Amartya Sen's two-faced poverty.

25 years ago the Inter-American Development Bank published the following article about Amartya Sen and the 'thousand faces of poverty'.  

What is poverty?

Low productivity. In particular, if a person makes less than is required to maintain life- he is poor.  

How is it measured?

By a deficit in income relative to the amount of money needed to stay alive.  

Who are the poor?

Those who fall below the poverty line.  

Amartya Sen, Nobel Prize winner for Economics, has devoted his life to such basic questions about development.

But they are easily answered. Devote your life to raising productivity or giving transfers to those unable to work. That is worthwhile.  But it isn't what Sen has done. He wrote pseudo-mathsy nonsense about imaginary problems- e.g. Arrow's theorem or Rawls's silly theory of justice. 

Defining and measuring poverty and calculating the percentage of poor people in a country or a region is not just a matter of numbers and averages.

Yes it is. Sadly, you may have to lower the poverty line if there isn't enough money to help those below it.  

In 1998, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded Amartya Sen the Nobel Prize for Economics “for having restored an ethical dimension to the discussion of vital economic problems.”

This is like giving the prize for best plumber to a guy who isn't a plumber but who argues that plumbers should be nice.  

Sen had delved beyond mathematical theory,

He isn't a mathematician. You can't delve into the theory of a thing of which you only have an undergraduate level knowledge.  

approaching economics with an innovative social vision that was more real and more human.

This is like a guy who can't fix your toilet but whose theory of plumbing says that plumbers should be nice. 

Years of hard work had helped him bring to light the many facets of poverty.

He hasn't done any actual work nor has he uncovered any 'facet' of poverty. He read somewhere that people have different metabolisms and nutritional needs. That's why special provision is made for them- e.g. expectant mothers were given a higher ration during the War. But this is an empirical, ideographic, matter. For a poor country, what matters is finding ways to boost productivity. Saying 'the government should give lots of money to poor people' is pointless. The Government doesn't have a lot of money. Why? Because productivity in the country is low.  

According to Sen, poverty is a complex, multifaceted world that requires a clear analysis in all of its many dimensions.

He is wrong. Poverty is about low productivity. There are many facets to this. Some policies (e.g. education) raise general purpose productivity. Others, like fixing a dysfunctional legal system, raise total factor productivity. By contrast, poverty has only one face or facet- viz. lack of income. 

“Human beings are thoroughly diverse,”

They really aren't. That's why a Doctor educated in India can practice just as well in America or Europe.  

the professor recently explained during a meeting of the Network of Policymakers for Poverty Reduction, an Inter-American Development Bank initiative.

i.e. a useless talking shop. 

“You cannot draw a poverty line and then apply it across the board to everyone the same way, without taking into account personal characteristics and circumstances.”

Nonsense! Governments do draw such a line and then make special provision for the disabled, expectant mothers, etc. etc.  

There are geographical, biological and social factors that amplify or reduce the impact of income on each individual.

But they are easily compensated for. That's why Doctors can treat patients from different countries and social backgrounds.  

The poor generally lack a number of elements, such as education,

some uneducated people are rich. They may have some special talent which makes them very productive.  

access to land,

plenty of rich people have zero access to land because they prefer to live in penthouse apartments 

health and longevity,

rich people can die young of incurable diseases 

justice,

a rich guy may be sent to jail for a crime he didn't commit 

family and community support,

Scrooge has neither yet is as rich as fuck.  

credit and other productive resources,

because they have low income- i.e. can't service debt. Also they can't buy a factory. Sad.  

a voice in institutions,

they may do. Sadly, those institutions may be powerless because of lack of resources arising from low productivity 

and access to opportunity.

Modi is poor. Rahul is rich. But it is Modi who seized the opportunity to become PM.  

According to Sen, being poor does not mean living below an imaginary poverty line, such as an income of two dollars a day or less.

Yet, such a person is in fact poor.  

It means having an income level that does not allow an individual to cover certain basic necessities, taking into account the circumstances and social requirements of the environment.

