experience of farming or property development would you hand on to that land.
A family without land in a peasant society may be deeply handicapped.
Not if it migrates to the City or, better yet, emigrates to a richer country. Indeed many families which are now very rich have ancestral stories of having to run away from the family land because an Uncle had grabbed their share and was bound to kill them if they stuck around.
I suppose Amartya Sen's extended family owned plenty of land in East Bengal. They had to run away because the Brits departed and the Muslims started killing them. But, precisely because they didn't have land, Sen's people did very well for themselves through education and knowledge based occupations.
(As the pioneering founder of the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, Mohammad Yunus is, of course, in a remarkable position to illuminate the importance of credit markets for the less privileged members of the society.)
But Microfinance is quite separate from loans raised on the security of land.
given the age-old value system in peasant societies, landlessness can also have constitutive importance in a world that values a family’s special relation with its land: to be without land may seem like being without a limb of one’s own.
Sen doesn't have a limb of his own. The fact is land redistribution and 'bhoodhan' does not reduce poverty. It increases 'involution'. Remaining in the village reduces life-chances for the next generation.
But whether or not a family attaches direct value to its relation with its “own land,”
Families either attach value to fungible assets or they sell it. Sen is as stupid as shit. I suppose he has some dim idea about a rural society where land ownership permits you to wear a turban and to curl your mustache. But such assertions of status exist even in prison where the murderer has a higher position than the mere pick-pocket. Still, the farmer with the turban sells land so as to educate his sons so they can get good jobs in the City. He pays dowries so as to get his daughters married into the families of urban professionals. Of course, he may also seek to rise through politics.
landlessness can also help to generate economic and social deprivations.
Manhattanites are very deprived compared to Appalachian hillbillies.
Indeed, the alienation of land has been—appropriately enough—a much-discussed problem in the development literature.
That literature is shit. England became more prosperous than France because agricultural
Clearly, particular relational deprivations may, easily enough, have both constitutive and instrumental importance.
This is not clear at all. Anyway, anything which is 'constitutive' is part of the relevant mechanism and thus is of instrumental importance. The petrol tank is of constitutive importance in the car engine. It is also of instrumental importance. You have to refill it from time to time. It is the instrument whereby power is generated for the engine.
For example, not to be able to mix with others
reduces possible transactions. It represents a contraction of the budget set. Take the COVID lockdown. A habitual recluse may feel no difference in their day to day life but their Income or Wealth is likely to have been affected. Furthermore, they may feel more anxiety re. receiving certain sorts of emergency and other services.
may directly impoverish a person’s life, and also, additionally, reduce economic opportunities that come from social contact. Indeed, quite often different aspects of capability deprivation and social exclusion may go together.
COVID gave us Social Exclusion. We had to avoid each other because we couldn't be sure who was infected. The greater success of some countries in implementing track and tracing and offering effective vaccines shows us how other types of Exclusion can be dealt with. This involves having alethic 'public signals' while tackling the severity of the underlying problem. I did get COVID but having already been vaccinated, didn't notice any symptoms. But I did rigorously isolate myself.
However, they can also appear singly, and as and when they are relevant, we have to pay attention to each possibility within the general categories of constitutively important deprivations and instrumentally significant handicaps.
No. We should do useful things. We should not listen to useless shitheads.
When a deprivation does not have constitutively relational importance,
it does not exist. The fact that I am a deprived of a flying unicorn does not affect my relations with anybody. This is because you can't be deprived of something which does not exist. I suppose you could say 'Vivek, you could easily be the next Beyonce by perfecting your twerking technique. The World is agog for your booty shake.' However, I am not actually deprived of twerking capacity. I'm just too lazy to acquire a skill which, to be frank with you, I find a little infra dig.
it may still be fruitful,
nothing Sen has ever done was 'fruitful'. His dad on the other hand got a PhD in Soil Science and may well have made a useful contribution to Indian agriculture. I'm not saying he actually did anything of the sort, but it is possible.
in many cases, to use the perspective of social exclusion, on instrumental grounds, to analyse it, if the causal process can be better understood through invoking the idea of exclusion.
or the idea of being ass-raped by invisible gorillas
The nature of the causal process is crucial for deciding the relevance of each perspective.
No. There may be multiple causes. What matters is ameliorating the effect.
. Active and Passive Exclusion
It makes no difference whether you are being actively ass-raped by a gorilla and being passively raped by a gorilla. It is a different matter, that there is no fucking gorilla.
When, for example, immigrants or refugees are not given a usable political status, it is an active exclusion, and this applies to many of the deprivations from which minority communities suffer in Europe and Asia and elsewhere.
But, where such immigrants or refugees are given a usable political status, the very thing they came in search off may disappear. Of course, one may say that a woman is guilty of doing Social Exclusion when she refuses to let every bloke put her penis into her but one may then have one's fucking head kicked in by that irate woman.
When, however, the deprivation comes about through social processes in which there is no deliberate attempt to exclude, the exclusion can be seen as a passive kind.
Many women in Argentina are passively excluding me from their vaginas.
A good example is provided by poverty and isolation generated by a sluggish economy and a consequent accentuation of poverty.
Which has nothing to do with Exclusion. All Sen is saying is that unemployment can cause people of the favored group to have similar experience to those in the 'excluded group'. The African American writer, Jay Saunders Redding attended a prestigious 'Black' College in the Thirties. From his dorm room he saw a white woman, living in a 'Hooverville' shanty town next door, stagger out out of her shack and collapse. He didn't rush to her aid because he would have been caught and lynched. So he called the police. As a highly educated man from the 'talented tenth', the police had no reason to suppose he was black. They assumed his patrician accent was that of a substantial citizen of the White Community. They told him they'd send a squad car around. The woman was probably drunk or had taken a beating. It really wasn't anything out of the ordinary. Later Redding learnt from the newspapers that the woman had died of some medical condition. The cops had never arrived. Some neighbor found her, but it was already too late.
Redding's point was that the Great Depression caused many Whites to experience an American reality previously confined to indigenous people and some poorer, rural, African Americans.
Both active and passive exclusions may be important, but they are not important in the same way.
There was active exclusion of African Americans from better paying jobs, more salubrious housing- GM even refused to sell 'niggers' Cadillacs till the Great Depression when Alfred Sloan decided to target that segment of the market. Since African Americans could not buy houses in good areas, they had more disposable income to buy expensive cars.
By contrast, there was no such Exclusion of Whites. There was structural Unemployment. There were dust-bowls. There were Bank failures and repossessions. But there was no Exclusion except in the sense that some Whites were also being ass-raped by invisible gorillas
The distinction can be relevant for causal analysis as well as for policy response.
No it can't. This isn't analysis. It is a waste of fucking time.
Relational exclusions may, in some cases, be brought about by a deliberate policy to exclude some people from some opportunities. For example, the decision of the United States Congress a couple of years ago to exclude permanent residents who were not US citizens from certain types of federal benefits was clearly an active exclusion, since it came about through policies directly aimed at that result.
No. This was not an exclusion at all. Permanent residents could take citizenship. But they would then have to pay Federal taxes even if they had spent the year working in a foreign country. True, Sen may have felt excluded but then, with equal justice, he could have felt himself to have been ass-raped by an invisible gorilla.
In contrast, the macroeconomic circumstances that may lead to a significant level of unemployment may not have been devised to bring about that result.
Not really. It was obvious that structural unemployment would break the back of powerful 'commanding heights' Trade Unions. Deindustrialization would alter the balance of power in the economy in favor of financial services. Cost push inflation would disappear thanks to offshoring of labor intensive industries or even business processes. Reagan and Thatcher showed that a strategy of kicking the Teamsters or Trade Unions repeatedly in the groin, and then kicking them in the head while pissing upon them, was a vote winner. Clinton showed that working class people prefer 'Workfare' to 'Welfare'. On the other hand, genuine proletarians want compulsory gender reassignment surgery paid for by the tax payer so that everybody can keep getting abortions.
