Back in 1986, Amartya Sen, giving the Elmhirst Lecture, told his audience the story of Alfred Marshall getting very angry with a student who claimed that all the great economists of the world had less understanding of how the world works than a 10 year old child. This may be true but economists earn more that 10 year old children. Why? Well, if a large amount of money is being spent on some project, one may as well spend a small amount of money on some Pandit to turn up and explain why this will please the Gods or contribute to GDP or some other such mumbo jumbo. Obviously, Pandits ought not to appear too worldly wise- otherwise they would be accused of hypocrisy, rather than pure imbecility.
Sen said-
"Practical" people are easily convinced that they know precisely what the problem is, and even though what they "know" with such certainly varies from person to person, they are impatient with the economists' tendency to use complicated ideas to tackle apparently simple problems.
Economists don't tackle problems. If they did, we'd call them businessmen or administrators or politicians or philanthropists. Economists are brought in by practical people so as to muddy the waters and fatigue their opponents.
What may be called "instant economics" has always appealed to the quick-witted layman impatient with the slow-moving economist.
This is because action has to be instant to avoid death or decline.
In the field of hunger and food policy, the need for speed is of course genuinely important, and this impatience does have considerable sense. But instant economics is also dangerously deceptive, particularly in this field.
No. Only if instant economics is not applied instantly would there be any problem for which economists could get paid a little money to gas on about.
Millions of lives depend on the adequacy of the policy response to the terrible problems of hunger and starvation in the modern world.
No. Millions of lives are endangered by very poor people having lots of kiddies whom they can't feed or educate. Human beings evolved to have alternative sources of food supply and to be able to walk away from regions of dearth. However, 'stationary bandits'- i.e. States- sometimes preferred to restrict mobility so as to extract more rent.
Past mistakes of policy have been responsible for the death of many millions of people and the suffering of hundreds of millions,
Sometimes letting or forcing tens of millions starve increases the power of the State. More generally a food availability deficit can enrich and increase the power of some influential people.
and this is not a subject in which short-cuts in economic reasoning can be taken to be fairly costless.
This is a subject where common sense and administrative ability, not economic reasoning, is required
One common feature of a good deal of instant economics related to food and hunger is impatience with investigating the precise mechanisms for acquiring food that people have to use.
People acquire food from their market or other distributor and/or their own food store.
People establish command over food in many altogether different ways.
No. They establish command over food in one and the same way- viz. by gaining legal title to it or simply eating it.
For example, while a peasant owning his land and the product of his labour simply owns the food produced,
No. The Government may refuse him title to the food he has produced. This may be for a good reason- e.g. the crop may harbor some disease and thus must be destroyed- or it may be for a bad reason. The Government may want the peasant to starve or relocate.
a wage labourer paid in cash has to convert that wage into a bundle of goods, including food, through exchange.
Peasants too use the market. Nobody grows all the things needed for their diet. Salt and Sugar and cooking oil and milled flour and so on are bought and paid for.
The peasant does, as it were, an exchange with "nature", putting in labour, etc., and getting back the product, viz. food.
Peasants too use the market. Sen did not understand this.
The wage labourer does repeated exchanges with others in the society - first his labour power for a wage and then the wage for a collection of commodities including food. We cannot begin to understand the precise influences that make it possible or not possible to acquire enough food,
unless we are in the food business and know about crop forecasts and fertilizer prices and transport bottlenecks and the activities of speculators etc. Economists don't have this knowledge. Still, one can generally predict in advance that they will talk bollocks, so drag them in if you want to delay things while appearing to take the problem seriously.
without examining the conditions of these exchanges and the forces that govern them. The same applies to other methods of acquiring food, e.g., through share-cropping and getting a part of the produce, through running a business and making a profit, through selling services and earning an income, and so on.
begging, prostitution, theft, and so on. But to understand these methods of acquiring food we would have to understand productivity and capability- e.g. why a pretty girl can get a lot of food by having sex with people whereas I can't even if I dress like P. Chidambaram. In other words, you would have to first understand everything before beginning to understand what is known by 'practical people'.
I shall call the problem of establishing command over commodities, in this case food, the "acquirement problem", and it is easy to establish that the acquirement problem is really central to questions of hunger and starvation in the modern world.
The 'acquirement problem' relating to gaining command over breathable air is really central to the question of drowning and asphyxiation in the modern world. But air, unlike food, isn't scarce. It is not an economic good. If you identify a 'problem' as central to a topic in economics and then discover it is also central to something outside economics then you know you are barking up the wrong tree.
