Poverty and Famine The variety of information on which social welfare analysis can draw can be well illustrated by the study of poverty.
The poverty of 'poverty studies' is not down merely to the varieties of information on which it draws but arises because it is done only by shitheads. If you really understand why a person is poor, you can make money from that understanding. Thus, if you know why a particular person has low productivity, you can figure out- or hire someone to figure out- how to raise productivity for a class of people. Your next task is to get someone to pay you for doing so.
Thus, ceteris paribus, if poverty persists it is because somebody is being prevented from making money by reducing its incidence.
Poverty is typically seen in terms of the lowness of incomes,
No. It is seen to correlate with a low material standard of living and the absence of savings or other sources of wealth. This is related to productivity. STEM subjects pay for themselves by figuring out ways to greatly raise productivity. But an Economist- i.e. a glorified Accountant- too, can contribute to this.
and it has been traditionally measured simply by counting the number of people below the poverty-line income; this is sometimes called the head-count measure.
But the poverty line is drawn so that not too many fall underneath it. If everybody is poor, nobody can be the Mother Theresa of Economics.
. A scrutiny of this approach yields two different types of questions. First, is poverty adequately seen as low income?
No. People on high income can be poor because they have large debts or many dependents or an expensive drug habit.
Second, even if poverty is seen as low income, is the aggregate poverty of a society best characterized by the index of the head-count measure?
No. Don't be silly.
I take up these questions in turn. Do we get enough of a diagnosis of individual poverty by comparing the individual's income with a socially given poverty-line income?
No. That's why the baby of a billionaire is not described as poor.
What about the person with an income well above the poverty line, who suffers from an expensive illiiess (requiring, say, kidney dialysis)? Is deprivation not ultimately a lack of opportunity to lead a minimally acceptable life,
No. Having to titty-wank your boss to keep your job is not an acceptable fucking life. I'm not saying that's what I have to do. It's this other bloke I know.
which can be influenced by a number of considerations, including of course personal income, but also physical and environmental characteristics, and other variables (such as the availability and costs of medical and other facilities)?
Why stop there? Is it not deprivation not to have a Mummy who is the Queen of Engyland and a Daddy who is the Pope?
The motivation behind such an exercise relates closely to seeing poverty as a serious deprivation
this is Aristotelian 'steresis'. It assumes there is some 'natural' trajectory for a person. Sadly, Darwin showed we don't live in an Aristotelian world.
of certain basic capabilities.
But poverty does not deprive you of any capabilities whatsoever. It may deprive you of remunerative use of those capabilities but that may be because you prefer to titty-wank your boss who, because you are self-employed, doesn't even pay you minimum wage. What you should be doing is seeking better paid employment.
This alternative approach leads to a rather different diagnosis of poverty from the ones that a purely income-based analysis can.
An income based analysis says 'this dude is poor coz his income is very low'. That's perfectly sensible. The alternative approach would be to say 'lack of facilities to enhance titty-wanking capabilities amongst self-employed socioproctologists may contribute to their being as poor as shit'.
This is not to deny that lowness of income can be very important in many contexts, since the opportunities a person enjoys in a market economy can be severely constrained by her level of real income.
Consumption opportunities- sure. But, in a market economy, there will be competition to secure the labor power of those on low incomes.
However, various contingencies can lead to variations in the "conversion" of income into the capability to live a minimally acceptable life,
or a so maximally opulent as to be a morally repugnant life. Sen forgets that variations in 'conversion' are independent of Income. They cancel each other out within every class. On the other hand, richer people suffering a 'conversion' deficit (e.g. having cancer) are likely to spend money on programs which also help poorer people like themselves. We are welcome to support or even initiate such programs.
and if that is what we are concerned with, there may be good reason to look beyond income poverty.
This already happens. Special facilities and programs seek to help people with different types of disabilities. It is likely that they receive higher transfers or tax allowances on this basis.
There are at least four different sources of variation:
there is only one. People differ from each other. The reason why they may do so could be environmental or sociological or historical. But evolution would ensure it happened anyway.
(1) personal heterogeneities (for example, proneness to illness),
which may be genetic or environmental
(2) environmental diversities
which cause personal heterogeneities.
(for example, living in a storm-prone or flood-prone area),
this impacts different people differently. Flooding is not a bad thing for people who have adapted to it. It may be a terrible thing for people who those who have not done so.
(3) variations in social climate (for example, the prevalence of crime or epidemiological vectors),
again, this depends on personal heterogenieties. A big guy may be perfectly safe in a crime prone district. People with higher pathogen load are more at risk of diseases which scarcely affect the majority.
and (4) differences in relative deprivation connected with customary patterns of consumption in particular societies (for example, being relatively impoverished in a rich society, which can lead to deprivation of the absolute capability to take part in the life of the community).
again, this is wholly personal. I should point out that Sen misreads Adam Smith who never said that guys with shabby clothes couldn't rise through hard work, thrift and enterprise. He was merely remarking that Scottish people had to spend more, relative to their income, to cut a good figure in Society. Thus, even if the English didn't bother with economising, Scots must do so.
There is, thus, an important need to go beyond income information in poverty analysis
no there isn't, ceteris paribus. Only if there is some structural change such that it is likely that capability improvement isn't cancelling out capability reduction would we need to do any such thing. But, even then, there would be little point if the cause was obvious.
, in particular to see poverty as capability deprivation.
but wealth may arise from 'capability deprivation'. Singapore got rich coz kids there could not exercise their capability to take drugs and burn busses and run amok the way kids at Presidency College Calcutta did in the late Sixties.
However (as was discussed earlier), the choice of the informational base for poverty analysis cannot really be dissociated from pragmatic considerations, particularly informational availability.
There is no information available about capability. I genuinely didn't know I was incapable of being a mathematician till I went to Collidge.
It is unlikely that the perspective of poverty as income deprivation can be dispensed with in the empirical literature on poverty, even when the limitations of that perspective are entirely clear. Indeed, in many contexts the roughand-ready way of using income information may provide the most immediate approach to the study of severe deprivation.
No shit, Sherlock! Still, back in the Seventies, some brown monkeys thought they were being very patriotic by pretending that Americans were much worse off than Cubans while Bangladesh was the earthly Paradise.
For example, the causation of famines is often best seen in terms of
food availability deficit. Curing famine involves bringing in lots of food and medicines and delivering it to the starving. Herbert Hoover found that out. Sen's own relative- B.R Sen did a good job, as head of FAO, in persuading the world that Famine could be eradicated.
a radical decline in the real incomes of a section of the population, leading to starvation and death (on this see Sen, 1976d, 1981).
Real income can increase (because of price controls) but starvation will still happen because excess demand for food is not being met due to FAD.
The dynamics of income earning and of purchasing power may indeed be the most important component of a famine investigation
Not if there are price controls on food. Some may get their quota. Others may find that they are shit out of luck.
. This approach, in which the study of causal influences on the determination of the respective incomes of different groups plays a central part, contrasts with an exclusive focus on agricultural production and food supply.
This silly man is assuming free markets for food. But, if there are price controls, food prices don't change. Indeed, real wages may appear to have risen. But there is excess demand.
he last concern—that a relative deprivation of income can lead to an absolute deprivation of a basic capability—was first discussed by Adam Smith (1776).
No. It had been discussed in ancient Sumer and Egypt and so forth. There is nothing new under the Sun of FAD.
Adam Smith's claim that "necessary goods" (and correspondingly minimum incomes needed to avoid basic deprivation) must be defined differently for different societies also suggests a general approach of using a parametrically variable "poverty-line" income.
Smith was simply saying that a Scottish dude with a thousand pounds a year was a very rich man who lived in a castle with plenty of servants whereas a London merchant with a thousand a year couldn't even afford to keep his own carriage.
The good news was that the London merchant could make bigger profits by investing in Scottish factories because wages were lower there. As Dr. Johnson remarked, in England oats was fed to horses. In Scotland, men ate oats and, in general, were as healthy and strong as horses.
Such variations can be used to reflect the disparate conditions of different persons (including, for example, proneness to illness).
Which may actually be greater among the better off because workers who are not hardy tended to die quickly.
Under certain conditions, the definition of poverty as having an income below the parametrically determined "poverty line" will be congruent with the characterization of poverty as capability deprivation
No. It will be congruent with poverty. Capability deprivation is unknowable. Could I have been better at twerking than Beyonce? We will never know.
(if the parametric variations are firmly linked to the income needed to avoid specified levels of capability deprivation). '
Nobody knows what that income is. Many a marriage has come unstuck because hubby and wifey assume that their income is enough to live as their neighbors do. Then they find themselves running into debt. Keeping up with Joneses is costlier than they had guessed. They are not capable of sustaining the life-style which they thought they were entitled to. But this can happen to whole classes of people. Before the Great War, the Russian nobility and the French rentier class and the German bildungsburgertum thought they could live in their accustomed manner. Then they discovered they had no such capability. Even the English 'milord' had to give up his valet and his butler. Sad.