Also, when particular groups—such as the young and the less skilled—suffer especially from being left out of the employment process,
because they are being ass-fucked by invisible gorillas. It isn't the case that young people can't get jobs which don't fucking exist.
it is possible that the economic conditions causing that result (and even the economic policies precipitating those conditions) may not have been, in any sense, aimed at excluding these vulnerable groups from employment.
Very true. It is also the case that when your elderly cat finally dies, it isn't because macroeconomic policy was deliberately aimed at that outcome.
The absence of direct aiming does not, of course, absolve the government involved from responsibility,
Rishi Sunak, you killed my elderly cat! Shame on you!
since it has to consider what bad things are happening in the economy
Elderly cats are dying! Indeed, some very sick people are also dying. Also, there was this bloke who topped himself coz his wife ran off with her Pilates instructor.
and how they can be prevented (and not merely the things that are directly “caused” by its own policies).
If you didn't cause a thing, chances are you can't fix it. If Rishi Sunak didn't kill my elderly cat, it is not the case that HMG should be trying to prevent the deaths of elderly felines.
Nevertheless, for causal analysis
you need a good Structural Causal Model not Sen-tentious bullshit
it may be important to distinguish between the active fostering of an exclusion—whether done by the government or by any other wilful agent—and a passive development of an exclusion
or a feeling that you are being ass-raped by an invisible gorilla.
that may result from a set of circumstances without such volitional immediacy. Let me illustrate this with an example of political exclusion in Europe that has, in my judgement, received less attention than it deserves. Recently, the targeting of settled immigrant population in Germany and France by right-wing extremists has received much political attention. The question is sometimes raised as to why Britain has, to a great extent, escaped this problem, even though decades ago when the large-scale immigration took place, Britain had strong anti-immigrant sentiments as well.
Britain introduced tough restrictions on immigration. However, the Brits probably liked White immigration from the Continent. Brexit happened because it was feared that Brussels would force Muslims- most of whom looked pretty White to me- on them. But this was in the context of ISIS type terrorism.
But, in the event, those sentiments seem not to have caused the kind of flourishing of right-wing extremism and severe targeting of immigrants
Britain could have had 'forcible repatriation'. Enoch Powell, at one point in time, looked like a future Prime Minister. Then people discovered he was barking mad. Still, Thatcher was able to implement some of his more sensible Economic ideas. Even the patrician Keith Joseph stopped babbling about the 'Social Market'.
that have occurred in Germany and France. (Some of my British friends seem to think that this is because they are just “nicer”; the explanatory power of this causal hypothesis is not pre-eminently obvious!)
It is pre-eminently obvious to most Indians. The French committed a lot of military atrocities so as to hang on to Vietnam and Algeria. The Brits gave kisses and cuddles to Gandhi and Nehru (even though they had spent a lot of time sulking in Prison) and thus Mountbatten had more influence in New Delhi than any Cabinet Minister till 1964.
I would argue that the explanation lies partly in the political exclusion from voting rights from which most of the settled immigrants in Germany and France suffer.
This is silly. France had a different system whereby overseas possessions sent representatives to the National Parliament. However, it was notable that Muslim Algerians who were full citizens were treated worse than European immigrants who did not bother to take French citizenship. Sen should not be highlighting a case where 'political rights' were utterly useless.
Furthermore, during the Sixties and Seventies, England had a discriminatory policy towards dark skinned British Citizens who, it was claimed, had no 'right of abode'. When Idi Amin forced the Brits to take a relatively small number of Ugandan Asians, conditions for all British Asians got worse. Ironically, those East African Asians worked so hard and assimilated so well that some of their kids ended up in a Tory Cabinet! Indeed, 'dishy Rishi' became PM at the age of 42.
England does not give the vote to non-Commonwealth citizens unless they become naturalized. Germany had a different approach to citizenship and initially had a concept of 'guest worker' similar to that which existed in some Warsaw Pact countries. With hindsight, we can't say there was very much of a right-wing backlash against migrants in either France or Germany. England's immigrants were White. The fact is Blair and Brown were keen to bring in more Poles, etc. and a lot of English people were deeply grateful for the excellent character and work-skills of such people. One rather odd result was that BAME people- by reason of our distinctive complexion- are assumed to be long-settled whereas a White person might- in big cities like London- be from the Continent. Thus, people seeking directions ask older blacks like me who, they rightly assume, are long established residents. Sadly, I am as stupid as shit, and generally send them off in the wrong direction. It is no consolation to such folk that I frequently get lost on my way back from the grocery store and end up in a pub on the other side of the river.
Indeed, in much of Europe, legally settled immigrants do not have the political right to vote because of the difficulties and delays in acquiring citizenship.
But this is true of every country in the world!
This keeps them outside the political process in a systematic way—this is clearly an active exclusion.
All Societies have a notion of eligibility. All Nations exclude non-Nationals from certain political functions. Why does Sen not mention the exclusion of babies and cats from the ability to vote or stand for Parliament?
He is pretending that not being able to vote creates Social Exclusion. Yet, as an Indian citizen who is not allowed to vote in the US, what great handicap has Sen faced? India does not allow dual Citizenship (because it wants to keep out Muslims from Pakistan and Bangladesh) otherwise Sen could have taken US citizenship- though he would then have had to pay Federal taxes even when employed in England. Boris Johnson gave up his American citizenship for this reason.
In France, the required qualification for acquiring French citizenship is quite exacting. In Germany the situation is worse, in this respect; German citizenship is very difficult to obtain even for the long-run residents from elsewhere.
So what? Immigrants do well in Germany. It may take a few more years of residency to get Citizenship there, but this makes little practical difference to anyone.
This political exclusion results in disenfranchisement of the immigrants, even long-term settled immigrants, and this in turn makes their social integration that much harder.
It had and has zero effect.
However, since the first version of this paper was presented in September 1998, the newly elected German government has declared its intention to ease the process of acquiring voting rights by settled immigrants.
This made no difference whatsoever. Anyway, increased European integration would have forced the Germans to change their policies. Recall, it was Brussels which forced the UK to set up a Supreme Court.
If the argument presented here is correct, this change, if carried out, will contribute to the integration of the settled immigrant population with the rest of the population of the country and also help to reduce the political targeting of the immigrant population by anti-immigrant activists.
25 years later, we can see that the argument Sen presented was shit. The man has never said anything sensible in his life. It is obvious that granting political rights to immigrant groups could lead to 'Sharia zones'. There is a suburb of Detroit where it is now legal to keep and slaughter animals in your backyard. It has also banned the flying of LGBTQ flags on city property.
Because of an imperial tradition, taken over by the Commonwealth, the right to vote is determined in the United Kingdom not exclusively by British citizenship, but also by the citizenship of the Commonwealth.
Only if they gain 'right of abode'.
Indeed, any citizen of the Commonwealth—any subject of the Queen as the head of the Commonwealth—immediately acquires voting rights in Britain on being accepted for settlement.
That's what matters. But it was much easier to get that permission if you didn't come from Sub-Saharan Africa or the Indian Sub-continent. By contrast, Western countries compete with each other to attract people from Hong Kong. That is what worries the Chinese Government. You can't oppress people who will be welcomed with open arms in rich countries.
Since most of the nonwhite immigrants to Britain have came from the Commonwealth countries (such as the West Indies, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, and Uganda), they have had the right of political participation in Britain immediately on arrival on a permanent basis.
But this didn't prevent highly racist immigration rules being put into effect. Still, I must admit the second Indian origin MP- 'Bow & Agree' Bhownagree- voted for restrictions on Ashkenazi immigration. Priti Patel & Suella Braverman are very much in the Bhownagree tradition.