The acquirement problem is often neglected not only by non-economists, but also by many economists, including some great ones. For example, Malthus in his famous Essay on the Principle of Population as It Affects the Further Improvement of Society (1798) leaves the acquirement problem largely unaddressed, though in his less known pamphlet An Investigation of the Cause of the Present High Price of Provisions (1800), which deals with more short-run problems, Malthus is in fact deeply concerned precisely with the nitty-gritty of this problem The result of this neglect in the former work is not without practical consequence, since the popularity of the Malthusian approach to population and food, and of the particular metric of food output per head extensively used in the Essay on Population , has tended to give that metric undue prominence in policy discussions across the world.
This is crazy shit. It is obvious that if output per head falls below a threshold, some will starve while all will pay higher prices. Two things are needful. Boost output and try to reduce population growth. That is what the world has done. Sen, being a useless tosser, wants economists to get paid for talking time-wasting bollocks because this solves their 'acquirement problem' regarding income and prestige. Because Sen came from a starving shithole he got intellectual affirmative action and a pat on the back for being the Mother Theresa of Economics. But this didn't help his own people.
Malthusian pessimism, based on the expectation of falling food output per head, has not been vindicated by history.
English history- sure. Bengali history- not so much.
Oddly enough, what can be called "Malthusian optimism", i.e., not being worried about the food problem so long as food output grows as fast as - or faster than - population, has often contributed substantially to delaying policy response to growing hunger (against a background of stationary or rising food output per head).
No it hasn't. We don't worry about shit which won't get us a promotion or the sack. One may as well say 'Respiratory optimism' has contributed substantially to delaying scuba divers from strapping on their oxygen tanks before plunging into the ocean. This could contribute to a massive increase in drowning incidents among the scuba diver community. The Government must, as a matter of urgency, constitute a high level committee of leading Social Scientists to combat this unwarranted optimism.
This is a serious enough problem in the case of intensification of regular but non-extreme hunger (without starvation deaths but causing greater proneness to morbidity and mortality), and it can be quite disastrous in the context of a famine that develops without a decline in food output per head, with the misguided focus leading to a hopelessly delayed response of public policy.
food availability matters. Output doesn't necessarily. That's how come we don't starve during winter.
While Malthus' own writings are by no means unique in focussing attention on the extremely misleading variable of food output per head, "Malthusian optimism", in general, has been indirectly involved in millions of deaths which have resulted from inaction and misdirection of public policy.
Drowning deaths are the direct result of inaction and misdirection of public policy due to 'Respiratory optimism'. How are people to know that oxygen is not freely available underwater? Not even Adam Smith has mentioned this. Wake up sheeple! Only a PhD in the Capabilities approach can save you from drowning or asphyxiation.
While fully acknowledging the great contribution that Malthus has made in highlighting the importance of population policy, this negative feature of his work, related to his own bit of instant economics, must also be recognised. The neglect of the acquirement issue has far-reaching consequences.
Malthus should have explained that people need to grow food. Moreover, they must eat that food so as to derive nourishment. Another great lacuna in his work is that he does not mention the necessity of respiration and not jumping into the ocean with lead weights so as to take a stroll along the ocean floor. This could cause air 'acquirement failure' and lead to death by drowning.
For many years rational discussion of the food problems of the modern world was distracted by undue concentration on the comparative trends of population growth and the expansion of food output, with shrill warnings of danger coming from very respectiable quarters.
This led to science and technology being used to boost food output and improve storage and transportation. Furthermore, contraceptive technology greatly improved permitting many countries to undergo demographic transition sometimes with Government help.
The fear of population outrunning food output in a global scale has certainly not been realized,
For the reason mentioned above.
and the world food output per head has steadily risen.
because of people like F.A.O's B.R. Sen not this vacuous cretin.
This has, however, gone hand in hand with intensification of hunger in some parts of the world.
Because population has grown but income has stagnated or fallen.
In many - though not all - of the affected countries, food output per head has in fact fallen,
but transport and storage has improved
and the anxiety about these countries has often been anchored to the statistics of food output per head, with Malthtsian worries translated from the global to the regional or cotntry level. But a casual analysis of the persistence and intensification of hunger and of thel development of famines does, in fact, call for something more than attention being paid simply to the statistics of food output per head.
Which is why other statistics and sample data were used. Sen is trying to reinvent the wheel.
