Economics has been defined as the science of choice under scarcity. This is misleading. Economic thinking is concerned with raising productivity- i.e. increasing the return on factors of production- and the best type of raised productivity is 'general purpose productivity'. In other words, if you are highly productive in field x, you can easily transfer to field y and make almost as much. If these two conditions are met, poverty and deprivation of every sort falls while the scope for exploitation too decreases. The Supply curve is not just shifting outward it is also becoming flatter such that less 'rent' is capturable.
Sadly, nobody explained this to Amartya Sen, though the thing is obvious enough.
Another thing else which is not clear to some economists and philosophers is that rights are only effective if they are linked to an incentive compatible remedy for their violation. This means it must be in the interests of the obligation holder to actually provide the remedy to all comers rather than severely ration it. If this does not happen there is entitlement collapse- at least at the margin. Thus, to makes rights effective requires raising productivity while doing 'mechanism design' so that it pays obligation holders to provide remedies in a timely and equitable manner.
In a recent paper on Sen & Human Rights, Polly Vizard
analyses the work of the Nobel Prize winning economist Professor Amartya Sen from the perspective of human rights.
There are no such rights unless remedies are provided for their violation.
It assesses the ways in which Sen’s research agenda has deepened and expanded human rights discourse in the disciplines of ethics and economics,
talking about a thing does not cause the thing to magically appear. The 'Twilight' novels may have deepened and expanded the discourse on vampires and werewolves. But no such creatures exist.
and examines how his work has promoted cross-fertilisation and integration on this subject across traditional disciplinary divides.
Who cares if useless academics teaching worthless shite sodomize or cross-fertilize each other?
The paper suggests that Sen’s development of a ‘scholarly bridge’ between human rights and economics is an important and innovative contribution that has methodological as well as substantive importance and that provides a prototype and stimuli for future research.
The correct scholarly bridge has to do with raising productivity in the supply of remedies to human rights violations and improving mechanism design so the product isn't inequitably rationed or remains subject to sudden disappearance.
It also establishes that the idea of fundamental freedoms and human rights is itself an important gateway into understanding the nature, scope and significance of Sen’s research.
But, since that research is useless, this is an idea which leads nowhere just as reading the Twilight novels isn't a gateway to meeting actual Vampires or Werewolves.
The paper concludes with a brief assessment of the challenges to be addressed in taking Sen’s contributions in the field of human rights forward.
There is no challenge. Just virtue signal like crazy and say things like 'the undeniable human right to undergo free and compulsory gender reassignment surgery as a baby has been atrociously breached by Donald Trump. I hate him. He is a Nazi. What's worse, he is a Nazi Werewolf.'
Sen’s Contributions in Ethics
Is poverty a denial of basic human rights?
No. Rights are justiciable. They are denied if a Court says nobody is obliged to provide the remedy. However, if the Court mandates an obligation holder to provide a remedy and if the obligation holder is unable to do so, or can refuse to do so with impunity, then the right is ineffective.
Poverty is a consequence of low productivity for a specific population which, in consequence, is unable to do 'risk-pooling' and thus insure itself against various calamities. There can be cross-subsidization between lower and higher productivity populations under a compulsory collective insurance scheme. There can also be charity. The problem is that it may come with strings attached and suddenly disappear when it is most needed.
The Universal Declaration on Human
Rights (1948)
is mere puffery. No justiciable rights arose by it.
establishes international standards in the field of poverty and
human rights
Nonsense! There still are no such standards.
– including the human right of everyone to a standard of living
adequate for health and well-being (including food, clothing, housing and
medical care and necessary social services) and to free and compulsory
elementary education.
What about the right to have gender reassignment surgery as a baby?
This cluster of human rights has long-since been codified
in international treaties in legally binding form and the international
recognition of poverty as a human rights issue has been strengthened in recent
years.
But 'international recognition' is worthless. The UN was supposed to stop one nation from seizing territory from a weaker neighbour. It failed miserably- assuming it actually tried.
the ‘capability approach’ developed by Sen and others provides a framework in
which freedom from poverty, hunger and starvation can be meaningfully
conceptualised as fundamental human rights that all governments have
obligations to respect, protect and promote (1.3).