The absence of this political exclusion has the effect of drawing the settled immigrants directly into British politics, where their votes are sought and taken into account.
That's not what happened. The existence of BAME citizens caused the resurgence in the career of actual Fascists like Oswald Moseley. His big mistake was to go on TV and start whimpering about how his Black Shirts were beaten up by little Jewish Tailors.
If right-wing extremists in Germany make strongly anti-immigrant statements, they do not lose the votes of immigrants (who have none),
Jewish Germans had votes under the Weimar Republic. That didn't prevent Hitler coming to power. Indeed, a mischaracterization of the policy of certain Jewish origin statesmen helped the Far Right.
whereas they pick up votes of those who are inclined in the same antiimmigrant direction. In Britain, in contrast, such statements would immediately bring in a backlash from immigrant voters, even when they are not British citizens.
Yet, History shows the opposite happened.
This has made the British political parties quite keen on wooing the immigrant vote,
No. British political parties are keen to either get big donations (the Tories) or bribe 'community leaders' to gain 'vote banks'.
and this clearly has served as a brake on the earlier attempts at racist politics in Britain.
No. It was Thatcher who said 'there's no such thing as Society'. People should try to get rich. Since immigrants only move to get more money, Thatcher's message was music to their ears. Blair was a bit Churchy- which appeals to immigrants who tend to have strong religious values- but he was a Thatcherite in economic policies. Then the fucker lied about WMD and fucked up Iraq.
Suppose the Emirates or the King of Saudi Arabia contemplated giving political rights to immigrants, what would happen? The immigrants would be massacred if they were too stupid to run away. A Society will tolerate foreign workers provided those workers don't get to take over that Society.
Persistent Unemployment and Exclusion:
Women were unemployed at a time when they were excluded from various types of employment for which they had the skills and qualifications. Everybody benefitted when discriminatory laws and practices were done away with.
An especially apt example is the important phenomenon of long-term unemployment.
Which has to do with low factor mobility. It has nothing to do with exclusion.
Indeed, in contemporary Europe, the extraordinary prevalence of unemployment and worklessness is
not extraordinary at all. The Welfare net lowered mobility. Regional Policy was a failure. Manpower policy, more often than not, was a fucking joke. The young and the talented voted with their feet. There was depopulation to accompany deindustrialization.
perhaps the single most important contributor to the persistence of social exclusion
which we could, with equal truth, describe as ass-rape by invisible gorillas- which is particularly pervasive in deindustrialized areas with high structural unemployment
in a large and momentous scale.
With double-digit unemployment rates across many countries in Europe (running between 10 and 12 percent of the workforce in France and Germany as well as Italy, and higher in Spain), the basis of self-reliant and self-confident economic existence of a great many Europeans is severely undermined.
because they are being ass-raped by invisible gorillas. We must increase the capability of such people to tighten their sphincters to such an extent that invisible gorillas will give up trying to penetrate them anally.
This is in sharp contrast not only with the contemporary experience of other economically developed countries, including Japan and the United States (with very much lower unemployment), but also with Europe’s own achievements of remarkably low unemployment not so long ago (with unemployment rates between 1 and 3 percent).
The Germans understood that they needed a 'Growth and Stability pact' whereby workers shared in the pain of restructuring such that industry could move up the value chain and, for example, export capital goods to China.
Oddly enough, the state of affairs with persistently high unemployment seems to have become “acceptable” in Europe
Europeans aren't as stupid as Bengali mathematical economists. They understood very well that they had to get out of ageing, low value adding, industries. Spain, sadly, embraced a construction bubble which meant that it suffered more after the sub-prime meltdown.
—feeble protests are typically combined with remarkable resignation.
Elderly leftists can protest feebly but nobody believes the Government has a magic money tree.
There is also an insufficient acknowledgement of the torments and disintegrations caused by
ass-rape by invisible gorillas
high levels of unemployment and inadequate assessment of different types of social exclusion that are brought about by the persistence of high levels of unemployment.
High levels of unemployment is the fault of including people in a welfare net which is bound to collapse sooner or later. The PIGS witnessed massive entitlement collapse. The young and the capable emigrated. Unemployment simply means low factor mobility.
We have to take fuller note of the many different ways in which the wide prevalence of joblessness blights lives and liberties in Europe.
Only if want to virtue signal like senile wankers. My question is why we aren't discussing ass-rape by invisible gorillas? Is it because of political correctness?
The point is sometimes made that unemployment is not—”any longer”—really such a social problem in Europe because of a functioning social security system that offers unemployment insurance and income support for all.
The problem was 'discouraged workers'. The solution was to classify them as disabled or as students doing a useless PhD in Capability theory.
This argument is deeply defective for several distinct reasons. First, social security and unemployment insurance cost public money, and the fiscal burden involved has many adverse consequences on the operation of the economy.
But this is still a better way forward then spending a lot of money on job creation schemes where useless people do useless stuff.
Second, the evil effects of unemployment are not confined only to the lowness of income with which jobless may be associated. To compensate for the lost income (or, more accurately, for a part of the lost income) does not do away with the other losses that also result from the persistence of unemployment.
Unemployed people have more leisure to take drugs which can cause them to experience ass-rape by invisible gorillas.
Some of these losses can be more fully understood in the perspective of social exclusion.
The only way to tackle social exclusion is to give useless people PhDs in worthless shite. They can then be employed doing mischievous shite. But this adds negative value. The country goes off a fiscal cliff more quickly. Chavez's Venezuela did plenty of Social Exclusion. Look at it now. About a quarter of the population has fled.
Let me list some of the other effects
they are all on an equal footing with ass-rape by invisible gorillas
—other than the loss of income associated with unemployment. Some of these effects can be helpfully analysed with the help of the idea of social exclusion
Fuck off!
Loss of Current Output: Unemployment involves wasting of productive power, since a part of the potential national output is not realized because of unemployment.
No. Unemployment can rise as Current Output rises. Productive power is stuff which involves creating goods and services which can be sold profitably. If this condition is not met, resources are being misallocated.
Unemployment either causes people to move or retrain or else it causes them to drop out of the labor market. This can be disguised but a better solution is to just classify such people as disabled or doing something else with their time.
This magnitude can clearly be quite large when unemployment rates are very high.
Don't pay a dole and unemployment magically disappears. The fact is unemployment is a luxury. As affluence rises, female and youth participation can fall.
Skill Loss and Long-run Damages: People not only “learn by doing,” they also “unlearn” by “not doing,” that is, by being out of work and out of practice.
So what? There is no point holding on to skills which nobody needs anymore.
Also, in addition to the depreciation of skill through nonpractice, unemployment may generate loss of cognitive abilities
not to mention loss of sphincter control
as a result of the unemployed person’s loss of confidence and sense of control.
by reason of their being ass-raped by invisible gorillas. I'm not saying we should not care about the plight of the unemployed. On the contrary, it is precisely because we can picture them as having lost cognitive capacity, sphincter control and the capacity to resist ass-rape by invisible gorillas.
In so far as this leads to the emergence of a less skilled group—with merely a memory of good skill
a good skill is one which is currently valued. A bad skill is one which nobody needs anymore.
—there is a phenomenon here that can lead to a future social exclusion from the job market.
Which is why it is a good idea to take any sort of job after about three months of fruitlessly searching within your own field.
Loss of Freedom and Social Exclusion: Taking a broader view of poverty, the nature of the deprivation of the unemployed includes the loss of freedom as a result of joblessness.
There is no loss of freedom, or cognitive ability or sphincter control or ability to resist anal rape by invisible gorillas.
A person stuck in a state of unemployment, even when materially supported by social insurance, does not get to exercise much freedom of decision,
Yes they do. They can decide not to buy expensive shit. More importantly, they can decide to move somewhere they will get paid well. Look around. Half the most successful families in your neighborhood are descended from people who got the fuck out of places where they couldn't get jobs or faced bigotry and violence.
and attitudinal studies have brought out the extent to which this loss of freedom is seen by many unemployed people as a central deprivation.