The shift in informational focus from food supply to entitlements (involving incomes as well as supply, and the resulting relative prices) can make a radical difference, since famines can occur even without any major decline—possibly without any decline at all—of food production or supply.
Rubbish! This stupid cunt thought a big famine might occur under Mrs. Thatcher. The plain fact is, if a famine is likely in an area then there aint no fucking reliable statistics there. The 'informational focus' is on not knowing shit about the place. Just turn up with lots of food and trucks to deliver it to the starving. You may have to pay off warlords so bring plenty of US dollars and Johnny Walker Whiskey.
If, for example, the incomes of rural wage laborers, or of service providers, or of craftsmen collapse through unemployment, or through a fall of real wages, or through a decline in the demand for the relevant services or craft products, the affected groups may have to starve, even if the overall food supply in the economy is undiminished.
Unless they fuck off to the cities and get jobs there- or, if no jobs are available, they put pressure on the Government till soup kitchens etc. are opened. Syria could have had as big a famine in 2012-13 as in 1915, but people moved to where they could get fed.
Starvation occurs when some people cannot establish entitlement over an adequate amount of food, through purchase or through food production,
lots of peeps don't produce food or have any money. They get fed by charity or government or international programs. Most then get jobs and become economically productive. The two famines that occurred in Bengal during Sen's lifetime were worsened by corrupt diversion of food from the Public Distribution System.
and the overall supply of food is only one influence among many in the determination of the entitlements of the respective groups of people in the economy.
Nope. Overall supply of food is all that matters. If there isn't enough, there has to be rationing. However 'tightening the belt' may actually improve health outcomes- as happened during the 'Cuban famine'. The North Korean famine, which occurred for the same reason, however, was quite horrible. The solution was for the State to loosen up the economy and then tax the surplus in gangster fashion.
Thus, an income-sensitive entitlement approacti can provide a better explanation of famines than can be obtained through an exclusively production-oriented view.
This turned out to be wholly untrue. All that the capabilities approach did was permit ignorant female professors to sit on UN or other committees and say things like 'Women receive the smallest share of the family's food. We must raise awareness of LGBTQ practices to save them from starvation'. Scotland was foolish enough to invite a UN Special Rapporteur on Food who said that Scottish women faced food insecurity because they lacked adequate access to arable land to raise turnips and thus feed their wee bairns!
It can also yield a more effective approach to the remedying of starvation and hunger (on this see particularly Drfeze and Sen, 1989).
Very true. Conferences involving the Capabilities approach tend to have excellent catering arrangements.
The nature of the problem tends to identify the particular "space" on which the analysis has to concentrate.
Very true. The nature of the problem of defecation tends to identify the particular 'space' where one can have a quiet shit.
It remains true that in explaining the exact patterns of famine deaths and sufferings, we can get additional understanding by supplementing the income-based analysis with information on the conversion of incomes into nourishment, which will depend on various other influences such as metabolic rates, proneness to illness, body size, etc.
This is silly. The big question is whether the lazy sods you are giving charity to will trade their food stamps for drugs.
As empirical studies of famines bring out, some actual famines have occurred with little or no decline in food production (such as the Bengal famine of 1943,
caused by massive food availability deficit as BR Sen- but also Sen's daddy- knew very well
The Ethiopian famine of 1973,
drought caused food availability deficit which, for some reason, the Government did not publicize. That is why the regime fell.
or the Bangladesh famine of 1974),
massive food availability deficit. America wouldn't supply food and India couldn't. The global food market was tight. America was sending the signal that it had a 'food weapon' just as the Arabs had an 'oil weapon'. Bangladesh quadrupled food production after 1974. East Bengalis are sensible people. Maybe that is why they got rid of Hindu buddhijivis like Sen.
whereas others have been infiuenced substantially by declines in food production (on this see Sen, 1981). '' An important further issue is the distribution of food within the family, which may be influenced by several factors other than family income.
Daddy eats all the food. Mummy starves. We must teach Mummy Queer Theoretic approaches to intersectionality within an appropriate framework of Gramscian Grammatology.
Issues of gender inequality and the treatment of children and of old people can be important in this context.
But the guys with the food can do nothing about such issues. Afghanistan or Yemen might have FAD right now. But them guys aren't going to abandon their ancestral religion and become Transgender activists in return for sacks of wheat.
Entitlement analysis can be extended in these directions by going beyond the family income into the conventions and rules of intrafamily division.
It can become even more useless- that is true enough. Still, the fact is, people doing Famine Relief already knew that you have to adopt different policies to help different classes of people. ICS officers like BR Sen knew all about this.
undoubtedly important for investigating the incidence of nutritional failures, morbidities, and mortalities. However, in a general analysis of the occurrence and causation of famines, affecting large groups, these additional matters may be of secondary importance. While I shall not enter further into the famine literature here, I would like to emphasize that the informational demands of famine analysis give an important place to income deprivation which have more immediacy and ready usability than the more subtle—and ultimately more informed—distinctions based on capability comparisons (on this see Sen [1981] and Dreze and Sen [1989]).
This is nonsense. Dreze did some work and Sen put his name to that shite. But it was worthless. Only because there was a buffer stock rotting away, did Governments implement various food distribution schemes.
I turn now to the second question. The most common and most traditional measure of poverty had tended to concentrate on head counting.
Sen thinks people have multiple identities. Like Ravana, poor people have ten heads. Why are they all not being counted?
But it must also make a difference as to how far below the poverty line the poor individually are,
If people can survive way below the poverty line, then the poverty line can be lowered. Still, for some purposes- e.g. Free Higher Education- having the 'BPL' tag even if your people are comfortably off can be advantageous. But then, by Goodhart's law, the measure becomes useless because it is being gamed. Suddenly everybody discovers that they are actually a disabled, Dalit, Lesbian with negative Income.
and furthermore, how the deprivation is shared and distributed among the poor.
Individual deprivation can't be shared or distributed. Wealth can, deprivation can't.
The social data on the respective deprivations of the individuals who constitute the poor in a society need to be aggregated together to arrive at informative and usable measures of aggregate poverty.
Only if that is what you are paid to do. But nobody really cares about that shite because they assume you are lying your head off.
This is a social choice problem, and axioms can indeed be proposed that attempt to capture our distributional concerns in this constructive exercise (on this see Sen, 1976b).'
Very true. Society can choose, provided it has nice axioms, that everybody should own a Superyacht and enjoy holidays on nearby planets with good amenities for disabled Dalit Lesbians suffering social exclusion due to they iz as poor as shit.
Several distribution-sensitive poverty measures have been derived axiomatically in the recent social choice literature, and various alternative proposals have been analyzed.
They are all useless. By the time Sen got his Nobel, people understood that big countries like China and India could lift hundreds of millions out of poverty. There is little point measuring a turd, instead of flushing it down the toilet.
While I shall, here, not go into a comparative assessment of these measures (nor into axiomatic requirements that can be used to discriminate between them), elsewhere I have tried to address this issue, jointly with James Foster (Foster and Sen, 1997).*' However, I would like to Vaughan (1987), Drfeze and Sen (1989), Barbara Harriss (1990), Bina Agarwal (1994), Nancy Folbre (1995), Kanbur (1995), and Nussbaum and Jonathan Glover (1995), among other contributions. '
What a fucking waste of time!
The so-called "Sen measure of poverty"
could be useful for politicians asked to explain why growth has fallen behind that of one's neighbors. You say 'ah! but as Nobel laureate Sen has shown, what really matters is some other measure of happiness according to which, by coincidence, my administration has performed best. '
can, in fact, be improved by an important but simple variation illuminatingly proposed by Anthony F. Shorrocks (1995). I have to confess favoring the "Sen-Shorrocks measure" over the original "Sen index."
But that type of index is actively mischievous! It would lead us to conclude that Chavez's Venezuela was the country everybody should emulate!
Sen's axiomatic approach is based on 'a focus axiom' which states that any poverty measurement must be independent of those above the poverty line.
This is foolish. Rich people give charity and create jobs for poor people. Only if there is some strong economic barrier between the poor and the rich- e.g. if they belonged to different, antagonistic, species- would this axiom be justified.
There is also a ' monotonicity axiom' which states that an increase in income below the poverty line must reduce poverty.
The problem here is that income is defined as what you can spend without reducing wealth while wealth is defined as the stock of assets used to generate a given level of income. Income can rise while wealth falls because what we are doing is imprudent. This is particularly the case where the income is from an 'incentive incompatible' activity. Thus, if workers steal everything from their place of work and sell it, though their income has risen, they have actually increased their own poverty.
Alternatively, new technology may mean that less wealth is required to generate the same level of income. There may be overcounting of 'depreciation'.
Sen also has a 'transfer axiom' which states that a transfer of income from someone below the poverty line to anyone who is richer will result in an increase in poverty.
This is obviously false. Mummy send her daughter a little money which the daughter uses to get a diploma in IT. Poverty has fallen coz daughters love their Mummies and will make sure they can enjoy their 'golden years'.