I shall have more to say on the policy questions presently, but before that I would like to discuss a bit further the nature and implications of the acquirement problem. I shall also discuss some arguments that relate to studying food 8 and hunger in terms of what in my book, Poverty and Famines, was called the "entitlement Approach".
Which already existed in India. There was a public distribution system and ration cards and fair price shops and 'Food for work' and so forth. The constraint was income. That had to grow or else charity had to be solicited.
That approach has been extensively discussed, examined, criticised, applied as well as extended, and I have learned a lot from these contributions. But the approach has also been occasionally misinterpreted, and given the importance of the subject of food policy and hunger, I shall permit myself the self-indulgence of commenting -inter alia - on a few of the points that have been made in response to my earlier analysis. 2. Famines and Entitlements The entitlement approach provides a particular focus for the analysis of famines. It does not specify one particular causation of famine - only the general one that a famine reflects widespread failure of entitlements on the part of substantial sections of the population.
This is nonsense. Entitlements may not exist. In Bengal there was a Famine Code and so we can speak of an entitlement to food from the Government- but if there was a Muslim League Administration , you were shit out of luck. However, in many parts of the world there was no entitlement to food whatsoever.
Such failure can arise from many different causes. The entitlement of a person stands for the set of different alternative commodity bundles that the person can acquire through the use of the various legal channels of acquirement open to someone in his position.
There were plenty of places where there was no law whatsoever.
In a private ownership market economy, the entitlement set of a person is determined by his original bundle of ownership (what is called his "endowment") 9.
No. There is no deterministic relationship between what one is entitled to, by law, and one's endowment. To give an example, an enemy alien may own lots of stuff but may be malnourished because they are in an internment camp.
Note that the use of the expression "entitlement" here is descriptive rather than prescriptive'. A person's entitlements as given by the legal system, personal circumstances, etc., need not command any moral endorsement. This applies both to the opulent entitlements of the rich and to the meagre entitlements of the poor. One of the points to emerge was the recognition that "famine deaths can reflect legality with a vengeance"
Or corruption or catastrophe or the breakdown of the rule of law. Of course, there may be a law which says that such and section section of the population must be denied any type of food. In that case, if the law is enforced, famine deaths will indeed reflect a particular law. But it won't reflect 'legality' because the latter concept is non arbitrary.
...and the various alternative bundles he can acquire starting respectively from each initial endowment, through the use of trade and production (what is called his "exchange entitlement mapping").
The problem here is that we don't know our 'endowment' and we don't know what alternative bundles we can acquire. Nobody does. All we can do is make a guess or just do what we normally do and hope it still works.
This is not the occasion to go into the formal, characterisation of endowments, exchange entitlement mappings, entitlement sets, etc.; I have spelt these out in some detail - some would say painful detail - elsewhere (in my book Poverty and Famines).
Only an omniscient God could actually use that conceptual apparatus.
A person has to starve if his entitlement set does not include any commodity bundle with enough food.
Unless he has a legal entitlement to be fed or else he can gain a loan or charity. I suppose you could count this as 'endowment' but the problem is nobody really knows how much they can borrow or who will be charitably disposed to help them.
A person is reduced to starvation if some change either in his endowment (e.g., alienation of land, or loss of labour power due to ill health), or in his exchange entitlement mapping (e.g., fall in wages, rise in food prices, loss of employment, drop in the price of the good he produces and sells), makes it no longer possible for him to acquire any commodity bundle with enough food.
No. A person is reduced to starvation if he can't get food. His wealth may be the same, his wage may be the same, prices may be the same, but if no one will sell or give him food- he starves. This may be because prices are fixed and food has disappeared from the market or it may be because he and his ilk are being 'boycotted'.
I have argued that famines can be usefully analysed in terms of failures of entitlement relations.
Only if drowning is usefully analysed in terms of a failure of respiratory entitlement.
The advantages of the entitlement approach over more traditional analysis in terms of food availability per head were illustrated with case studies of a number of famines, e.g., the Bengal famine of 1943,
which was caused by the greed and incompetence of Bengali politicians just like the Bangladesh famine of 1974
the Ethiopian famines of 1973 and 1974,
which was the fault of the regime
the Bangladesh famine of 1974, and the Sahel famines in the early seventies. In some of these famines food availability per head had gone down (e.g., in the Sahel famines); in others there was no significant decline.
Practical people could quickly spot why the thing was happening. Sen-tentious shite was about pretending no politician was at fault. Some long dead economist had made a mistake and then everybody had put 'unwarranted emphasis' on the wrong metric and so the only way to solve the problem of Hunger is by giving Sen a Nobel prize.