Which is why they try to get jobs and move to places where they are available.
Unemployment can be a major causal factor predisposing people to
getting ass-raped by invisible gorillas
social exclusion. The exclusion applies not only to economic opportunities, such as job-related insurance, and to pension and medical entitlements, but also to social activities, such as participation in the life of the community, which may be quite problematic for jobless people.
if they are stupid enough to believe this shit. Even then, the remedy is obvious. Get on your fucking bike as Norman Tebbit said. Sen certainly got on his bike and went off to Harvard.
While I have particularly emphasized the problem of massive unemployment in Europe,
which we now know was not really a problem
similar issues are important in Asia and Africa as well, even though the overwhelming fact of economic poverty—in the form of low incomes— sometimes leads to the neglect of these problems in social and economic analyses.
Not in India where there has been more emphasis on removing 'Social Exclusion' more particularly of Women, Backward Castes and Dalits than on boosting per capita Income.
Even though the European literature on social exclusion has been driven by the European context,
and has been found to be totally useless
it has made an important suggestive contribution to the possibility of analysing poverty in other regions with greater interest in constitutive deprivation associated with exclusions of various types.
No. The thing is useless in Europe and it is useless elsewhere. Once people start babbling about Social Inclusion you know they are stupid, useless and will fuck you in the ass- albeit by taking recourse to invisible gorillas.
European Origin, Universal Importance, and Asian Use
Europe concentrated on economic growth. That's why lots of immigrants turned up- thus giving an excuse for useless wankers to talk about 'Social Inclusion'. Meanwhile Indians fled India where the thing had become a nuisance.
First, is the European origin, with its cultural specificity, a barrier to the use of the concept elsewhere, including in Asia?
Yes. The problems of the rich are not the problems of the poor.
Second, does the European, and in particular French, origin give it a conceptual lineage that is worth tracing in assessing the richness of the idea?
No. The French realized that they were falling behind precisely because they listened to their own useless shitheads. Macron, who was close to Ricouer, denounces all po-mo, multi-culti, shite.
Also, since the literature on social exclusion has been mainly concerned with problems in European countries,
created by migrants fleeing 'Social Inclusion' in their newly Independent homelands
it could be asked whether that literature has anything significant to offer to Asia or Africa. I consider the second question first. While the French origin may be thought to be entirely accidental, it is, in fact, quite useful not to dismiss this fact altogether. France is a country quite unlike any other,
as is Germany and Italy and Belgium and India and Pakistan and Japan and the USA
and French culture is a very distinctive part of European civilisation,
because France is in Europe
with a very specific history of events and ideas, including the French Enlightenment
which was somewhat shittier than the Scottish one
and the French Revolution
which was a whole lot shittier than the American one
which changed the nature of the world in which we live.
Not for English speaking countries. As Voltaire recognized, we were fifty years ahead of the Frogs even before we overtook the economically. Indeed, that's why we overtook them.
Is that specific history of ideas and occurrences important in understanding the demands and reach of the notion of “social exclusion”? There may well be an important connection here.
The French like talking bollocks. Social Inclusion is bollocks
The demands for “liberty, equality, and fraternity”
as opposed to tyranny and everybody getting ass-fucked by invisible gorillas
in the French Revolution (and in the related developments in the eighteenth century Enlightenment)
which led to a King being replaced by an Emperor before the King came back and then an Emperor came back after which nobody wanted that job, so there was a Third Republic and then a Fourth and a Fifth.
have had profound influence on the intellectual history of the modern world.
No. Only shitheads are influenced by French or German 'intellectual history'.
I would like to argue that the concern for fraternity leads to the need for avoiding “exclusion” from the community of people,
France deported plenty of Jews during the Vichy regime. No doubt, the Jews were very grateful that this was done in a fraternal spirit.
just as the concern for equality pushes us in the direction of a commitment to avoid “poverty.”
Why not a commitment to avoid death?
Needless to say, the masculine form of the term “fraternity” (particularly reinforced in the US by the oddities of male communal living in some American universities) is not material here, and should in fact be shunned in extending and generalizing this concept (indeed the French revolutionaries did not really aim particularly at male exclusivism, despite the masculine form of the language.
France only gave women the vote in 1945. Sen's Mummy had the vote before Simone de Boudoir.
Equality is concerned with comparisons of different persons’ opportunities,
No. It is concerned with equal treatment before the Law unless it is merely a slogan used by a tyrant.
and if we focus, in that context, on the deprivation of opportunities, we move in the direction of the idea of poverty,
No. Poverty exists when opportunities are not utilized- e.g. the opportunity to tell your community to go fuck itself and to move to somewhere less shitty
in particular, to poverty as capability deprivation.
which is exactly the same as poverty as ass-rape by invisible gorillas. Clearly, if some force can deprive you of capability it can also ensure that you are being sodomized by simians. What possible reason could it have not to ensure so a hilarious outcome?
In a similar way, fraternity is concerned with the interrelation between the opportunities enjoyed by different members of the community,
No. Brotherhood is about being brotherly to a guy you call 'bro'. It has nothing to do with opportunities either of you enjoy. Suppose your brother's dick falls off and thus his sexual opportunities decrease. He would still be your bro. On the other hand, if his hands fall off, you are not obliged to give him a wank.
and if we focus instead on the absence of such interrelations, we move in the direction of the idea of social exclusion.
No we don't. Consider the social exclusion faced by 'pariah' communities. It has zero to do with the 'opportunities' enjoyed by anybody. It has to do with bigotry and may have its origin in some sort of false religious belief. Every major religion has been able to successfully critique wrong interpretations of Scripture such that any particular group was considered outside the pale of salvation.
This way of looking at the different concepts suggests that we should expect that ideas of poverty and social exclusion would be closely linked (just as equality and fraternity are), without being congruent with each
This way of looking at different concepts suggests that all ideas are closely linked, without being congruent, with ass-rape by invisible gorillas.
The major achievement of the European literature on social exclusion has been the enrichment of the analysis of processes that lead to capability deprivation. Arjan de Haan (1997) is right to point out that the literature on social deprivation has helped us to understand better the multidimensional nature of deprivation as well as the importance of causal—and often dynamic—connections.
Fuck off! This Arjan bloke is utterly useless. At one time, the Chinese would allow these nutters to turn up for Conferences on 'participatory practices' and so forth so as to bluff the West they were going to go down a democratic path. Then they lost patience and told these shitheads to fuck off.
If the constitutive role points at the inescapable necessity to see poverty as being multidimensional
then the role of constitutivity points at the necessity of multidimensionality in the utter intellectual impoverishment involved in this type of mental masturbation.
(some of the dimensions of which are well reflected by the constitutive role of social exclusions
or anal rape by invisible gorillas
in addition to the multiplicity of consequences in which we may also take a serious interest), the causal perspective also forces our attention
who the fuck would force the attention of Sen-tentious morons on anything at all? Let them ponder on the invisible gorilla fucking them in the ass.
on the importance of processes and changes associated with the emergence and development of capability poverty of particular types.
e.g. not being to get a job coz invisible gorillas are incessantly sodomizing you.
...the absence of “social safety nets” when economic growth falters and lives are battered, probably afflicts Asia and Africa more than western Europe because of the protection offered by certain features of the European “welfare state.”
This is why Social Exclusion- e.g. of women, Dalits, etc- has fallen. People exit places where there are strong social taboos on economic participation. They enter others where nobody gives a fuck about anything save your productive capacity. Incidentally, a lot of 'welfare safety nets'- e.g. Speenhamland or Bhoodhan- were about freezing up the social geography by reducing the imperative to exit for those at the bottom of the pile.
here are gains to be made from greater integration of social investigations across regional boundaries,
not if those investigations are done by verbose cretins
and from examining shared as well as disparate problems faced in different regions of the world
. Practical Reason in a Changing World
The practical reason these cunts are virtue signaling on this issue is because they get paid a little money.