The truth is that Nations rise out of poverty by pushing marginal producers out- thus raising poverty- before reemploying them in more productive sectors. Sen and his ilk protested against the smashing of China's 'iron rice bowl' but that was a vital step in that Nation's rise.
There is little point pretending the poor are a separate species from us whom we must look after in the same manner that we look after Tigers and Elephants and Pandas.
. To axiomatize exactly a particular poverty measure, we
take the stupidest and most bigoted idea we can possible have and pretend it is always true.
shall have to indulge in the "brinkmanship" of which I spoke earlier (Section V), by adding other axiomatic demands until we are just short of an impossibility, with only one surviving poverty measure. X.
Fuck does this mean? I suppose Sen is saying 'guys, if we continue to go down this stupid road, we will reach a point where we have proved that all billionaires are actually starving to death and thus deserve massive welfare checks. Our axioms have mathematically proved that nobody can be not very very fucking poor.'
Comparative Deprivation and Gender Inequality
Wimmin be very deprived- especially if they have to marry billionaires so as to be able to live the high life. Why can't Melania marry a disabled BPL Dalit Lesbian and enjoy the same standard of living as Donald Trump can offer her?
At one level, poverty cannot be dissociated from the misery caused by it,
Nor Wealth disassociated from the guys who have it coz they will fuck you up if you try to rob them.
and in this sense, the classical perspective of utility also can be invoked in this analysis.
Misery is disutility. It persists so long as there is no opportunity cost to it- i.e. no better alternative.
However, the malleability of mental attitudes, on which I commented earlier, may tend to hide and muffle the extent of deprivation in many cases. The indigent peasant who manages to build some cheer in his life should not be taken as nonpoor on grounds of his mental accomplishment.
Nor should the billionaire. Come to think of it, billionaires are constantly complaining that they haven't doubled their wealth this financial quarter.
This adaptability can be particularly important in dealing with gender inequality and deprivation of women in traditionally unequal societies.
It can also be particularly important in dealing with penis size inequality and the deprivation experienced by needle dick people in traditionally promiscuous societies.
This is partly because perceptions have a decisive part to play in the cohesion of family life,
Sen's family life suffered when he perceived his best friend's wife as more attractive than his wife. This caused him to have to move to Engyland.
and the culture of family living tends to put a premium on making allies out of the ill treated.
Very true. I would make an ally out of the cat any time my baby son beat me up. Sadly, the cat escaped.
Women may—often enough— work much harder than men (thanks to the rigours of household chores), and also receive less attention in health care and nutrition, and yet the perception that there is an incorrigible inequality here may well be missing in a society in which asymmetric norms are quietly dominant.
Equally, it may be present. That's why many civilizations placed so much importance on buying slaves so Mummy is spared noisome labor.
This type of inequality and deprivation may not, under these circumstances, adequately surface in the scale of the mental metric of dissatisfaction and discontent.
Or it may surface there in spades. The fact is, plenty of needle-dick dudes have a mental metric of dissatisfaction and discontent which rivals that of even the most virulent feminist who hates God coz she can't pee standing up. So what? There is a penis enlargement industry to cater to such people- or so I have heard.
The socially cultivated sense of contentment and serenity may even affect the perception of morbidity and illness.
Or it may do no such thing.
When, many years ago, I was working on a famine-related study of postfamine Bengal in 1944,1 was quite struck by the remarkable fact that the widows surveyed had hardly reported any incidence of being in "indifferent health," whereas widowers, complained massively about just that (Sen, 1985a Appendix B).
Whereas female investigator found the opposite effect- more particularly if they were talking to their granny.
The truth is, Indian surveys were useless. The country was too poor and those employed too lazy and feckless for this not to be the case.
Similarly, it emerges in interstate comparisons in India that the states that are worst provided in education and health-care facilities typically report the lowest levels of perceived morbidity, whereas states with good health care and school education indicate higher self-perception of illness (with the highest morbidity reports coming from the best provided states, such as Kerala).
Sadly, this only emerged after everybody had acknowledged that Indian statistical surveys were completely shit. I remember one survey which showed villagers who didn't have a clock or a radio yet reporting their exact time of waking up or going to sleep. I own plenty of gadgets but I can't say whether I went to sleep at eleven o'clock or twelve o'clock. Indian surveys could give this information because those involved simply invented the results they reported.
On the other hand, it is true that if you think illness is caused by witch-craft, you might not mention this to a stranger- just in case the guy is the head warlock.
Mental reactions, the mainstay of classical utility, can be a very defective basis for the analysis of deprivation.
Classical utility was just a theory. It was never applied. Later, a little money was wasted in this way. Maybe such Stats can be useful for Market Researchers.
Thus, in understanding poverty and inequality, there is a strong case for looking at real deprivation and not merely at mental reactions to that deprivation.
But mental reactions to deprivation drive economic behavior. I feel hungry. Food deprivation is what causes me to go to the kitchen to fix myself a sandwich. But the larder is bare. Fuck it, I'll have to get a job and spend the money I earn on food. Sad.
There have been many recent investigations of gender inequality and women's deprivation in terms of undemutrition, clinically diagnosed morbidity, observed illiteracy,
getting chopped into pieces by their 'Food blogger' lover, farting continually while watching Avatar, the list is endless.
and even unexpectedly high mortality (compared with physiologically justified expectations).''^ Such interpersonal comparisons can easily be a significant basis of studies of poverty and of inequality between the sexes
as can rating women on their propensity to flatulence
They can be accommodated within a broad firamework of welfare economics and social choice (enhanced by the removal of informational constraints that would rule out the use of these types of data).
No. Useless shite can only be accommodated by useless shitheads.
XI. The Liberal Paradox This lecture has included discussion of why and how impossibility results in social choice can be overcome through informational broadening.
This is not true. However much information you have, Social Choice will still be arbitrary unless it is not non-deterministic and based on what can be cheaply verified. There can be no 'neutral algorithm' for Social Choice. Nor should there be, because of Knightian Uncertainty.
Axiomatic approaches don't have to have impossibility results. One can have a 'Revelation Principle' and assume that there is always some result which everybody would accept as optimal. Nothing can be proved either way. It is impossible to disprove the Liebnizian conclusion that whatever happens, happens for the best, nor to disprove the alternative conclusion, that the best outcome is never computable or implementable.
The informational widening considered so far has been mainly concerned with the use of interpersonal comparisons.
Which are arbitrary- not to say stupid and bigoted.
But this need not be the only form of broadening that is needed in resolving an impasse in social choice. Consider, for example, an impossibility theorem which is sometimes referred to as "the liberal paradox," or "the impossibility of the Paredan liberal" (Sen, 1970a, b, 1976c). The theorem shows the impossibility of satisfying even a very minimal demand for liberty when combined with an insistence on Pareto efficiency (given unrestricted domain)."
But, with unrestricted domain, nobody would permit unrestricted domain! Either liberty exists- in which case there is no Social Choice or else there is no Liberty- in which case it is foolish to speak of Society choosing anything.
Since there have been some debates on the content of liberty in the recent literature, perhaps a quick explanatory remark may be useful.
Liberty only exists if it has the power to continue to exist. Otherwise, there is merely a permission of a certain sort which may be withdrawn at whim.
Liberty has many different aspects, including two rather distinct features: (1) it can help us to achieve what we would choose to achieve in our respective private domains,
This is not true. A guy being held captive by lusty super-models who feed him delicacies does not enjoy liberty. Indeed, he may be greatly displeased if anybody kills those super-models and sets him free to starve.
Liberty may not help us achieve anything in our respective private domains. It may involve, as the valorous people of Ukraine are demonstrating, sacrificing your life for your Nation.
for example, in personal life (this is its "opportunity aspect"), and (2) it can leave us directly in charge of choices over private domains, no matter what we may or may not achieve (this is its "process aspect").
There is no such difference when it comes to Liberty. We are welcome to delegate choices in the private domain both in terms of what is chosen and who implements that choice.
In social choice theory, the formulation of liberty has been primarily concerned with the former, that is, the opportunity aspect.
But a slave master or a jailor may leave a 'private domain' to his slave or prisoner. Equally, one may exercise one's liberty such that no private domain is left.
*' There is also some analytical interest in the "source" of the impossibility result involved here,
the source is unrestricted domain and the refusal to understand that nobody in their right mind would agree to being bound by a Social Choice rule with that feature. We want different rules in different contexts.
particularly since both "Pareto efficiency" and "minimal libierty" are characterized in terms of the same set of preferences of the same individuals.
Which can't be known by even that individual- i.e. the thing does not exist. Why not characterize everything in terms of the magic formula which changes everybody into flying unicorns?
This may have been adequate to show the possible conflict between the Pareto principle and the opportunity aspect of liberty
There is no such conflict. But Liberty has no necessary connection with opportunity. The King's slaves may be able to extort lots of money and live as they like. But they still would not have Liberty. Equally, Robin Hood and his Merry Men may have precious little in the way of 'opportunity'. Yet they are Free.