Nonsense! Poverty was already conceptualized and measured before Sen was born as was hunger and malnourishment and starvation. In India, this happened in the 1880s. Sen's stupid 'capability' approach consists of saying something already known and accounted for- viz. some people, for health reasons or by reason of arduous labour, need more food, or food with different characteristics, than others. This led to different rations for different people in some countries during the Great War and was continued in one form or another in various countries including Lenin's Russia.
Hayek and Nozick suggest that impartiality in ethics
requires an ‘end-independent’ approach that focuses on procedures and rules,
rather than consequences, outcomes and results.
But they also suggest that their approach will lead to better outcomes.
This emphasis underlies
Hayek’s characterisation of individual freedom in exclusively negative terms —
it would be easy enough to recast them in positive terms
as the absence of coercion,
freedom is the positive ability to pursue happiness according to your own lights.
with coercion defined in terms of intentional
interference by other people in a protected individual domain.
i.e. a violation of a Hohfeldian immunity. This tends not to happen if you have a reputation for killing fuckers who try to fuck with you. That's plenty 'positive'.
He maintains that
this characterisation makes the evaluation of individual freedom independent of
(1) the fulfilment of individual needs, opportunities, desires and the ability or
effective power to fulfil particular goals
It would be easy enough to say that freedom is dependent on the ability to pursue happiness according to your own lights.
(2) the outcomes of impersonal
circumstances and processes (including competitive market allocations and the
outcomes of socio-economic processes of development and growth).
I regard Nature as my Aunty and open markets as my cousins. Thus all contingent circumstances are highly personal to me.
In Hayek’s view, positive rights ‘to
particular things’ are only possible in the context of voluntary agreements
and/or special relationships (such as tie-relationships)
Hayek wasn't that stupid. He understood that a guy who is known to be able to fuck over fuckers who try to fuck with him has positive rights which he himself enforces. No agreements are necessary. It is a different matter that a Justice system will recognize 'Hohfeldian incidents'. But this is true regardless of political regime. It wasn't the case that a thief was spared by a Soviet court though, no doubt, his class-origin would be taken into account. But the same thing happens in Liberal regimes, where poverty or addiction may be a mitigating factor.
and require the
assignment of responsibility to particular agents (in the form of counter-party
obligations to ensure that the benefits of the right are provided).
This is true of all Judicial systems.
As universal
claims they are indeterminate — because
that's how universals work. I may say 'I want to marry a Woman'. This is indeterminate because 'Woman' is a universal. The particular woman I propose to will have specific traits which mark her out uniquely.
there is no rational principle (or universal
rule) that can prescribe the particular actions that particular obligation holders
should undertake in specific situations.
Because that is how reality works. There is nothing sinister about this.
Hayek develops a critique of the
economic and social human rights enumerated in the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights in this context. He argues that these ‘rights’ represent positive claims to ‘particular things’ to which every human being is entitled but for
which no distinct agent is responsible; and that claims of this type cannot be
universalised within the framework of a free society.
Sure they can. The Government can say 'any poor person anywhere can claim a basic income from us.' Sadly, if this is actually done, the country would go bankrupt. But, before that happens, the Government might be overthrown by citizens who don't want to pay the necessary taxes to finance the altruism of the leader.
Incidentally, Sen may be useless but he isn't so crazy as to demand that any particular country take on the obligation to rescue foreigners from poverty. This begs the question, what does he actually demand? The answer is- nothing. He just says that we should discuss matter and discuss them some more and then canvass the opinions of 'impartial observers' from far away places and then evaluate the evaluating of evaluation till the cows come home. This is cool if you are a useless bureaucrat or an Academic teaching stupid shite who wants to sit on a particularly useless committee discussing whether foetuses have the right to undergo gender reassignment procedures funded by the tax-payer.
What is Sen's contribution? It is that some people may need more food than others. But this was already known before he was born and countries which had rationing gave more to those in certain categories or those with a Doctor's letter, etc.
In Sen’s view, focussing on ‘primary goods’ can
result in indifference to, and neglect of, the actual things that people can and do
achieve.
But it hadn't had that result even before Sen was born! He was ignorantly asserting something which had never been true!
The relationship between access to ‘primary goods’ and the things that
people can do and be is contingent and conditional, and can vary between
individuals, families and population goods.