The literature of social exclusion addresses two central issues, respectively in epistemology and in practical reason.
No. That stupid shite doesn't address anything at all. It merely makes arbitrary assertions of a risible type.
The epistemic question on which it focuses is how to get a better understanding of the diverse phenomena of deprivation and poverty,
e.g being ass-raped by invisible gorillas
focusing particularly on relational obstacles.
Not being related to the Royal Family has been a big obstacle for me. Is that the sort of thing Sen means? No. he is far less sensible.
The challenge of practical reason goes beyond that into policy implications of that understanding.
No. The challenge for practical reason is to find practical solutions. Thus one way in which India reduced Social Exclusion was through reservations and other affirmative action programs. This was done much before anything similar happened in Europe or America. Sadly, this meant economic growth took a back seat.
The question there takes the form of asking how to improve policymaking,
Only people who are actually implementing policy can improve it. You can always hire wankers to bullshit so as to pretend you will eventually get round to policy implementation after you have stolen everything in sight.
in light of the understanding generated by studies of social exclusion. Even though I have, in different ways, tried to address both questions, the balance of attention—so far in this paper—has definitely been more in favour of epistemology
epistemology, though not itself knowledge, is about knowledge. Sen has merely strung together a bunch of non-sequiturs.
than practical reason. This is, I would argue, appropriate, since the lessons for policymaking have to be, in an important sense, parasitic on the understanding generated by epistemic investigations.
No. No branch of knowledge depends on theories about how that knowledge is acquired. It depends on improving outcomes or better predicting outcomes. There may be a number of rough and ready Structural Causal Models underpinning activity in that field and epistemology may have a place till a 'crucial experiment' settles an 'open question' in the field.
However, for a practical and action-oriented organization like the Asian Development Bank,
which had become utterly useless. Asia was developing rapidly precisely because there was a global capital market. The ADB's response was to cobble together a 'Long Term Strategic Framework 2020' which the Brookings Institute described as 'a project best read as bureaucratic jargon for the ADB’s promise to keep producing bureaucratic jargon through the year 2020.'
the ultimate interest in issues like social exclusion
these guys should have faced financial exclusion because they were useless
Sen waffles on for a bit before doing what he is paid to- viz. say that Whitey shouldn't complain if Asia gets ahead by exploiting the fuck out of its cheap labor.
.. when there are reasons to complain about “exploitative” conditions of employment, or of deeply “unequal” terms of social participation, the immediate focus is not on exclusion at all, but on the unfavourable nature of the inclusions involved. Anita Kelles-Viitanen (1998) has drawn attention to this basic issue.
by running naked through the streets of Amsterdam? No? Sad.
Sen gasses on about how you can get rid of problems of Social Exclusion by saying they are unfortunate outcomes of Inclusion and you were only hired to bullshit about the former not the latter.
Japan had a more rigid caste system than India. How did it achieve Social Inclusion? The answer is that it focused wholly on getting richer and militarily stronger.
It can be argued that there is a basic dichotomy between two different classes of economic experiences in Asia that makes the nature of the problems of social exclusion faced in the different countries also rather diverse. There are, on the one hand, countries that have achieved major transformations of economic affluence, particularly in the form of massive industrialization and remarkable enhancement of per capita incomes. Japan is, of course, the pre-eminent example of this, with spectacular progress from low income to one of the highest levels of economic opulence in the world, but many other economies in East and Southeast Asia have also managed to industrialize and to raise their levels of per capita income very substantially.
Only if they focuses on economic growth. Malaysia did have 5 year plans and a 'sons of the soil policy'. But Malaysians are smart. The Brits had helped them kill off their indigenous Commies. Thus they did well. Indonesia too killed Commies and began to rise- more particularly after IMF tough love forced out Suharto. Still, Malaysia and Indonesia weren't really 'caste societies'. Japan was.
On the other hand, other economies, primarily in South and West Asia have achieved less in these respects, even though some have done more than others to go along that route.
Because they cared more about money than equality or fraternity or the plight of those being ass-raped by invisible gorillas.
The classification is not, of course, very neat, and there are cases that are not clearly on one side or the other of the roughly drawn borderline. But the overall contrast has some epistemic value
No. It has evidential value. It is informative not epistemological.
and actual relevance for policy analysis. The social exclusion problems faced in many economies in Asia (mainly in South and West Asia) are, as a result, somewhat different from those in many of the countries further east.
Because Social Exclusion is seen as a problem rather than the consequence of not getting as rich and strong as possible.
Back in the Sixties, the Chinese spent a lot of time Socially Excluding the descendants of 'Class Enemies'. Then they decided that being as poor as shit was no fun. To get rich is glorious.
Indeed, I shall argue that the success of the more eastern economies may have been partly due to their ability to avoid, to a great extent, a specific type of social exclusion— particularly from basic education and elementary social opportunities— that plagues the economies of South and West Asia.
The Japs wanted to recruit soldiers to conquer Korea and China and so forth. Once Japan won its first war against China, everybody was happy to send their kids to school so they would be better soldiers. Every 'Tiger' nation has faced an existential military threat and has had conscription of one sort of the other, at least some of the time. A literate soldier is a better soldier. A literate workforce is more productive. There is a profit and national security angle to the thing. Sen, of course, thinks Nationalism is evil. Education should make you an anti-national. If you don't have a nation, the least you can do is be utterly useless.
The economies in East and Southeast Asia do, of course, face social exclusion problems of their own (even the ones with great progress in per capita income do suffer from various specific exclusions),
but they have the money to waste on stupid bureaucratic shit.
there is an identifiable philosophy on which the success of many of the economies of East and Southeast Asia has been based,
get rich, get strong. Don't talk incessant virtue signaling bollocks.
and we can even try to identify an “eastern strategy” that first evolved in Japan
No. Japan was doing 'Tardean mimetics' just as Scotland and Germany and so on had done.
a broader analysis shows that the development process in Japan and in East and Southeast Asia had several strikingly new features.
Fuck off! The Japs went to the extent of dressing up in top hats and frock coats to attend a Western style Parliament.
The new features that were crucial included, first of all, an emphasis on basic education as a prime mover of change.
But every country Japan was imitating already had free compulsory primary education.
Second, it also involved a wide dissemination of basic economic entitlements (through education and training, through land reform, and through availability of credit),
The Japanese created private property in agricultural land in 1873 but there was no fucking land reform till MacArthur took over. Japan imitated German welfare policies. Savings were mobilized and loans were made on the German pattern.
which removed (or substantially reduced) social exclusion from the general opportunities of participating in the market economy.
Because that's how market economies work. Government policies can kickstart them but this involves mimicking what is already known to work. It does not involve listening to Sen-tentious morons.
Third, the chosen design of development included a deliberate combination of state action and use of the market economy,
like in Germany and towards the same purpose- viz. having a kick ass military.
in a way that the more laissez faire oriented western modelling of economic development did not adequately seize.
But the German model does. There's a reason Tojo and Hitler were allies. After 1945, the Japs imitated America and got taller and richer and more vulnerable to the predations of Godzilla and Mothra.
Indeed, these successes were based on a basic understanding
that you should imitate what smart peeps are doing and try to do it better
Take 'Quality Circles'. The Japs learnt that from the Americans and then did it better.
—which was often implicit rather than explicit—that we live in a multi-institutional environment, and that our ability to help ourselves and to help others depends on a variety of freedoms that we respectively may enjoy.
Nonsense! Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela and many other such leaders helped their people though they were in jail and enjoyed no freedoms whatsoever.