As for the Pareto principle- provided information is costless and transactions are frictionless- any Society will quickly gravitate to the Pareto frontier just by bartering.
Sen's 'Liberal paradox' ignored the possibility that 'prude' might bribe 'lewd' or vice versa. In practice, 'nosy preferences' lead to deals whereby both sides get something in return for giving up more extreme claims. But this is also why Grievance Studies flourishes. Everybody stockpiles nuisance claims of their own. You play the gender card. I play the race card. Then both of us decide we are actually Disabled Dalit Transgender Lesbians.
(on which Sen [1970a, b] concentrated), but an exclusive concentration on the opportunity aspect cannot provide an adequate understanding of the demands of liberty
Liberty demands that Sen-tentious assholes fuck off
However, social choice theory can also be made to accommodate the process aspect of liberty through appropriate recharacterization,
Why, for God's sake? I don't want to operate on myself or do my own taxes or manage my own portfolio. I want to delegate all that to qualified people.
It is also important to avoid the opposite narrowness of concentrating exclusively only on the process aspect of liberty, as some recent writers have preferred to do. Important as processes are, this cannot obliterate the relevance of the opportunity aspect which too must count Indeed, the importance of effectiveness in the realization of liberty in one's personal life has been recognized as important for a long time—even by commentators deeply concemed with processes, fiom John Stuart Mill (1859) to Frank Knight (1947), Friedrich A. Hayek (1960), and Buchanan (1986).
Which is why the first thing Zelensky did when Putin invaded was to consult Social Choice theorists on how best to protect the Liberty of his people.
The difficulties of having to weigh process fairness against effectiveness of outcomes
are self-created and wholly irrelevant to the question of preserving liberty. The difficulties of having to kill Putin's goons are what should concentrate minds. Liberty aint something Professors can conjure up for us with axioms or equations.
cannot be avoided simply by ignoring the opportunity aspect of liberty, through an exclusive concentration on the process aspect.
But sensible people don't have to bother with that shite. Opportunities exist if processes exist and vice versa. They are one and the same for the individual. An enterprise, however, might usefully distinguish the two for a Managerial purpose.
How might the conflict of the Paretian liberal, in particular, be resolved?
People do deals.
Indeed, neither the claims of liberty, nor that of Pareto efficiency, need be significantly contingent on interpersonal comparisons
Sure they can. Interpersonal comparisons are about preference intensity which people can signal by spending money or burning shit down. Putin's goons pretended they wanted to put down neo-Nazism. But they didn't really. They were mercenaries- nothing more. The Ukrainians genuinely wanted to kick out Putin's hordes. Their 'preference intensity' is prevailing.
Sen's type of Social Choice was useless because it didn't get that the way deals get done is through 'transferable utility'- i.e. paying off the other side- or transferable disutility- i.e. making a nuisance of yourself to the other side till they back off.
. The force of one's claims over one's private domain lies in the personal nature of that choice—
No. It lies in the force with which you fuck up those who try to fuck with you.
not on the relative intensities of the preferences of different persons over a particular person's private life.
Sadly, this isn't true. Mummy has very intense preferences against us turning into bums. She may speak very sweetly, but she tends to get her way- thank God!
Also, Pareto efficiency depends on the congruence of different persons' preferences over a pairwise choice—not on the comparative strength of those preferences.
Only in Sen's stupid system. The fact is, I may say I have a preference about what is happening to Lesbian goats in Guatemala. But I don't really. I'm just virtue signaling. Sen and Arrow assume that everybody has a preference over everything. But they don't really.
Rather, the resolution of this problem lies elsewhere, in particular in the need to see each of these claims as being qualified by the importance of the other
this is nonsense. A claim is qualified by the Hohfeldian incidents accruing to the claimant. Other claims are only important if they impact those incidents. My claim that Amartya Sen eats only dog shit does not qualify his claim that he eats human food.
—once it is recognized that they can be in possible conflict with each other (indeed, the main point of the liberal paradox was precisely to identify that possible conflict).
Conflict arises because of scarcity. That is why we expend scarce resources on punishing those who start conflicts of a certain sort. Collective security is the basis of Liberty or, indeed, the Rule of Law.
The recognition of the importance of effective liberty in one's private domain (precisely over particular choices) can coexist with an acknowledgement of the relevance of Paretian unanimity over any pair (over all choices—whether in one's private domain or not).
No it can't. There are informational and cognitive constraints. We simply don't have the time or brain power to have preferences over all choices in Society. Uncorrelated asymmetries exist such that I care whether or not I get a cheeseburger or a pizza slice. But I genuinely don't give a shit whether Mr. Jones gets a cheeseburger while Mrs. Smith got a pizza slice.
A satisfactory resolution of this impossibility must include taking an evaluative view of the acceptable priorities between personal liberty and overall desire fulfillment, and must be sensitive to the information regarding the trade-offs on this that the persons may themselves endorse.
Nonsense! We ought not to give two shits about any of this. The thing is simply stupid. Why not say 'we must take an evaluative view of every fart while keeping in mind the tradeoff between smelliness, loudness and the nature of the skid-marks left in Mr. Jones's chaddi.'
This too calls for an informational enrichment (taking note of people's political values as well as individual desires), but this enrichment is of a rather different kind from that of using interpersonal comparisons of well-being or overall advantage."*
Sen- a little brown monkey from a shithole country- thought that the stupid shite he was teaching actually mattered! Western countries were hanging on his every word and changing their policies accordingly. This was narcissism of a breath-taking kind. By contrast, my farts fuel Democracy and Social Justice throughout the Galaxy.
XII. A Concluding Remark Impossibility results in social choice theory— led by the pioneering work of Arrow (1951)— have often been interpreted as being thoroughly destructive of the possibility of reasoned and democratic social choice, including welfare economics "
Nope. Everybody already knew that there are big problems with any given voting rule. The solution is to have different voting rules for different things. Also, invest in Constitutional 'Checks and Balances' so as to prevent the emergence of an elected Dictator. Your country may still turn to shit so try to get a second passport.
" This may, formally, require a multistage social choice exercise in the determination of these priorities,
which is what happens in Parliamentary sub-committees and other such deeply boring places.
followed by the use of those priorities in the choice over comprehensive social states
No. We can't choose social states. We can only make choices based on expected social states.
I have argued against that view.
Sen always argues against any sensible view.
Indeed, Arrow's powerful "impossibility theorem" invites engagement, rather than resignation
It invites derision. Define a Dictator as a guy who isn't a Dictator and you get- ex falso quodlibet- an explosion of nonsense.
We do know, of course, that democratic decisions can sometimes lead to incongruities.
Always, not 'sometimes'.
To the extent that this is a feature of the real world, its existence and reach are matters for objective recognition. Inconsistencies arise more readily in some situations than in others, and it is possible to identify the situational differences and to characterize the processes through which consensual and compatible decisions can emerge
Bribery. Log-rolling. Pork barrel politics. If all else fails, assassination or emigration.
The impossibility results certainly deserve serious study. They often have wide—indeed sweeping—reach, not merely covering day-today politics (where we may be rather used to incongruity), but also questioning the possibility of any assured framework for making social welfare judgments for the society as a whole.
Come to think of it the McKelvey chaos theorem is perfectly sensible. Don't make a decision space multi-dimensional. Tell Sen-tentious tossers to butt out.
Impossibilities thus identified also militate against the general possibility of an orderly and systematic framework for normatively assessing inequality, for evaluating poverty, or for identifying intolerable tyranny and violations of liberty.
No. All we can say is that there isn't a 'one-size-fits-all' solution. But kids learn that in the playground.
Not to be able to have a coherent framework for these appraisals or evaluations would indeed be most damaging for systematic political, social, and economic judgement.
Fuck off! Some mathsy cunts- who didn't understand math- thought a 'coherent framework' was possible in the Fifties. Then math itself proved this could not be the case. Evolution isn't deterministic. How can Social Choice for creatures who evolved by natural selection be deterministic?
It would not be possible to talk about injustice and unfairness without having to face the accusation that such diagnoses must be inescapably arbitrary or intellectually despotic.
Why not face that accusation squarely because it is true and what's more everybody knows it is true? Why pretend that mathsy handwaving can prove something already known to be false?
These bleak conclusions do not, however, endure searching scrutiny,
Can Sen show any non-arbitrary result? No. He says maybe interpersonal comparisons can help but such comparisons are arbitrary- not to say bigoted and ignorant.
and fruitful procedures that militate against such pessimism can be clearly identified.
No. They start arbitrary and end up arbitrary. This is not to say good enough Social Choice doesn't happen just by folk doing deals on the basis of 'transferable utility'. Smart people do 'interpersonal comparisons' and pay guys to do stuff for them. 'Hicks-Kaldor' improvement is about permitting reallocation so that the 'winners' could, if they pleased, compensate the 'losers'. At any rate, the Government gets more tax revenue.
This has indeed been largely an upbeat lecture—emphasizing the possibility of constructive social choice theory,
i.e. talking bollocks
and arguing for a productive interpretation of the impossibility results.