That famines can occur even without any decline in food output or availability per head makes that metric particularly deceptive.
But that metric is seldom available. If it its, then there are also superior forecasting tools available to administrators and arbitrageurs.
Since food availability is indeed the most commonly studied variable, this is a source of some policy confusion. It also makes "Malthusian optimism" a serious route to disastrous inaction.
Not by arbitrageurs. They make their money by anticipating events.
In Poverty and Famines two broad types of famines were distinguished from each other, viz. boom famines and slump famines
There are no boom famines. There can be War famines. True, some may see a War as a 'boom' but that is not the usual view.
. A famine can, of course, occur in a situation of general decline in economic activity (as happened, for example, in the Wollo province of Ethiopia in 1973, due to a severe drought).
Ethiopia's periodic famines had a political component. Areas of unrest and resistance were targeted and famine death was a weapon.
But it can also occur in over-all boom conditions (as happened, for example, in the Bengal famine of 1943, with a massive expansion of economic activity related to war efforts).
War conditions means imports were cut off and some activities- e.g. fishing- were curtailed. There was no 'over-all boom'. Some industries boomed, others languished.
If economic expansion is particularly favourable to a large section of the population (in the case of the Bengal famine, roughly the urban population including that of Calcutta) , but does not draw into the process another large section (in the Bengal famine, much of the rural labouring classes), then that uneven expansion can actually make the latter group lose out in the battle for commanding food.
Only if nobody gives a shit about them. Bengal's elected leaders preferred to make money or just make Hindus the scapegoat rather than bestir themselves to provide relief as mandated by law.
In the food battle the devil takes the hindmost, and even a boom condition can lead to some groups losing their command over food due to the worsening of their relative position vis-a-vis the groups favoured by the boom.
For a political reason. Wars are an extension of politics.
It is also important to emphasize that the entitlement approach is consistent with many different detailed theories of the actual causation of a famine. While the approach identifies certain crucial variables, different theories of the determination of the values of these variable may all be consistent with the general entitlement approach. For example, the entitlement approach does not specify any particular theory of price determination, but relative prices are quite crucial to the entitlements of various occupation groups.
Only if prices are market clearing. If they are administered then what matters is who has a ration book or other quota to buy at the established price. Those who don't have the ration book may starve.
The entitlement approach by itself does not provide - nor is it intended to provide - a detailed explanation of any famine, and such an explanation would require supplementation by more specific theories of movements of prices, wages, employment, etc., causing particular shifts in the entitlements of different occupation groups. What the entitlement approach does is to take up the acquirement problem seriously.
Starving people and people who care about starving people care about the underlying problem which does not have to do with 'acquirement' but rather with supply. Simply giving people money or a ration book does not solve the problem. There has to be food in the shops or food in the community kitchens for starvation to be avoided. The entitlement approach is mischievous because only one thing matters- viz. food availability for famine relief.
Rather than arbitrarily making some implicit assumption about distribution (such as equal division of the availble food, or some fixed pattern of inequality in that division), it analyses acquirement in terms of entitlements, which in a private ownership economy is largely a matter of ownership and exchange (including of course production, i.e., exchange with nature).
This is nonsense. In a private ownership economy there are various types of insurance and arbitrage. One such has to do with paying taxes to the Government so it can maintain buffer stocks and a public distribution system just in case some catastrophe befalls. Of course, as happened in Bengal, a transition to democracy could cause shitty politicians to let millions starve while some of their supporters got very rich. But that is a political failure, not a matter for economists at all. True, if you are a dictator planning to create a famine, hiring Sen as an economic advisor may shield you from blame. Actually, that isn't true. Everybody knows Sen is a cretin.
I would claim that this is not in any way a departure from the old traditions of economics. It is, rather, a reassertion of the continuing concern of economics with the mechanism of acquiring commodities.
Sadly, Sen and other such mathematical economists haven't studied the relevant mechanism. They don't know how the relevant markets actually operate. I recall a friend of mine who had gone to my part of the world to research cereal markets showing me a picture of how deals are struck in the grain market. Two men are shaking hands with a ceremonial cloth placed over their hands. Was this a Dravidian custom? Did the cloth sanctify the deal? No. These guys were using hand gestures to spell out the details of the deal. In other words though there was a public auction with a large number of participants, the price had been fixed in advance by a cartel. However market share was determined by this silent and secret type of bargaining. The peasants well understood that the purpose of the cloth was to hide what one hand was saying to the other.