The list of relevant freedoms includes social opportunities
But slaves could have the same opportunities.
as well as market arrangements,
The Romans had markets, including slave markets where you buy slaves with commercial expertise who could conduct business for you.
and the development of individual capabilities
or, more typically, their retardation or elimination such that there was specialization on the basis of comparative advantage
as well as enhancement of social facilities.
Social facilities may decline greatly as a Nation goes for growth.
At a very general level, these changes can be seen as radically countering the social exclusion from participatory growth that plagues economic development in most of the world.
No. They can be seen as the consequence of having senile kleptocrats in charge while very poor people continue to have babies like crazy.
We live and operate in a world of many institutions.
Sadly, these nutters are not confined in an Institution.
Our opportunities and prospects depend crucially on what institutions exist, how they function, and how inclusionary they are.
No. They depend on people with power or Institutions which aren't wholly dormant not doing stupid shit.
Not only do institutions contribute to our freedoms,
They don't. Money is what causes institutions to exist because salaries have to be paid. If Institutions fuck up the economy too much then there is no money for those salaries. Anyway, they get disintermediated. The ADB is a case in point. When it was founded it served a useful role. But it had become irrelevant by the time Sen wrote this worthless shite.
. Consider the experience of Japan. Even in the middle of the nineteenth century, at the time of Meiji restoration, Japan already had a higher level of literacy than Europe,
Fuck off! On the highest estimate it was still half that of Germany. Also, the quality of literacy was much lower for obvious reasons to do with the Japanese script. About 20 percent of the population had quite good literacy- enough to read a newspaper, for example- by the end of the Edo period. This was about the same as the literacy rate for Protestant countries in the Sixteenth century. The figure for Northern Europe was generally higher than Japan though it must be said, literacy rates fell in England and Wales for much of the Nineteenth Century precisely because the opportunity cost of education was rising. When I was young, there were still some older people in London who could not read. But they had earned good money in skilled construction and other such jobs. Illiterate immigrants could be easily absorbed into most factories- one reason literacy tended to fall in Nineteenth Century Europe.
even though Japan had not yet had any industrialization or modern economic development, which Europe had experienced, by then, for a century.
Some parts of Europe had. Others had not. It must be said that literacy level was often a proxy for linguistic and religious homogeneity.
The emphasis on developing productive human capability was intensified in the early period of Japanese development, in the Meiji era (1868-1911).
This was classic 'catch up growth' based on Tardean mimetics.
For example, between 1906 and 1911, education consumed as much as 43 percent of the budgets of the towns and villages, for Japan as a whole.
Three years of compulsory education had been made free in 1900. This was increased to six years in 1908. This meant a lot of schools had to be built.
Already by 1906 there is evidence—based on army recruitment information—to suggest that there was hardly any potential recruit even from rural Japan who was not literate.
It was conscription which first educated most Japanese men. Ex-soldiers could become teachers. However, this was a literacy geared towards understanding military instructions. There are plenty of reports from missionaries etc. on the low quality of literacy.
In fact, by 1913, though Japan was economically still quite underdeveloped, it had become one of the largest producers of books in the world— publishing many more books than did Britain (then the leading capitalist economy on the globe) and indeed more than twice as many as the United States.
Most Japanese books would have been classed as pamphlets in England. The fact is Britain still publishes far more books than Japan. Also, lower quality literacy in Japan meant that 'manga' comic-books were read by adults. America also had declining literacy because of immigration and developed a comic book culture.
The priority to shared basic education and human development
There was no such priority. The Army wanted soldiers who could read and write. Industry was less concerned with literacy.
came very early to Japan,
It came earlier to India but proved useless in defending the country. So the thing declined. There is no point reading about why Ahimsa is cool if foreigners keep invading and taking away all your cool shiny stuff.
and even though it is massively high today, the important thing to note is that this relative priority goes back more than a century, and has not, comparatively speaking, intensified as Japan has grown richer and much more opulent.
The Japs had this quaint idea that Universities should be highly selective and produce high quality graduates. The Indians had the idea that Universities should be places where you could dump Sen-tentious cretins- unless they escaped to Amrika so as to gain affirmative action.
A similar priority can be seen, to varying extents, all over East and Southeast Asia,
India did have that priority. But linguistic and religious diversity put paid to it in most places. Also, as Travancore discovered you have to pay some parents to get them to send their kids to school- at least initially.
though often this came rather more hesitantly and slowly. The Republic of Korea, Singapore, Thailand, and Taipei,China, and the former city state of Hong Kong, as well as other economies in the region— most importantly the People’s Republic of China—have made excellent use of this general approach.
It helps if you can sack teachers who play truant. If you can't, some villages are going to have Government schools where nothing is taught. They may still have private schools unless the locals keep raping teachers to death.
The so-called “East Asian miracle” was, to a great extent, based on
shooting people or, at the very least, sacking them if they didn't show up for work.
the reach and force of “the eastern strategy” of focusing on
building a rich and secure country
shared— non-exclusionary—human development.
Nobody gave a shit about that. We want to belong to exclusive clubs and societies. If a College says it wants to be 'inclusive', we understand that it wants to charge an arm and a leg for teaching worthless shite.
In contrast, the persistence of illiteracy in many parts of Asia is a
what we would expect to happen if very poor, illiterate, people have babies like crazy.
matter of great importance in generating social exclusion and economic deprivation
because if deprived people have babies like crazy they are likely to grow up deprived.
that have both constitutive significance and instrumental consequence.
only for useless tossers paid to virtue signal by the equally uselessw ABD.
The basic capabilities to lead a life with elementary freedom tend to be severely compromised by keeping large sections of the population out of educational opportunities,
Very true. Harvard should admit everybody and give them financial assistance.
and in addition, these exclusions also contribute to making the process of economic growth less participatory in some regions
Economic growth is not participatory. Religious growth is. Atheists have to talk about Social Inclusion only if they are too useless to do actual Science or get rich in Commerce
Other limitations of social opportunities, such as the lack of land reform
a good thing. The landless should run away to the Cities.
and unavailability of micro credit,
a good thing. If you need micro-credit, you need to get the fuck away from the place you are.
can also have similarly exclusionary effects.
It is a good thing to be excluded from places where your life is bound to suck ass big time.
Policy Issue: Asian Crisis and Protective Security In the preceding analysis, I have had the opportunity to praise the achievements of East and Southeast Asia, and suggested how the rest of Asia (indeed the rest of the world) can learn a great deal from their successful use of nonexclusionary expansion of human development.
Successful countries mobilize resources, including labor resources, so as to grow economically or in military might. This means more inequality and more restrictions on freedom- more particularly for the poor and stupid.
One reason England got ahead was because it dissolved monasteries, enclosed common land, burnt witches, rounded up vagrants and unproductive people and either confined them in a Work House or shipped them off to distant colonies to labor under articles of indenture. As Adam Smith enviously observed, the English were able to get work out of even women and small children by sending them down coal mines. The Established Church did encourage literacy because it believed that the working class would learn from the Bible that they must obey their superiors. The Dissenters and Catholics and Chartists had the opposite belief. Still, as the Service Sector expanded, the returns on literacy increased to a point where suddenly a class of literature which working class people might actually enjoy reading came into existence. Apparently the quality of literacy is declining in South Korea because kids have superior sources of entertainment and thus can't bee bothered to learn their language properly.
However, not everything in the experience of this region has been so positive and successful, and some of the problems have been strongly brought out by the recent Asian financial and economic crisis
Which didn't matter at all.
. We may usefully begin with the general recognition that the heady days of unmitigated success—with things going up and up and nothing ever falling down—are over.
The opposite was the case. Crony capitalism, stupid government policies, crazy borrowing, an overvalued real exchange rate, and dependence on hot money were damaging economies. There had to be a shakeout. Countries needed to build up their own forex reserves and to stop doing stupid shit. China, it must be said, gained from the crisis. They kicked in bail-out money and suddenly started looking good to capital markets previously worried about the handover of sovereignty in Hong Kong.