The productive interpretation is that some non-deterministic procedure is always better than a deterministic one. Magic is cooler than Science.
Indeed, these apparently negative results can be seen to be helpful inputs in the development of an adequate framework for social choice, since the axiomatic derivation of a specific social choice procedure must lie in between—and close to—an impossibility, on one side, and an embarrassment of riches, on the other (see Section V).
but it would involve an infinite number of axioms and a non denumerable number of meta-axioms etc. Under unrestricted domain, each individual can also vote on the voting rule and this is the logical reductio ad absurdum for this type of mischegos.
The possibility of constructive welfare economics and social choice
rests solely on whether the guys doing it are being constructive as opposed to being mathsy wankers.
(and their use in making social welfare judgments and in devising practical measures with normative significance) turns on the need for broadening the informational basis of such choice.
but information acquisition and processing are costly. Ultimately, we have to make a choice between funding Sen-tentious shite and actually doing some good.
One feels some sympathy for kids who thought they could do Physics at College and then be part of Space exploration or cool stuff like that. But if you came from a shithole country, people said 'do Econ, not Physics', without realizing that Econ aint magic. Physics can make a country richer. Studying Poverty will make you poorer. Axiomatizing Social Choice won't improve the choice menu for a poor country which insists on doing stupid shit.
Different types of informational enrichment have been considered in the literature.
I myself have contributed a paper describing how classifying the smelliness of farts can enrich the informational basis of Social Choice. The fact is farts have a direct connection to Society's well-being- which is why I was expelled from the LSE India Society back in 1979.
A crucial element in this broadening is the use of interpersonal comparisons of well-being and individual advantage. It is not surprising that the rejection of interpersonal comparisons must cause difficulties for reasoned social decision, since the claims of different persons, who make up the society, have to be assessed against each other.
especially their claims that 'who smelled it dealt it'.
We cannot even understand the force of public concerns about poverty, hunger, inequality, or tyranny, without bringing in interpersonal comparisons in one form or another.
Nor can we understand the force of East Bengal's concern to get rid of Hindus.
The information on which our informal judgments on these matters rely is precisely the kind of information that has to be—and can be—incorporated in the formal analysis of systematic social choice
but this will always be a wholly arbitrary procedure. Also this 'formal analysis' stops when it discovers nobody will pay for it.
The pessimism about the possibility of interpersonal comparisons that fuelled the "obituary notices" for welfare economics (and substantially fed the fear of impossibility in social choice theory) was ultimately misleading for two distinct reasons. First,
countries realized that 'Hicks Kaldor' was fine because Government's need tax revenue. Thus do stuff which yields higher tax revenue- i.e. let the Rich get richer- otherwise your existing welfare arrangements collapse.
it confined attention to too narrow an informational base, overlooking the different ways in which interpersonally comparative statements can sensibly be made and can be used to enrich the analysis of welfare judgments and social choice.
but, if tax revenue didn't go up, there was no fucking money for Social Choice
An overconcentration on comparisons of mental states
which was impossible
crowded out a plethora of information that can inform us about the real advantages and disadvantages of different persons, related to their substantive well-being, freedoms, or opportunities.
not to mention the smelly farts people can provide
Second, the pessimism was also based on demanding too much precision in such comparisons, overlooking the fact that even partial comparisons can serve to enlighten the reasoned basis of welfare economics, social ethics, and responsible politics.
but this would be an arbitrary procedure. What Sen can do a Sharia council can equally do. But the Sharia council has superior ability in enforcing its decisions. Sen-tentious shitheads have to run away from them.
Addressing these problems fits well into a general program of strengthening social choice theory (and "nonobituarial" welfare economics).
because that is what the cunt was paid to do. But people with tenure die sooner or later. Their availability cascade collapses or turns into a branch of Grievance Studies for those with very special educational needs.
There are two distinct issues here. First, partial comparability can be very effective in generating an optimal choice (Sen, 1970a, c).
No. It can generate a choice- but it won't be optimal. Where there is optimality there may 'naturality' or non-arbitrariness. But this is unlikely to be the case for anything which evolved by natural selection.
Second, even when an optimal alternative does not emerge, it can help to narrow down the maximal set of undominated alternatives to which a maximizing choice can be confined
Only in the sense that a maximizing fart can be confined.
In general, informational broadening, in one form or another, is an effective way of overcoming social choice pessimism and of avoiding impossibilities, and it leads directly to constructive approaches with viability and reach.
Can Sen give a single example of Social Choice theory having 'lead directly to a constructive approach'? No. The thing is useless when it it is not mischievous.
Formal reasoning about postulated axioms (including their compatibility and coherence), as well as informal understanding of values and norms (including their relevance and plausibility), both point in that productive direction.
Only in the sense that farts point in a productive direction. The fact is farts can motivate actions. Social Choice Theory can motivate the same sort of actions. This involves running away from the person who produces the thing incessantly.
Indeed, the deep complementarity between formal and informal reasoning—
or farting and Social Choice theory
so central to the social sciences—
which become anti-social if you fart enough or are Amartya Sen
is well illustrated by developments in modem social choice theory.
There was no development. The thing was a wank which, however, some brown monkeys used to emigrate from shithole countries. But, had those shithole countries done sensible things, those same guys could have been rich or, at least, useful.
A public good is 'non-rival' and 'non-excludable'- i.e. the cost does not increase when more avail of it (e.g. if more people listen to a radio broadcast, the cost of radio broadcasting does not go up). Also, nobody can be prevented from tuning into the broadcast.
I read in 'The Accidental Prime Minister' that Dr. Manmohan thought loan waiver for farmers is a 'public good'. This is nonsense. If more farmers get loan waivers, the cost to the Exchequer rises unless those loans were not recoverable- in which case there is no 'loan waiver' there is just a 'write-off. Moreover, there is an opportunity cost. If farmers loans are written off, other non performing assets are not being written down and thus there is greater 'Balance Sheet weakness' which undermines the provision of credit and which increases volatility associated with exogenous shocks.
Sanjaya Baru writes-
One evening in late 2007 after sitting through a long inconclusive discussion on the subject of loan waivers with senior officials and ministers, Dr Singh walked back to his private working space at 7 RCR. There, in that quiet corner, looking out into the patch of green where a peacock or two would always be walking around, pecking at food, he sat and gave me a long lecture on the history of loan waivers in India. It was the British, he explained, who first understood the nature of rural indebtedness and the importance of keeping the farmer alive.
The British understood that marginal farmers need to sell up and move to manufacturing jobs in urban areas. There is no point keeping a sub-subsistence farmer alive and trapped in what will soon become a negative marginal product activity. That's how you get Malthusian famines once there is an exogenous shock- e.g. Burmese rice imports getting cut off as happened in 1942, or else a global grain shortage and US use of 'the food weapon' in 1974.
Another point is that loan waivers are far from transparent. Giving them empowers the 'arhatiya' middle-man who arranges the thing for the illiterate farmer. The result- as was seen during the recent Farmer's protests- is that the farmers prevent the disintermediation of the middle-man which is needful to gain economies of scope and scale and enable the adoption of higher value adding or more environmentally friendly agricultural policies.
Rural credit, he recalled K.N. Raj telling him, is a ‘public good’.
Raj was a stupid as shit. Credit, by definition, is rival and excludable. If you get a loan, someone else does not.
Economists define a ‘public good’ as any good or service that, once provided, does not discriminate between beneficiaries and non-beneficiaries.
Nonsense! A radio broadcast is a public good but it discriminates between those who have radios and like listening to that particular broadcast and those who don't.
A street light is a common example of a public good.
It is a local public good. It discriminates between those who live on that street and those who don't.
Government spends money on street lighting and everyone who uses the street, irrespective of whether she is a taxpayer or not, a citizen or a visitor, benefits from it.
But those who don't use that street get no benefit whatsoever. We won't pay for street lighting in some far away place which we will never visit.
A loan waived by a bank may appear to be a private good since the primary beneficiary is the debtor.
He is the only beneficiary.
However, in keeping farmers alive,
the farmer can stop being a farmer and enjoy a better life. Why not lend money to beggars and then waive those loans, provided the beggar doesn't do anything productive at all?
Land is scarce. Why not get farmers to give up unviable farms and do something else instead?
in sustaining the livelihood of farmers and in ensuring rural social stability,
i.e. vote banks for the Party. But Punjabi farmers have stopped voting for Congress. Kejriwal has swept the polls.
a loan waiver in the case of an impoverished and highly indebted farmer would have wider social benefits.
It has negative external effects. The Banking system become weaker and less able to allocate capital efficiently. There is 'moral hazard'. People borrow in the expectation of not having to repay the debt. They may use the money for ostentatious expenditure.
Many countries, including developed market economies, justified farm subsidies on such social grounds.
Subsidies are different from loan waivers. It is foolish to use the latter as the former because you then encourage a spendthrift culture whereby people maximize their debt, in the expectation that the loan will be waived, but do not upgrade the underlying asset. Thus there is no productivity gain which there would be with a subsidy.