Economics should be concerned with mechanism design- e.g. improving auctions like the one described above. It shouldn't be about saying there is an acquirement problem and a respiration problem and so forth.
If I had the courage and confidence that Gary Becker shows in his distinguished work in calling his own approach "the economic 15 approach , I would have called the entitlement approach by the same bold name.
Becker's approach helps you cut through bullshit. Sen's approach is to shit copiously on everything while virtue signalling like crazy.
While the price of timidity is to shy away from such assertive naming, I would nevertheless claim that economic traditions stretching back centuries do. in fact, direct our attention to entitlements in analysing problems of wealth, poverty, deprivation and hunger. This is clear enough in Marx's case,
No it isn't. He thought poverty and hunger would remain till the industrial proletariat were sufficiently advanced to do away with Capitalism. They would then help agriculture become fully mechanized. All this depended on future technological breakthroughs.
but the point is often made that Adam Smith was a great believer in the simple theory of food availability decline in explaining all famines, and that he would have thus had little patience for discussion of entitlements and their determinants.
Nonsense! Scotland had made parishes responsible for enumerating the poor and pushing beggars into work-houses. The population is an asset which must be made to do useful work.
Indeed, it is true that in his often-quoted "Digression concerning the Corn Trade and Corn Laws" in Book IV of the Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith did remark that "a dearth never has arisen from any combination among the inland dealers in corn,
because the cost of storing so much food would be high. Moreover, a mob would soon detect and grab any such hoard.
nor from any other cause but a real scarcity, occasioned sometimes, perhaps, and in some particular places, by the waste of war, but in by far the greatest number of cases, by the fault of the seasons" however, in understanding the point that Adam Smith is making here, it is important to recognise that he is primarily denying that traders could cause famine through collusion, and he is disputing the view that famines often follow from artificial shortages created by traders, and asserting the importance of what he calls "a real scarcity".
Speculators may want to collude so that stocks they bought up in advance can be sold at the highest price. However, this was easier when the stock was high value to weight and could be stored off shore- e.g. a bunch of ships delay landing till the price has hit the target.
We have to look elsewhere in the Wealth of Nations to see how acutely concerned Adam Smith was with the acquirement problem in analysing what he called "want, famine and mortality". I quote Smith from the chapter called "Of the Wages of Labour" from Book I of the Wealth of Nations:
But it would be otherwise in a country where the funds destined for the maintenance of labour were sensibly decaying. Every year the demand for servants and labourers would, in all the different classes of employments, be less than it had been the year before.
Not necessarily. Demand for unskilled labor at a subsistence wage may increase. Women and children as well as men of all classes might have to work.
Many who had been bred in the superior classes, not being able to find employment in their own business, would be glad to seek it in the lowest.
Which, ceteris paribus, means more employment as the self-employed or those of private means are obliged to become day labourers.
The lowest class being not only overstocked with its own workmen, but with the overflowings of all the other classes, the competition for employment would be so great in it, as to reduce the wages of labour to the most miserable and scanty subsistence of the labourer.
Indeed. But this might mean that labour intensive manufacturing or farming generates more jobs than before. Work is disutility. Lower income and wealth increased hours worked.
Many would not be able to find employment even upon these hard terms, but would either starve, or be driven to seek a subsistence either by begging, or by the perpetration perhaps of the greatest enormities. Want, famine, and mortality would immediately prevail in that class, and from thence extend themselves to all the superior classes...
Which is why laissez faire societies pay a little money in taxes for a 'night-watchman' state in which beggars are sent to the workhouse and criminals go to the galleys or chain gangs.
Here Adam Smith is focussing on the market-based entitlement of labourers, and its dependence on employment and real wages, and explaining famine from that perspective.
He does not mention famine. He says people will become beggars or criminals in which case, under the Scottish or English laws, they would be forced into either the workhouse or the prison. However, in the former case, 'rates' might rise. Thus it was sensible for the good folk of the parish to consider economic matters and take pre-emptive action. This might be 'sponsored emigration' or involve the setting up of new labour intensive manufacturing or other industries.
This should, of course, come as no surprise. In denying that artificial scarcity engineered by collusive traders can cause famine,
Adam Smith didn't deny it. He said that there must be a dearth for speculators to collude to keep up prices. That is a different matter. What he was concerned with was stupid and despotic actions by the administration- e.g. beating bakers because they put up the price of bread- or throwing solid citizens in jail on trumped up charges of hoarding.