Even though much of Asia is already well on the way to recovery from the crisis that hit it two years ago, the sense of invulnerability has not survived.
What fucking sense of invulnerability did the Thais have? That was the first domino to fall. It has had 18 coups and 18 constitutions. The financial crisis did lead to the creation of direct elections for both chambers of Parliament but there have been a couple of military coups since then.
There was no basis for assuming such immunity from vulnerability.
Which is why nobody had any such thing. Short term, overvaluation is cool coz you want to get your loot out of the country before there is a coup or revolution or whatever.
Consider, for example, the crises in Indonesia, or in Thailand, and earlier on, in the Republic of Korea.
Corrupt, crony capitalist economies with a tradition of military coups.
It is not silly to ask (given the dominance of trend-oriented reasoning in economic analysis) why it should be so disastrous to have, say, a 5 or 10 percent fall in gross national product in one year when the country in question has been growing at 5 to 10 percent every year for decades.
Why do corrupt kleptocracies have overvalued currencies? It's so cronies can get their loot out of the country. We are speaking of the collapse of Ponzi schemes big enough to have 'wealth effects' with macroeconomic consequences.
At the purely aggregate level this is not quintessentially a disastrous situation.
Yes it is. A ten percent fall is defined as a Depression. ASEAN could bounce back because the cure was devaluation which boosted exports. Maybe there was a little less corruption and macro stupidity. Maybe not. What matters is that these are smart, hard working, enterprising populations.
However, if that 5 or 10 percent decline is not shared evenly by the population,
Why the fuck would it be?
and if some are excluded altogether from the part of the economy that survives the crisis, then that group may have very little income left (no matter what the overall growth performance might have been in the past).
So what? Will they magically become bullet-proof? Will they be able to kill soldiers who shoot at them?
As a result, the sharing of “protective security” is an important instrumental freedom,
No it isn't. Being able to kill anybody who tries to fuck with you is an important instrumental freedom as is having lots of money in Swill Bank accounts and a second passport. On the other hand, having equimarginal sacrifice promotes National cohesiveness, solidarity, and will to engage the enemy. That can be important for securing freedom from a foreign threat.
and nonexclusionary social arrangements for safety nets cannot but be an integral part of development itself.
This is nonsense. 'Safety nets' are highly exclusionary. There are strict eligibility criteria. Otherwise there is no incentive to provide the net.
It is worth noting here that even the highly illuminating literature on “sustainable development”
it isn't illuminating. It is stupid shit. Nothing is sustainable. The Sun really should burning so brightly. It will run out of fuel in a few billion years. Also, the Universe is totes unsustainable. It should stop expanding so rapidly.
often misses out the fact that what people need for their security is not only the sustainability of overall development, but also the need for guaranteed social protection
but no such guarantee exists. It is simply a fact that entitlement collapse occurs all the time. Ask Madoff's investors. At least Madoff went to jail. Nobody went to jail when Greek pensioners took a haircut because Governments have sovereign immunity. In practice, Governments don't say 'Your entitlements have gone. We just fucked you in the ass and there's nothing you can do about it'. What happens instead is that the real value of entitlements erode while eligibility tightens and expenditure taxes rise.
when people’s predicaments diverge and some groups are thrown brutally to the wall while other groups experience little adversity.
Being thrown to the wall is a signal that you simply aren't productive enough to be worth protecting. Either make yourself more valuable or move. Guys who 'experience little adversity' are doing something right. Be like them or, if you can't, go to somewhere people like you don't experience adversity. You may not succeed but at least your eyes will be opened to the reality of the world in which you live.
There is, in fact, an important need to think of equity and economic inequality in quite a different way in the context of security from the way they are standardly treated in the development literature in the context of long-run growth.
Development literature is shit. The only important need turned out to be to ignore the cunts who produced it.
It is necessary to go well beyond the analysis and rhetoric of “growth with equity”, which have been so often invoked in the development literature—
this cretin contributed to that shit show. There is no 'growth with equity'. There is growth with increased inequality. Some get richer others don't. Increased inequality drives Tardean mimetics or 'separating equilibria' whereby the less able specialize in areas where they have comparative advantage. This is a discoordination game whereby they develop their own sub-culture. But that sub-culture may turn out to be more appealing. Comparative advantage can turn into absolute advantage. Back in the late Sixties and Seventies when the brain-drain from India began, lowly coders looked up to the likes of Prof. Sen. By the end of the Nineties, the shoe was on the other foot. Getting a Nobel Prize for being Brown was a shitty way to get ahead compared to becoming a billionaire and creating thousands of well paying jobs.
not least in explaining the success of the economies in East and Southeast Asia. That large literature is, of course, conceptually rich and practically important, and is particularly suited to analyse the big—but different—problem of eliminating endemic poverty. In contrast, the problem of sudden destitution can have a very different nature, and may involve quite disparate causal processes from persistent deprivation and endemic poverty. For example, the fact that the Republic of Korea has had economic growth with relatively egalitarian income distribution
South Korean real wages, in 1990, were less than half what they are now. As Korean workers have grown more and more skilled, income and wealth disparity have gone up by about 30 or 40 percent.
has been extensively—and rightly—recognized. This, however, was no guarantee of equitable influence in a crisis situation.
Had the Koreans not learnt their lesson from the crisis, their real wages would have stagnated. There would be less inequality but a lot of the younger, smarter, people would have emigrated.
For example, the Republic of Korea did not have, when the crisis hit it, any ongoing system of social safety nets, nor any rapidly responding system of compensatory protection.
Which is why it recovered quickly. The alternative was to slowly go off a fiscal cliff such that the tax burden on the organized sector became unbearable and the black economy ballooned. Korea would have started to look like Venezuela without the petrol.
The emergence of fresh inequality and the destitution of the socially excluded can coexist with a very distinguished past record of “growth with equity.”
No. Growth means more inequality- unless the population is homogeneous with respect to value adding traits. It may be that manufacturing can be expanded in that way for a small open economy but, if you look a bit more closely, this was never actually the case in any 'Tiger' economy.
I have not so far discussed the issue of exclusion from political participation and from democratic rights.
It is precisely these two factors which enable countries to rise into 'opulence' though, no doubt, small, low population density countries with a good natural resource base can do 'catch up' growth on the basis of a Social Compact not to do stupid shit.
How does the issue of democracy relate to the problems of deprivation, security, and crises that I discussed in the last section?
In the case of South Asia, it generally worsens them.
Of course, it can be argued that social exclusion
the cretin means 'political exclusion'
from political participation is itself a deprivation,
No it isn't. Migrant workers in the Gulf don't want political rights there because any move to grant such a thing would immediately result in their own expulsion.
and a denial of basic political freedom and civil rights directly impoverishes our lives.
No it doesn't. People from Europe were happy to move to Saudi Arabia provided they had a higher real wage and the ability to save a larger amount. They didn't give a shit about civil rights. Nobody was clamoring to go work in some starving shithole where more and more political freedoms and rights and entitlements of various sorts were being offered to a population desperate to emigrate.
Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi of Japan, in his insightful “Opening Remarks” to an “Intellectual Dialogue on Building Asia’s Tomorrow,” has eloquently emphasized the need to take a broad view of security:
Not broad enough. China's military budget only overtook Japan's in 2007. Currently, China spends four times as much as Japan. This was despite the wake-up call given by the 2010 trawler incident and the return to power of Abe.
When things are routinely good and smooth, the protective role of democracy may not be desperately missed.
The destructive role of democracy- e.g. the two big famines caused by corrupt politicians in Sen's native Bengal during his own life-time- can prevent 'good and smooth' routine existence. Guys who voted for Chavez or Mugabe or Zuma, come to that, have lived or will live to regret it. Democracy means things can turn to shit even when there are sunny skies and balmy breezes.