A debt waiver was a subsidy, and a public good
It was neither. It was a corrupt scheme to create a vote bank. It damaged the economies of those States where it was most salient. Manmohan harmed Punjab.
.Dr Singh recalled how every thirty years or so there had been a farm loan waiver in India and the last one had been sanctioned by Charan Singh in 1979.
Nonsense! The first nation-wide farm loan waiver was implemented in 1990 by Janata Party government led by then Prime Minister V.P. Singh and cost the government Rs 10,000 crores. This was in response to the militancy of farmer's leaders like Tikait. Charan Singh was PM for just 23 days. Either Manmohan was completely ignorant or else Baru is as stupid as shit and is putting words in his mouth.
The cycle of mounting debts and accumulating farmers’ grievances would end with an across-the board loan waiver. By 2007, he felt, the time had come for another loan waiver. The policy debate within government went on for several months after that. It was possible that the party was not just mulling the decision, but had also decided to wait for the right political time. In Dr Singh’s mind, though, it seemed to me that afternoon, the decision had already been taken. He understood the political significance of a farm loan waiver, he had respectable policy precedents and an acceptable theoretical justifi cation for what would be criticized by many as a populist measure.
Chidambaram could have spun it as a write off and announced that in future there would be better banking practices and stricter scrutiny of Non Performing Assets. This didn't happen. India was headed for a Moody's downgrading.
Above all, four years of high economic growth had generated the optimistic view that the country could afford to splurge on such schemes.
Just when sub-prime was going to tank the global economy.
After several months of deliberation and after taking stock of the views of an expert committee chaired by economist R. Radhakrishna, Dr Singh approved the loan waiver scheme. Chidambaram unveiled the scheme through his budget speech in February 2008, including under it all agricultural loans disbursed by scheduled commercial banks, regional rural banks and cooperative credit institutions up to 31 March 2007 and overdue as on 31 December 2007, with the benefi t to small and marginal farmers, those with holdings up to 2 hectares, being larger than for other farmers. The scheme would benefi t 4 crore, that is, 40 million, farmers and would cost the government about Rs 72,000 crore, that is Rs 720 billion. Despite the high cost, Dr Singh viewed the farm loan waiver as ‘his’ contribution to ‘inclusive growth’.
You can only get an agricultural loan if you own agricultural land. This is not an inclusive measure at all. The Government is buying the votes of the dominant caste. But why should they stay loyal? The other point is that the money the farmer borrows, if not frittered away, will go into urban real-estate and financing emigration. It won't go into the SME sector or agribusiness or anything else. Every wonder why so many farmers make a loss year after year? The answer is that so long as they follow the arhatiya's advise, their real income comes from the loan they become eligible for. But that loan will be written off.
It was set apart in his mind from the ‘flagship’ schemes for which his party gave all the credit to Sonia Gandhi, the NAC and the NCMP. Still lurking within the Oxbridge economist was a bit of the Punjab farmer, and he knew that this initiative would resonate well in rural India. After Chidambaram’s budget presentation, Dr Singh took ownership of the initiative
which he was welcome to do because it represented bad economics. Furthermore, increased opacity in the Nationalized Bank sector (when is a loan not an agricultural loan?) would mean crony capitalists could loot National Savings and live large. What's not to like about that?
through a fervent reply to the debate on the motion of thanks to the President, in March 2008, and recited from memory Oliver Goldsmith’s lines from The Deserted Village, ‘Ill fares the land, to hastening ill a prey, / Where wealth accumulates, and men decay; / Princes and Lords may flourish, or may fade; / But a bold peasantry, their country’s pride; / When once destroyed can never be supplied.’
But rural depopulation turned out to be a very good thing for Ireland and England and so forth. It is better to work in high value adding manufacturing or service industries then to gnaw on a potato or turnip on your little farm. Goldsmith died 70 years before the great Irish famine.
It may be that Manmohan wasn't as stupid as Baru paints him. The fact is Baru had started off as a Leftist and Manmohan too appeared a Lefty- he had studied under Joan Robinson and then had been a colleague of Paul Prebisch at UNCTAD in Geneva. KN Raj had brought him to the Delhi School of Econ and so most people assumed he was as stupid as shit. Perhaps by quoting Goldsmith or crediting Charan Singh with Loan waivers, Manmohan hoped his Media adviser would reassure the Left eco-system that the PM had shit for brains and genuinely wanted to fuck up the Indian economy.
Baru suggests that it was Arjun Singh- a feudal turned machine politician- who entrenched the Left in Academia-
Arjun Singh used his perch at the HRD ministry to reinforce his image as a ‘left-wing secular’ politician, favouring and funding scholars and activities that helped him project this image. Whenever a journalist asked Dr Singh what he thought of Arjun Singh’s political games at the HRD ministry, the PM’s stock reply would be that India needed an educational system that promoted excellence and merit rather than any particular ideology. By favouring pro-Left and Muslim academics in various ways, he created a constituency of support among those who tended to be critical of the PM for following a foreign policy aimed, as they saw it, at ‘cosying up’ to the US—a country at odds with the Muslim world. Such was the sycophancy he encouraged that the Jamia Millia University even named a street on its campus after Arjun Singh when he was still in office.
Why did Congress invest so heavily in anti-nationalism? Under UPA-1, it could be argued that this was to keep the alliance with the Left. But why did this trend persist under UPA-2? One answer is that Manmohan- whose attempt to get elected to the Lok Sabha had been sabotaged by Congress because he acknowledged that his party had killed Sikhs in 1984- had a good reason to hate India. Furthermore, if he was going to fuck up farming through loan waiver, why not also fuck up the Indian higher education system? After all, he himself was supposed to be from a farming family and he had indeed risen through higher education. Fucking both up was his duty as a Congress PM.
Baru's book paints a picture of a confused and introverted man who appeared professional to world leaders because he'd mug up what he'd say to them. But this meant that Bush, who had great personal charm of a preppie kind, could play him like a fiddle. This meant Manmohan showed unexpected, indeed unexampled, firmness in standing up to the Left on the 123 nuclear deal. But this was a flash in the pan. It soon became obvious that Manmohan had lost the plot. By 2012 he didn't even know that Pranab as Finance Minister would put in retrospective taxes on corporate income.
However, India's larger problem was that Baru- son of a senior official- and his ilk had been very well educated into becoming as stupid as shit. Consider the following
The best realist interpretation of non-alignment came from a distinguished Polish Marxist economist, Michal Kalecki, who worked briefly at the Planning Commission in the 1960s and wrote extensively on Third-World development. In his famous essay ‘Observations on Social and Economic Aspects of Intermediate Regimes’, an essay that spawned a most fascinating debate between Dr Singh’s friend and mentor Professor K.N. Raj, and the communist party leader E.M.S. Namboodiripad in the columns of the Economic and Political Weekly, Kalecki called the non-aligned countries ‘the proverbial clever calves that suck two cows’.
But a beggar who sucks two cocks is still a beggar. Moreover, other beggars look down on him as a cock-sucker. Non-aligned countries were stupid. True, the Soviets would buy shoddy stuff off you and give you fairly decent armaments in return whereas American 'free money' was inflationary and unreliable. Still, one needed to pick a type of economic regime and then work closely with the Super-power promoting that regime. Non-alignment just meant begging and sucking cock on spec.
The simultaneous suckling of two udders, the US and the USSR,
The Soviets were as poor as shit. They did barter deals advantageous to a country with low living standards. Them guys thought Mithun Chakraborty was a super-cool disco dancer.
was a tactical response to an opportunity that presented itself. Given the existing geo-political environment, a group of countries that Kalecki called ‘intermediate regimes’—neither capitalist nor socialist in a bipolar world—grabbed this opportunity to further their own developmental possibilities.
No. Egypt, India and Bolivia grabbed the opportunity to turn to shit. Let the working class migrate to the Gulf or elsewhere if it wanted to get paid properly for actually doing some work.
Good governance is a Public Good- one which the PM must promote. Baru explains why Manmohan could do no such thing. The fact is, he wasn't a Prime Minister at all. He was a servant who lay prone when not ministering to the Dynasty. Perhaps, history will be kinder to him once Khalistan is created and accedes to Pakistan after which the Sikhs are killed and Manmohan's dream of being able to 'breakfast in Amritsar, lunch in Lahore and dine in Kabul' is realized under the Caliphate. Rahul, of course will immediately go on a walk- but that walk will get shorter and shorter which is just as well because the fellow would be getting old and arthritic.
Meanwhile, Manmohan is remembered not just as the author of the 123 deal which, like subsequent nuclear deals, produced little or nothing because of local opposition, but also for his Sharm al Sheikh gaffe which allowed Pakistan to use Baluchi separatism as a stick to beat India with. Baru suggests that Manmohan wanted to make Indo-Pak peace (i.e. unilateral surrender to Pak) his legacy but Sonia wanted her son to get the credit. Then Rahul realized he would be shot by a Godse if he bent over for the Pakistanis, so, Congress had no Prime Ministerial candidate to offer the country. That's the problem with being anti-national. Your own people will kill you if you take the top job and try to hand the country over to its enemies. Sad.