Adam Smith was in no way closing the door to the economic analysis of various different real influences on the ability of different groups to command food in the market, in particular the values of wages and employment.
But this 'economic analysis' is what guys in the food business do! That's how they make their money.
Perhaps it is useful to consider another argument presented by another great classical economist, viz. David Ricardo,
a sensible man who made a lot of money for himself. However, he started talking nonsense once he got into politics
attacking the view that a famine cannot occur in a situation of what he calls "superabundance". This was in a speech that Ricardo wrote for delivery in Parliamenmt in 1822, using the third person for himself as if the speech is reported in the Hansard, though in the event Ricardo did not actually get to deliver the speech. The reference is to the famine conditions then prevailing in Ireland, and Ricardo examines the point made by another member of Parliament that this could not be the case since there was superabundance of food in Ireland at that time.
But says the honble. gentn. the people are dying for want of food in Ireland, and the farmers are said to be suffering from superabundance.
Protestants weren't. If Catholics were then God be thanked!
In these two propositions the honble. gentn. thinks there is a manifest contradiction, but he Mr. R could not agree with him in thinking so. Where was the contradiction in supposing that in a country where wages were regulated mainly by the price of potatoes the people should be suffering the greatest distress if the potato crop failed and their wages were inadequate to purchase the dearer commodity corn? From whence was the money to come to enable their to purchase the grain however abundant it might (be) if its price far exceeds that of potatoes.
The Catholics had been forced off their land and were subsisting on potatoes grown on their small holdings. The corn farmers were Protestants in the main. The more Catholics perished or emigrated, the safer the 'Ascendancy'. Sen doesn't get that this was a political matter.
He Mr. Ricardo should not think it absurd or contradictory to maintain that in such a country as England where the food of the people was corn, there might be an abundance of that grain and such low prices as not to afford a renumeration to the grower, and yet that the people might be in distress and not able for want of employment to buy it, but in Ireland the case was much stronger and in that country there should be no doubt there might be a glut of corn, and a starving people.
This is a political statement. Ricardo's speech was attacking that of another politician who blamed the 1819 currency act for the current 'deflation'. The phrase 'farmer vs fundholder'- with the former suffering and the latter gaining- summed up the political cleavage of the period. Since Ricardo was a financier and represented the interests of the City, he naturally tried to show that there was no connection between the monetary shock occasioned by returning to the gold standard and the distress of which his opponent spoke. Sen is either very very stupid or utterly disingenuous. It is clear that, from a Keynesian point of view, Ricardo was wrong. He was defending his class interest with spurious arguments. In the above passage he is hinting at the Corn Law which protected the landowners. If you guys go after the gold standard then us guys in the City will come after your Corn Laws. The mention of Ireland adds a whiff of insurrectionary grapeshot.
Sen, cretin that he is, pretends Ricardo greatly cared about starving people. But then, he too pretends he is afflicted by that curious foible.
There is indeed nothing surprising in the fact that economists should be concerned with the acquirement problem, and dispute the instant economics that overlooks that aspect of the food problem based on confusing supply with command, as the "honourable gentleman" quoted by David Ricardo clearly did.
Nobody has any such instant economics. Consider a moment how Governments should respond to an exogenous shock emanating from the Ukraine war with respect to food prices. My 'instant economics' is that the 'income effect' of the change in relative prices should be sterilized in one way or another by the Government at least with respect to the working or vulnerable section of the population. Sen would be incapable of this clarity. Indeed, he'd never come up with any policy proposal but just ramble on instead about Malthus and Ricardo and how it is very very important that we distinguish 'supply' from 'command' even though supply means you command the thing in question and surrender it for a consideration after which it comes under the command of the guy whose demand for it was 'effective'- i.e. he had the cash to make it good.
It is a confusion that has recurred again and again in actual discussions of the food problem, and the need to move away from instant economics to serious analysis of the acquirement problem and the entitlement to food is no less today than it was in Ricardo's
For Sen maybe. The guy is a cretin. He never understood any Economics at all. He just wrote nonsense about nonsense saying it was very very vital that more and more of this nonsense be written because otherwise rampant starvation- not to speak of sodomy and suttee- would prevail.
It is not my purpose to assert that the entitlement approach is flawless as an economic approach to the problem of hunger and starvation.