Which is what happens if you earn less than two dollars a day. A richer country can afford a higher poverty line.  

Furthermore, many of the factors are interconnected.

There is only one factor which matters- viz. productivity. Why won't Sen mention it? The answer is that it is useful to focus on ways to raise productivity. But, as a buddhijivi, Sen is averse to doing anything useful. His job is to scold all those nasty economists who raise productivity and help their countries become richer.  

Sen has found examples to illustrate his theory in the world of women, where he has done pioneering work,

No. He jumped on the 'missing millions' bandwagon which began in the mid Seventies when sex-selective abortion became popular. But, prior to that, there had been good old fashioned female infanticide.  

along with his studies on famines

which is caused by food availability deficit. The solution is to grow more food and invest in transport infrastructure so as to get the food to where it is needed. But British ICS officers knew all about this fifty years before Sen was born.  

and freedoms, and on the economics of poverty.

This simply isn't true. Sen doesn't even understand 'Giffen goods'- e.g. the fact that poor people may eat more potatoes when Income falls.  He believed that when incomes rose for those in Bengal who were working in war industries, they suddenly started eating three or four times as much rice as they previously had. The reverse was the case. If real income goes up, you eat less rice and more fish or vegetables. 

A woman with more education, he explains, tends to have a better paid job,

Unless she lives in a strict Islamic state. In some Indian States, higher female education correlates with lower participation in the work force. Why? Richer people can spend more on educating their daughters. But those daughters get married off into high status families which look askance upon women having a career. 

better control over her fertility,

unless contraception is banned 

and better health indicators for herself and her children.

only if household income is higher.  

For years, Sen has preached that the image of women as heroines relegated to self-sacrifice for home and family has not helped them at all.

Why not preach getting rural girls into giant factory dormitories? That's what leads to demographic transition. Higher productivity then directly raises real wages and permits collective insurance against sickness, unemployment, etc.  

“There are systematic disparities in the freedoms that men and women enjoy in different societies,” says Sen, “and these disparities are often not reducible to differences in income and resources.”

But, even more often, they are reducible to differences in income. If Sen were right, then Equal Pay Legislation would do little to tackle the underlying problem.  

There are many other areas with gender disparities, such as the division of labor in the household, 

only if there is a household 

the extent of education received, and the liberties that the different members of the same household are permitted to enjoy.

Governments and NGOs have specific programs to tackle these problems. Sen is ignorant of them. 

How people must look in order to be accepted in society–the clothes they wear and their physical traits–limits their economic options, a phenomenon Sen refers to as “social shame.”

Sen read this in Adam Smith. No doubt, in England in the Fifties, there was some truth to this notion. But, by the Seventies, the belted Earl and the Cockney prole were indistinguishable.  

Rather than measuring poverty by income level, Sen recommends calculating how much an individual can achieve with that income,

Nobody knows what they can achieve with their income. Had I bought 100 dollars worth of bitcoin ten years ago, I would now have 50,000 dollars.  

taking into account that such achievements will vary from one individual to another and from one place to another.

You can't take into account what is unknowable- e.g. the price of bitcoin ten years from now. 

Otherwise, how could we explain the existence of pockets of poverty in rich countries among middle-income people?

Drugs.  

In the inner cities of the United States,

where gangbangers indulge in drive-by shooting 

because of inadequate services the quality of life (measured in terms of life expectancy, infant mortality, health, education, and safety) of people who earn acceptable incomes and live in a rich society is comparable—and sometimes even inferior—to that of many poor countries in the rest of the world.

There was a period when young African American males had higher longevity and better educational and vocational outcomes if they were incarcerated under 'three strikes'. That is why that policy was popular with African American voters.  

Sen was born in India’s West Bengal state, and has used his country and China as a laboratory to study the economics of development.

No. He remained wholly ignorant of both. There is a story that he once went to Punjab to spend some time living with a family of farmers. He soon came running back to Delhi.  