Ram Guha wants to defeat Hindutva- i.e. ecumenical Hinduism- and has written an article in the Telegraph towards this great end. Obviously, since he is as stupid as shit, the thing will backfire. The question is, how hilariously will it do so? To begin, we must understand that Guha is actually an Englishwoman-turned-Indian.
In its issue dated November 30, 1947, the journal, Harijan, printed an appeal from an Englishwoman-turned-Indian to the citizens of a country she had made her own. “Twenty two years ago I, a lost wanderer,” she wrote, “refound my spirit’s home in India — India, whose aeons of history were again repeating themselves in epics of spiritual grandeur.
The silly bint thought that Gandhi would found a great Religion like Lord Buddha or Jesus Christ. Romain Rolland, who had written a book on the composer, persuaded her to abandon a mania for Beethoven for thralldom to a wily Bania. Rolland himself, however, decided that Stalin was yet more sublime than some 'naked fakir'. Hero-worship deranges the mind.
With what boundless inspiration and enthusiasm I plunged into the great drama of Light and Hope, unfolding itself before the war-torn, sinking world. In Bapu I found the Guiding Star; in Hinduism, the word of Truth; in India, the Mother.”
A dozen years later she'd return to England and Beethoven-mania, before settling in the Vienna woods where she spent the last 22 years of her life. So, we are speaking of an Englishwoman-turned-Indian-turned-Austrian. Why is Guha quoting that crazy biddy? The answer is, he identifies with her. His daddy was actually a British Admiral. Soon he will go off to Vienna to join the other Guha- the every so subaltern Ranajit. Then ghost of Beethoven will appear to him and fuck him in the ass. The Joy!
Then she added: “Little did I know that twenty-two years later I should have to see the Mother’s breasts torn and bleeding with the gashes inflicted by her own children, and the word of Truth trampled underfoot by the very people who call themselves Hindus.”
Muslims started the violence and Sikhs joined in. Hindus retaliated in some places but were perfectly peaceful elsewhere- e.g. Guha's own ancestral Tamil Nadu.
This anguished Indian was Mira Behn, the daughter of a British admiral who had come to this country in November 1925 to work with and alongside Gandhi. She had lived with her ‘Bapu’ in his Sabarmati and Sevagram ashrams, made speaking tours in the United Kingdom and the United States of America canvassing for India’s freedom, and spent several long terms in prison in her adopted country’s cause. All this while she had committed herself, in theory and in practice, to the Gandhian ideals of the abolition of untouchability, the promotion of khadi, and the pursuit of Hindu-Muslim harmony.
Gandhi was a crackpot all of whose schemes failed. Naturally, other crackpots joined him in his crazy schemes which Banias and Marwaris funded so as to increase their own wealth and power.
The appeal written by Mira was addressed specifically to the last of these ideals. For the Partition of the subcontinent had been preceded and followed by a series of bloody riots in which Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs were all victims as well as perpetrators. Mira’s mentor, Gandhi, was working heroically to stem the violence.
He was useless. It was in the interest of Mountbatten, Nehru and Suhrawardy to pretend that Gandhi had succeeded in Bengal. The truth is, he failed. Birla and other Marwaris had quietly funded the Hindu retaliation against Suhrawardy's 'Direct Action Day'. As for the Hindus of East Bengal- nobody gave a toss about them more especially if they themselves were Hindus from West Bengal. On the other hand, Gandhi said he knew which Congress members in Bihar had killed Muslims- Nehru threatened to send planes to bomb them!- but, of course, he didn't suspend any from the party. Instead he collected some money and moved on.
In September, after achieving success in calming Calcutta,
The Hindus had won there. The Marwaris weren't going to pay for any more murder. If East Bengali Hindus wanted to make space for themselves, they were welcome to do so- or, in the case of Mandal's Namasudras, not actually very welcome at all, as was discovered at Marichjhapi. Still, what mattered to Birla & Co was that Calcutta had been secured for India. It might as well be peaceful.
he proceeded to Delhi where the situation was alarming, with Hindu and Sikh refugees from Partition seeking revenge against the Muslims who still lived in Delhi.
Which they took in ample measure though it is true that some refugees started to return in 1948. The Constituent Assembly quickly passed a law preventing Muslims from returning to reclaim their property. Refugees from the West were awarded Muslim property but those from the East were ignored. Why? The Bengali was considered a coward. There was no point accommodating them because they contributed nothing to your collective security. Punjabis, on the other hand, were fighters.
Gandhi’s hope was that after he was able to restore the security of the Muslim minority in North India, he would cross over the border and work to ensure the safety of the Hindus and Sikhs who still remained in Pakistan.
Hilarious! If the East Bengalis had chased him away so easily, what hope had he in West Punjab? Nehru had to turn tail and run when he tried to visit 'the Frontier Gandhi' in Peshawar.
However, the restoration of peace in Delhi and its surroundings proved much harder than Gandhi had anticipated. Already angry, the Hindu and Sikh refugees had their feelings further inflamed by extremist organisations like the Hindu Mahasabha and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, which were actively engaged in fomenting hatred against the Muslims who had chosen to stay behind in India.
Just as Guha is still actively engaged in fomenting hatred against Hindutva. But the effort is otiose. Muslims hate Hindutva because they hate Kaffirs. Hindus and Sikhs- like everybody else- don't like people who are trying to kill them and take their property.
A Delhi police report dated October 24, 1947 had this to say about the designs of the RSS: “According to the Sangh volunteers, the Muslims would quit India only when another movement for their total extermination similar to the one which was started in Delhi sometime back would take place… They were waiting for the departure of Mahatma Gandhi from Delhi as they believed that so long as the Mahatma was in Delhi, they would not be able to precipitate their designs into action.”
Police reports contain the sort of information policemen believe their masters want to hear. Moreover, if your job is to prevent people being killed, it is quite convenient to be able to say that the presence of such and such Saint obviated any need for special measures. God does not permit bad things to happen if a Mahatma is in the vicinity.
And an Intelligence Bureau report dated November 15, 1947 observed: “[T]he workers of the Rashtriya Swayam Sewak Sangh, especially those coming from West Punjab as refugees, intend starting communal trouble in Delhi after the Diwali festival. They say they could not tolerate the sight of Muslims moving about in Delhi...”
But if they saw the Mahatma they would immediately start cuddling and kissing Muslims.
Mira was living in Delhi through the months of October and November 1947, watching with horror as this hate-filled ideology was taking root in the minds of more and more Hindus.
She was probably very happy when Muslim tribesmen massacred Belgian Nuns in Baramulla in October 1947.
Moved to act, she issued her appeal to Indians in general and to Hindus in particular.
Why did she not tell her own people- as the Mahatma had done- to meekly submit to Herr Hitler?
“Is it for this that we have taken our Freedom?” she asked:
She spent the last 22 years of her life in Austria. That's where her Freedom took her. Hitler came from Austria. Sadly, her people had not shown the fellow much love. Instead they kept trying to blow him up with their bombs.
“Not to be the Land of Light, but to be the Land of Darkness?”
India continued to be the Land of Blathershites till 1962. Then, it occurred to Indians that maybe Gandhi and Nehru & Co. were hypocritical cunts who had indulged their own ego at the expense of their country.
What was the end game of these religious fundamentalists calling themselves ‘Hindus’? What was the sort of country they would create if they triumphed?
An India with a smaller Muslim population and a stronger Army and Economy.
The India that Hindu extremists dreamed of, wrote Mira, “would be peopled by a race of self-styled, Superior Beings,
a Mahatma is a very Superior Being indeed.
whose spiritual intolerance
Gandhi was spiritually intolerant.
would be the very negation of true Hinduism.
as represented by the Bhagavad Gita which the lady- like the Mahacrackpot- had been introduced to in an English translation.
All Muslims would be ruthlessly uprooted from their ancestral homes and driven out, and in this state of affairs it would be surprising if the other non-Hindus did not share the same fate.”
Lots of Muslims were ruthless uprooted from their ancestral homes by the Custodian of Evacuee Property under Nehru through the Fifties and into the Sixties.
Mira ended her appeal with this stirring paragraph, which I must quote in full: “But my heart and mind refuse to accept this repulsive picture as inevitable.
Did that heart and mind accept the repulsive picture of the Mahacrackpot sleeping naked with his own grand-niece?
The Hindu nature will first regain its balance,
said an unbalanced English woman
and realize that it has been led into the darkness by
Romain Rolland, who ended up worshipping Stalin
a fanatical group of people who have become poisoned by the very thing they detest. It is no remedy for an evil to try and outdo it in its own line.
Vinobha Bhave and JP and other such nutters did try to outdo the Mahacrackpot in his own line.
The public must call a halt and think for themselves what is happening to them. Under the influence of fanatical propaganda they are blindly reviling the great leaders who brought them out of the Slough of Despond on to the dizzy heights of Freedom.