It doesn't approach shit. It just remains an abstraction about which anything can be said. It has no informative value as it isn't operationalizable. Nobody knows what their own entitlements or capabilities are let alone what are those of other people. The thing is just hot air.
Several "limitations" of the entitlement approach were, in fact, noted in Poverty and Famines, including ambiguities in the specification of entitlement,
because it is only after you go to court that you find out what precisely the entitlement is.
the neglect of non-legal transfers (e.g., looting) in the disposition of food,
not to mention the neglect of cannibalism
the importance of tastes and values in causing hunger despite adequate entitlement,
Bengalis won't eat wheat- boo hoo!
and the relevance of disease and epidemic in famine mortality which extends far beyond the groups whose entitlement failures may have initiated the famine.
Disease is bad. We should scold it properly so it will go away.
To this one should also add that in order to capture an important part of the acquirement problem, to wit, distribution of food within a family, the entitlement approach would have to be extended.
No. You'd need specific measures- e.g. high calorie meals for workers in essential services provided in work canteens while children are provided with milk and suitable food in schools. Community workers need to visit homes to check on the elderly and vulnerable for whom 'meals on wheels' provision has to be made. All of this is ideographic not theoretical or nomothetic. The entitlements approach is a waste of time.
What of forecasting potential problems? Once again this is ideographic. The same methods used by arbitrageurs can be used by administrators. It is true you can't rely on
some mechanical formula on an "early warning system".
but administrators can justify their intuition by using such formulae. Indeed they have to do so in order to get a bigger slice of the budget.
The various information on prices, wages, outputs, etc., have to be examined with an economic understanding of the determinants of entitlements of the different occupation groups
This is impossible. Economic information is not information about legal entitlements nor can a picture of the past enable us to say what obtains now or will obtain in the future.
Some arbitrageurs and administrators did see the Ukraine war coming and built up stocks. Others were aware there could be a problem based on volatility in the future's market. But seeking to understand the 'determinants of entitlements' wouldn't have helped anybody prepare for what we now have.
and of the rich variety of different ways in which the entitlements of one group or another can be undermined.
These are discovered after the fact only if 'hedging' was insufficient. Otherwise it wouldn't register save for arbitrageurs involved in that day to day business.
The different processes involved not only vary a good deal from each other, they may also be far from straightforward. For example, in various famines some occupation groups have been driven to the wall by a fall in the relative price of the food items they sell, e.g., meat sold by pastoral nomads in Harerghe in the Ethiopian famine of 1974 , fish sold by fishermen in the Bengal famine of 1943.
There was a political or military aspect to both. Studying entitlements won't put an end to war or the policies of an oppressive regime. Why pretend otherwise?
These groups may survive by selling these food items and buying cheaper calories through the purchase of grains and other less expensive food. A decline in the relative price of meat or fish will, of course, make it easier for the richer parts of the community to eat better, but it can spell disaster for the pastoralist and the fisherman. The observed variables have to be examined in terms of their specific roles in the determination of entitlements of vulnerable groups to make sense of them as signals of turmoil
Why bother with 'signals of turmoil' when you can see that fucking turmoil for yourself in photographs or newsreels?
It has sometimes been argued that if a famine is not caused by a decline in food availability, then there cannot be a case for food imports in dealing with the famine.
Unless the people of that country are disgusting swine who enjoy gormandizing while throngs of beggars starve to death before their eyes. But even in this case you don't need to bring in imports. Just buy food and give it to the beggars. If plenty of food is available then though the gormandizers are disappointed, there is no famine.
This is, of course, a non sequitur, and a particularly dangerous piece of nonsense. Consider a case in which some people have been reduced to starvation not because of a decline in total supply of food, but because they have fallen behind in the competitive demand for food in a boom famine (as happened, for example, to rural labourers in the Bengal famine of 1943)•
Sen says that previously everybody was half starved. Then some got more money and they ate twice as much so as to have jutting bellies. This meant that some proportion of the poorest starved to death.
But the solution to this problem is obvious- rationing. England introduced rationing during the War. Why didn't Bengal? Was it because Bengali politicians are incompetent, corrupt and entirely callous of human lives?
The fact is that the prices are too high for these victim groups to acquire enough food. Adding to the food supply will typically reduce the food prices and help these deprived groups to acquire food.
But if sufficient food was available, imports only contribute to obesity.
The fact that the original rise in prices did not result from a fall in availability but from an increase in total demand does not make any difference to the argument.