He is currently a professor at Harvard University and Master at Trinity College at Cambridge University.

He spent about ten years in India but had to leave after eloping with his best friend's wife. Otherwise, his career has been entirely in the West- about which he knows nothing. He once said that Britain under Thatcher might face a Bangladesh style famine! 

Based on his extensive experience in development and poverty reduction, he had devised a large repertoire of theories and teachings that he believes also apply to Latin America and the Caribbean.

He has given bureaucrats an excuse to talk endless bollocks without actually doing anything.  

According to Sen, poverty analysis should focus on an individual’s potential to function rather than the results the individual obtains from functioning.

He is wrong. When analysing something undesirable there is only one way to proceed- viz. tackle the root problem which, for poverty, is low productivity. It is amazing that Sen, who comes from a country with very low productivity, has never once applied his mind to raising it. But that is easily done. Imitate what more successful countries have done. Don't try to reinvent the wheel.  

Another of Sen’s achievements has been to sweeten the development pill.

Nonsense! He ran away from India long ago. England and America were already developed. Manmohan sweetened the development pill by permitting some actual development with the result that the middle class expanded greatly and was able to buy nice cars and houses etc. Sen was against Manmohan.  

In the stroke of a pen, Sen did away with the blood, sweat and tears approach that had been pushed on underdeveloped countries as the only way for them to achieve progress.

Why not also get rid of death? Sadly, pen strokes have no magical powers. While Sen was talking nonsense, South Korea and Singapore and then China embraced export led growth. They raised productivity and thus became affluent. Sen objects to India taking the same road. That's why non-Bengali Indians despise him.  

The old theory of sacrifice has given way to that of individual success, which Sen subscribes to, provided that there is a framework of social support and genuine democracy.

Sadly the countries which have risen most in Asia have had neither for the greater part of their post-war history.  

This was the explanation Sen gave for the profound financial and social crisis that swept across Asia in 1998.

It was a market correction, nothing more.  

Efforts there had focused on production and individual success,

corporate success.  

but without a network of social support or the freedoms necessary for a democracy to thrive.

China is thriving. It has no fucking democracy. India had higher per capita income in 1980. Now China is about five times bigger. (Though under ppp, it might be only 2.5 times that of India).  

Sen believes that inequality, like poverty, is a multifaceted problem.

It isn't a problem. Development occurs because inequality increases. People have an incentive to imitate what the smarter people are doing.  

And in the course of a conversation laden with social commentary, the issue of globalization inevitably comes up.

Unknown to the participants, by 2015, with the rise of Trump & Sanders, the backlash against globalization would succeed. Hilary Clinton did a U turn on TPP. It was too little, too late.  

The protests against it, says Sen, have invigorated a very necessary debate on its impact.

The debate didn't matter. Trump & Sanders did. But immigration was as much an issue as the 'export of jobs'.  

In his view, globalization can be neither rejected outright nor accepted without serious criticism.

Criticism does not matter. Trump becoming POTUS does.  

First, we have to see what percentage of the world is benefiting from it. Because it’s one thing if education is 90 percent for the wealthy and 10 percent for the poor, and something very different if the proportion is 70/30 or 60/40.

Fuck that. The rich can afford to accumulate degrees on fancy campuses. The poor can't. What matters is the productivity gap. Bridge that and you cease to be poor. Take the lead, and it is your turn to be rich and to condescend to those you have overtaken. 

On the other hand, if you are stupid and useless, defeat your own poverty of ideas by virtue signalling like crazy. That's what Sen did. Being a darkie, he was awarded intellectual affirmative action. But Manmohan and Montek and Modi actually helped India to rise a little.  This made Sen very angry. He turns his scowl at Punjabis and Gujeratis who want the country to grow rich. His sweet and saintly smile, he turns towards Whitey. They reward him with Prizes and Honorary Doctorates. But it was Yunus, not Sen, who got to run his country. It is sad to think that Amartya was unable to make India a present to the Islamists as Yunus has done in Bangladesh.