But it comes into its own when things get fouled up,
Not in South Asia. Sen's people would not have had to flee their ancestral homes if the Brits hadn't transferred power to democratically elected shitheads.
for one reason or another. And then the political incentives provided by democratic governance acquire great practical significance.
Political incentives have to do with telling lies and pointing a finger at scapegoats.
Many economic technocrats recommend the use of economic incentives (which the market system provides) while ignoring political incentives (which democratic systems could guarantee).
Democratic systems can't guarantee shit. What matters is whether leaders do sensible things.
However, economic incentives, important as they are, are no substitute for political incentives,
Political incentives are economic in nature. If you win the election you get a big Government house and a Government salary and a chance to make your family very rich.
and the lacuna of the absence of an adequate system of political incentives cannot be filled by the operation of economic inducement.
Unless you pay a lot of money to smart people to make the economy grow rapidly while killing or incarcerating those who try to prevent that outcome.
The recent problems of East and Southeast Asia bring out, among many other things, the penalty of limitations on democratic freedom. Two distinct issues are particularly important to consider here, viz. “protective security” and “transparency guarantee.” Taking the issue of protective security first, once the financial crisis in this region led to a general economic recession, the protective power of democracy—not unlike that which prevents famines in democratic countries—was badly missed in some countries in the region. The newly dispossessed did not have the hearing they needed. The vulnerable in Indonesia or the Republic of Korea may not have taken very great interest in democracy when things went up and up. But when the unequally shared crisis developed, that lacuna kept their voice muffled and weak. The protective role of shared democratic rights is strongly missed when it is most needed. Not surprisingly, democracy has become a major issue precisely at a time of crisis, when the economically dispossessed felt strongly the need for a political voice. Indeed, the Republic of Korea has already greatly advanced in that direction, and there are changes in Indonesia as well. Inclusive democratic rights are receiving more explicit consideration in public discussions elsewhere in Asia also (including in the Philippines and Thailand). The second connection between the lack of democracy and the nature of the recent financial and economic crisis concerns the issue of transparency.
This is stupid shit. China was the least democratic country in the region and it was wholly unaffected by the crisis.
The financial crisis in some of these economies (such as the Republic of Korea or Indonesia) has been closely linked with the lack of transparency in business, in particular the lack of public participation in reviewing financial and business arrangements.
But there was no on increase in transparency. So all we can say is that lack of transparency correlates with economic success. But so do periodic crises and shake outs.
The lack of a shared and inclusive democratic forum has been consequential in this failing.
No. It has been consequential in the success of ASEAN countries which grew rapidly.
The opportunity that would have been provided by democratic processes to challenge the hold of exclusive families
In South Asia, 'democratic processes' reinforce, they don't challenge, the 'hold of exclusive families- e.g. Gandhis, Bhuttos etc.
or groups could have made a big difference. Democratic rights and shared opportunities of political participation can, of course, be important in many other contexts as well. For example, in India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan these rights are being more and more invoked in recent agitations involving gender equity and also justice to the lower strata of society.
With the result things got worse there.
As was discussed earlier, exclusions of different kinds may link with each other, and progress in inclusion in one field may help to advance inclusion in other areas. These connections call for more extensive investigations, but it is important to note that even in the economically successful region of East and Southeast Asia, where scepticism about shared democratic and civil rights had often been aired in the past, there is more and more recognition of the need for political inclusion and participation.
Twenty five years later, we must disagree. The Philippines had Duterte and now has a Marcos. Thailand has a military government but a Civilian administration may come into existence but for how long, nobody can say. South Korea witnessed the election of the daughter of a military dictator but she was very peculiar and fell on corruption charges. Still, they are a remarkable people and their politics appears less corrupt than previously. Malaysia, however, can't be said to have changed much though, economically, its leaders tended to make good decisions. Still, jailing an elderly politician on the grounds that he raped a much stronger younger man aint exactly best practice.
Policy Issue: Diversity of Exclusions Since this paper is becoming monstrously large,
It is shit. Sen hasn't talked about exclusion at all. He has pretended that the relative lack of a thing represents exclusion from that thing. Thus men are being socially excluded from having vaginas. Government must give compulsory gender reassignment surgery to everybody at least once a week.
The level of child undernourishment is larger in India and South Asia
because they are overpopulated shitholes
generally, despite the fact that these countries are “self-sufficient” in food and there is no substantial unmet demand in the food market.
Very poor people are likely to have severely malnourished kids who will have severely malnourished kids.
It is interesting that even though it is sub-Saharan Africa that is seen, correctly, as not being self-sufficient in food, in contrast with the self reliance of India,
Sen & Co are very angry that India is 'self-reliant'. What they don't get is that, thanks to Democracy, India has been a starving shithole for much much longer than sub-Saharan Africa.
the incidence of undernourishment is much greater in India than in sub-Saharan Africa.
Because India is much more densely populated.
Indeed, judged in terms of the usual standards of retardation in weight for age, the proportion of undernourished children in Africa is 20 to 40 percent, whereas the proportion of undernourished Indian children is a gigantic 40 to 60 percent (Scrimshaw, 1998; see also Svedberg, 1998).
Sen himself is very short and appears stunted compared to his sub-Saharan colleagues.
About half of all Indian children are, it appears, chronically undernourished, despite there being no “food shortage,” and this is a context in which the instrumental role of being excluded by penury from the food market can be fruitfully invoked to clarify the nature of the food situation in India.
Kuwait has no starving kids though it grows little food. Could Sen clarify why this might be so? Don't be silly.
If (as is the case in many traditional analyses of deprivation and underdevelopment) poverty is seen in terms of income deprivation only, then
it can be tackled
introducing the notion of social exclusion as a part of poverty would vastly broaden the domain of poverty analysis.
in which case, poverty will grow and grow till nobody is willing to spend a dollar trying to combat it.
However, if poverty is seen as deprivation of basic capabilities, then there is no real expansion of the domain of coverage, but a very important pointer to a useful investigative focus.
Sen's shite has proven itself utterly useless.
In this essay, social exclusion has been placed within the broader perspective of poverty as capability deprivation, and this conceptual linkage both provides more theoretical underpinning for the approach of social exclusion and helps us to extend the practical use of the approach (sections 2 and 3).
There was no practical use mentioned in those sections.
What is particularly important to study is the linkage between exclusions in different spheres of interindividual and interfamily interactions, involving both overlap and causal linkages.
There is no point whatsoever studying any such linkage. Either tackle the underlying cause or ameliorate the effect or just shut the fuck up.
, investigation of the recent Asian financial and economic crisis helps to bring out the role played by social exclusions
there was no such role. Either the country's currency was overvalued causing it to have borrowed from abroad too much or else there was no crisis.
2 comments:
Sankarachaya "Tat tvam asi"
F**k F**k...
Neti Neti..
Deep F**k
Bhagvat Gita..Arjuna &Krishna
S**t ho*e..
Such trash thing from Vedas to Hindswaraj... mr. Proctologist probably not able to shallow the truth ....philologists'-Koshyambians-Ambedkarites dig the hole big big big and made "Indic knowlege system" just antiquarian product "Indology" worthy of show-case... but have no place in " language game" of contemporary life-world which effectively is occupied by Natural Science based on Analytic epistemology and Social science based on continental methodology...
Indic civilisation is big loser...this shit of Amrit Kal with no investment in public education will never able to supplant eurocentrism...
Cry cry cry.... Indic civilisation is going down the hill...still not able come to terms with the fact that whatever their achievements in epistemology and logic...all are simply Sh**t in contemporary context...says a lot , when European and American universities has more scholars on Sanskrit than " Indian universities"...there is simply nothing left in term of cognitive potential of this shit called " Indian philosophy "... it can not ground modern science, it can not give idioms of contemporary politics, its holy sh**t...
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