This silly woman came to India in 1925. She did not understand that Gandhi's unilateral surrender in February of 1922 was the reason that Hindu-Muslim unity dissolved and also that India didn't get what Ireland and Egypt and Afghanistan got in that very year. Gandhi's every big political campaign ended with the Viceroy being more firmly in the saddle than before.
If they heed not those men today, they will slip over the precipice into the dark abyss.”
Heeding Gandhi turned out to have been the worst mistake India could make. That is the lesson History teaches all Indians save those, like Guha, who are condemned to teach it.
Mira’s appeal to her fellow Indians was published in the last weeks of 1947.
A dozen years later she returned to Europe and Beethoven mania. Guha, too, we fondly hope, will move to Vienna once Ranajit pops his clogs.
As I write this column, seventy-five years later, her appeal seems strikingly relevant to the country we now live in.
This silly fellow thinks Modi is Hitler.
Her statement about “the word of Truth trampled underfoot by the very people who call themselves Hindus” applies, word for word, to the activities of the BJP’s IT cell.
Guha, thankfully, is not a Hindu. He is a British Admiral's daughter and soon he will go and settle in the Vienna Woods and Ghost of Beethoven will fuck him in the ass. Oh! The Joy!
Her description of the imaginary Hindutva nation as “peopled by a race of self-styled, Superior Beings, whose spiritual intolerance would be the very negation of true Hinduism” perfectly describes the ideology of the party in power in India today.
Some mean people are saying to Guha- 'You are not really an aristocratic European lady. You are Indian. What's worse, you are Hindu by birth and heritage.' He replies, 'If I were really Indian- as you wickedly aver- would I find the best description of India today was actually given by a crazy White lady 75 years ago?'
In the immediate aftermath of Partition, Hindutva ideologues wished that “all Muslims would be ruthlessly uprooted from their ancestral homes and driven out” to Pakistan; now, they have modified that ambition to ensuring that Muslims who are Indian citizens must acknowledge their theological, cultural, political, and social subordination to Hindus.
That was Nehru's achievement. Come to think of it, Indira was pretty quick to put Muslims in their place in the Eighties.
Can the Hindu mind regain its balance, shed its belief in its religious and political supremacy, and truly embrace the secular and pluralistic ideals of the freedom struggle?
The INC should have left Annie Beasant in charge. There should have been a deal such that Muslims gave up cow-slaughter in return for support on Khilafat. India would then have got provincial autonomy in 1922 and Independence in 1924 once Labor was in power. But Gandhi didn't like Beasant. He thought he was a bigger Mahatma than any the Theosophical Society venerated. So he promised devotion to Khilafat without any reciprocal commitment on cow-slaughter. But, in Indian law, such a transaction (i.e. one where no consideration passes) is considered 'benami'- bogus. The Muslims realized this in 1922 when Gandhi unilaterally surrendered. Moreover, it turned out that the Viceroy had been lobbying Whitehall on their behalf. Muslims- like the Ali brothers- had fallen for a cheap Bania trick.
Back in the winter of 1947-48, it was able to do so for two reasons; first, a fast by Gandhi, where the extraordinary moral and physical courage of a seventy-eight-year-old man shamed the citizens of Delhi into a vow of communal amity;
Which was wholly bogus. Muslims were still having to flee and those who wanted to return were turned back. Emigration from Delhi and surrounding areas continued till 1971 when the border was closed. Muslim Delhites had seen the writing on the wall in 1923 itself. They knew what their fate would be once the Brits left. From being a third of the population in 1947 (which was still much lower than what it had been in 1857) Muslims fell to being around five percent. That was under Congress. It is a myth that the INC pampered or protected Muslims. But that is why Congress was popular with Hindus! It was the muscular right arm of Hinduism. The RSS was merely a provincial copy of the Seva Dal. Indeed, Hegdewar was a pal of Hardikar and only set up his outfit as an 'over-ground' alternative to the Congress outfit.
and second, the assassination of Gandhi, which shamed Hindus everywhere into shunning organisations such as the RSS and the Mahasabha,
Congress killed or destroyed the property of plenty of Brahmins in Pune. Later, in 1984, it was the turn of the Sikhs in Delhi to feel the wrath of the Seva Dal- headed by Jagdish Tytler.
in whose crucible the killers of the Mahatma had been raised.
Congress violence against Maharashtrian Brahmins was mindless. Theirs was a Gandhian crucible- right?
Apart from shaming ordinary Hindus, Gandhi’s assassination had the further, and vital, consequence of bringing Jawaharlal Nehru and Vallabhbhai Patel back together.
Both Patel and Nehru knew that the Army wouldn't fire on Hindus. So there was little they could do except wait things out and tell lies about what was happening. I suppose, they had finally understood that the Freedom Struggle hadn't actually produced Freedom at all. Still, they had done a deal with the Brits and it was in their interest to pretend that sulking in jail was actually 'fighting for Independence'. One new enemy enabled this- viz. the challenge posed by the Communists. That's when Nehru secured his hold on power. He showed ruthlessness in dealing with the Reds but, in compensation, moved Congress to the Left.
The prime minister and the home minister had been on testy terms in the months following Independence; however, following the murder of their mutual Master, they nobly chose to bury their differences.
Patel was in the weaker position. Without the Mahatma he was nothing. Nehru could always lurch to the left and leave the old Gandhians stranded.
Much as BJP propagandists may try, they cannot efface the historical truth that in those crucial years, 1948 to1950, Nehru and Patel were comrades, not rivals, working shoulder-to-shoulder in uniting a nation from its fragments and building an institutional template for its democratic future.
Had Jinnah lived a little longer, the same may have been said of Jinnah and Liaquat.
Gandhi’s fast, Gandhi’s murder, and the coming together of Nehru and Patel all played their part in vanquishing the forces of Hindutva in those first, fraught years of Indian independence.
Congress wasn't 'Hindutva' only because it was Casteist. Brahmins and Kayasthas grabbed everything. The OBCs were treated with disdain. One reason Nehru wanted free food from America- though Truman had humiliated him- was that an agricultural country which can feed and defend itself is one where farmers take power away from Barristocrats.
Are there any lessons from that distant past for our contentious present?
Yes. Guha will go to Vienna- once Ranajit dies- and Ghost of Beethoven will bugger him senseless. Oh! The Joy!
In 1947-48, Hindutva was an insurgent force, attacking the State from the outside;
No. Hindutva was an insurgent force at the time of Vivekananda and Aurobindo and Savarkar and Subramaniyam Bharati. But the Great War changed things. The age of Empires was over. The treaty of Lausanne had shown that Religion mattered more than Language in determining Nationality. Greek speaking Muslims went to Turkey. Turkish speaking Christians went to Greece. Thus, the only question was whether India could gain Independence without Partition. The Mahacrackpot claimed to have a magical way to bring this about which involved spinning wheels and everybody giving each other enemas while chanting Ahimsa and going meekly to jail every now and then. Meanwhile his financiers gained wealth and power. Nehru, taking a Socialist tack, brought the money-men under control. That was why the Brahmins and Kayasthas liked him.
now, it commands the very levers of State power, and
India is doing better than ever before- at least where the BJP is well entrenched.
is seeking to bend every institution (including the judiciary and the military) to its will.
Guha thinks the military should have a will of its own. We must catch up with Pakistan in that respect. As for a self-selecting Judiciary- why does England or America or Europe not have any such thing? The answer, I suppose, has to do with Ghost of Beethoven.
What combination of crises, catastrophes and visionary leadership will it take for Hindutva to be dislodged from power?
All Indians ask is to have a better alternative to whichever bunch of politicians is currently fucking up their State. At the National level, would it be too much to ask to have a rival Prime Ministerial candidate other than, the moon-calf, Rahul?
Or could it be that the Hindu mind shall never regain its balance, condemning us all to a divisive and destructive future?
Not all of us. Once Ranajit dies, Guha can go off to the Vienna woods where he will be buggered by the Ghost of Beethoven. Oh! The Joy!
On how those questions shall be answered in the months and years ahead the future of our Republic may depend.
The future of the Indian Republic depends on getting girls out of the countryside into big factory dormitories. Boys can do construction or security or migrate to join the unorganized sector. That's it. That's the whole story. Religion doesn't matter. Doing sensible things for the Economy is all that matters.
Guha is a Tambram. Thanks to the Brahmin attachment to the Mahacrackpot, Brahmins became pariahs in Tamil Nadu. But the economy did better as the non-Brahmin majority took control. Brahmins gained because T.N became more educated and more prosperous. It is not a bad thing for a minority to lose a superiority complex and for them to learn to rub along with everybody else. Muslims in non-Muslim countries understand this perfectly well. So do Hindus. There is no point spending all your time cultivating a sense of grievance or a Manichean world view according to which 'majoritarianism' is always evil. Still, for Guha one final apotheosis awaits- buggery at the hands of the Ghost of Beethoven in the Vienna Woods. Oh! The Joy!