Food supply is inelastic whereas demand- in the case of gormandizers- is elastic. A rise in income may lead to a rise in the purchase of high income elasticity foods- fish, cheese, butter- while the demand for 'Giffen goods'- potatoes, rice, wheat- will fall. Sen does not know basic economics.
Similarly, in a slump famine in which some group of people has suffered a decline in their incomes due to, say, unemployment, it may be possible to help that group by reducing the price of food through more imports.
During the Great Depression, some in America were malnourished. Would food imports have helped? No. The cost of transport of some agricultural commodities was so low that farmers were not selling their produce. The solution was fiscal and monetary expansion together with direct intervention to help the vulnerable.
What Sen has said is mischievous nonsense.
Furthermore, in each case import of food can be used to break a famine through public relief measures.
No. A situation where it is not profitable to shift food to where it is needed should not be cured by imports because that worsens the underlying problem. Suppose we pass a law saying nobody should wipe their own bum. Some people may find a partner to exchange bum wiping services. Others may pretend to have such a partner while secretly wiping their own bum. But some would have smelly and sticky bums. Is the solution to the problem importing sexy Swedish bum-wipers? Yes! Of course it is! It isn't the case that a stupid law should be overturned and the stupid politicians who passed should be given the order of the boot.
This can be done either directly in the form of food distribution,
why not sexy Swedish bum-wipers?
or indirectly through giving cash relief to the famine victims combined with releasing more food in the market to balance the additional demand that would be created.
In which case all that matters is food availability. Make sure there's plenty of food. Fuck the entitlements approach.
There are, of course, other arguments to be considered in judging pros and cons of food imports, including the problem of incentives for domestic food producers. But to try to reject the case for food imports in a famine situation on the simple ground that the famine has occured without a decline in food availability (if that is the case) is to make a straightforward mistake in reasoning.
The only mistake is to think food availability hasn't declined if more people are going hungry. Obviously, if you have a shitty way of aggregating food availability you will get wrong results.
A more interesting question arises if in a famine situation we are, for some reason, simply not in a position to get more food from abroad. Would a system of cash relief then be inflationary, and thus counterproductive?
Yes. Rationing is the way to go.
The answer is it would typically be inflationary, but not necessarily counterproductive.
It would be politically impossible. People may grumble at rationing. They go bonkers when you get an inflationary spiral which ends with guys using wheelbarrows full of cash to buy a loaf of bread.
Giving the famine victims more purchasing power would add to the total demand for food.
But then, at the margin, some quit work so as to qualify for monetary relief. This may reduce the supply of everything including food.
But if we want a more equal distribution of food, with some food moving from others to the famine victims, then the only way the market can achieve this (when the total supply is fixed and the money incomes of others cannot be cut) is through this inflationary process.
No. The market can achieve this by making peeps feel good about contributing to charity and volunteering in soup kitchens and so forth. Religion is very much a market phenomenon as are big Charities.
The additional food to be consumed by the famine victims has to come from others, and this may require that prices should go up to induce others to consume less, so that the famine victims - with their new cash incomes - can buy more.
But this causes cost-push inflation. The workers demand wage increases to compensate for the fall in their real income.
Thus, while having a system of cash reliefs is not an argument against food imports in a famine situation, that system can have some desirable consequences even when food imports are, for some reason, not possible.
Cash relief is one of the tools used. This can be in the form of tax rebates or family credit or one-off payments or something of that sort.
If our focus is on enhancing the entitlements of famine victims, the creation of some inflationary pressure - within limits - to redistribute food to the famine victims from the rest of the society may well be a sensible policy to pursue.
It may be inevitable. However if we are truly speaking of famine, then rationing is the way to go. Affluent countries can deal with malnourishment through Charity and Social Security and so forth.
All this is obvious to even a 10 year old child. Why was it not obvious to Sen and his stupid acolytes? The answer is that they were getting paid to be stupid. Indians in particular needed to show extreme imbecility to gain intellectual affirmative action. Sen reinvented the wheel- except it was square in shape- and got a pat on the back because, obviously, his starving shithole of a country didn't have wheeled vehicles of any sort. The little monkey was making progress. Give him another Nobel Prize and maybe the guy will invent fire by rubbing two pieces of ice together.
By the time Sen got to Cambridge, the West could no longer say 'we rule India because we are mentally superior to Indians' because India was independent. What they could do was keep Sen around so it would become obvious to White students why their ancestors had ruled his shithole. Sen may not have contributed to Food Security, but he has given us some food for thought concerning exactly how stupid and useless a vacuous buddhijivi can be.