This was already known which is why pregnant women and nursing mothers were given a different ration as were those doing arduous physical work- e.g. coal miners.
Sen came to the UK when food rationing still existed. Why does he not know that there was already a 'non-absolutist' Welfare model that was highly sensitive to consequences?
SUPPORT FOR A ‘NON-ABSOLUTIST’ MODEL THAT IS SENSITIVE TO CONSEQUENCES, OUTCOMES AND RESULTS The ‘capability approach’ also departs from other influential theories by providing a ‘non-absolutist’ model of fundamental freedoms and human rights that is sensitive to consequences, outcomes and results.
Courts and administrative tribunals have always taken a 'non-absolutist' approach.
The discussion in section 1.1 explored the ways in which ‘absolutist’ models attribute little or no role to consequences in ethical evaluation and suggest that fundamental freedoms and human rights should always take strict priority over other goals when there are conflicts.
Who cares about some shitty model in the mind of a useless pedagogue? Reality features 'concrete models'. If you want to be useful, that is what you concern yourself with.
All justiciable rights and obligations are defeasible. A particular court may give priority to 'principles' over 'outcomes in one case but not another. The 'ratio' is context dependent. Stare decisis only applies in another case if it is held that if the facts in the case are sufficiently similar
For example, in the Nozickian model, the set of libertarian rights (including rights to life, liberty and property) takes strict priority over other goals, with individual rights being characterised as constraints on individual action that are non-contingent (in the sense of applying in all circumstances), unqualified (in the sense that their violation is always wrong), and absolute.
But if Nozickian, or any other type of jurisprudence, has a concrete model then defeasibility will still obtain. Why? Defeasibility is the essence of the law. Sen must have read HAL Hart.
Sen has set out a far-reaching critique of this approach in the context of poverty, hunger and famines.
No he hasn't. He has babbled ignorant nonsense.
The libertarian specification of individual rights implies that endemic hunger and famines can arise with no violation of acknowledged rights,
not in countries like India and Bangladesh which had a Famine Code. East Bengal had two big famines during Sen's lifetime BECAUSE of the transition to Democratic (i.e. corrupt and incompetent) rule.
whilst ‘consequence independent’ ethical reasoning results in ‘indifference’ to consequences such as malnutrition and starvation.
So does 'consequence independent ethical reasoning which is deeply concerned with malnutrition and starvation. The fact is, Sen-tentious virtue signalling was the reason agricultural India refused to boost agricultural productivity. Food is Yuman Rite! Uncle Sam should feed us and then we should bite his hand.
For these reasons, Sen has proposed that the achievement of fundamental freedoms and human rights be evaluated in consequence-ethical systems that incorporate information about outcomes and results and of other forms of ‘complex multilateral interdependences’ involved in valuing fundamental freedoms and human rights in a society.
We have seen the consequences of universal human rights. It means you can't deport a homicidal rapist or terrorist. You have to pay to house and feed and educate his growing family of wannabe suicide-bombers.
The problem with 'Consequentialism' is that it is a double edged sword. Moreover, incessant woke virtue signalling creates a big backlash. With Trump's re-election, the penny should have dropped.
This broader informational base provides support for justified limitations on fundamental freedoms and human rights when there are sufficiently strong reasons (e.g. the limitation of property rights in order to prevent a famine).
The experience of Bengal is that such limitations reduce agricultural surpluses and directly lead to famine. The actual reason rights must be suspended is War or other National Emergencies. It is also the reason that a genocidal regime should give up the crazier aspects of its ideology for the duration of the conflict. If it doesn't, the country will be conquered.
Furthermore,
absolutist models can only provide support for a limited range of fundamental
freedoms and human rights that are in logical terms ‘co-possible’ —
No. An absolutist model featuring magical leprechauns can provide every type of right including that of simultaneously being Beyonce and a Walrus. It is reality which determines what is 'compossible'.
with the
feasibility of ‘complete realization’ being a condition of the admissibility of
rights-
Nonsense! Partial realization is good enough. What matters is that remedies are 'incentive compatible'.
based claims. In contrast, the ‘non-absolutist’ model recognises the
possibility of mutual conflicts and incompatibilities between fundamental
freedoms and human rights.
So do absolutist models. The leprechauns are always getting into fights with the unicorns. This is because unicorns carry away the pots of gold the leprechauns have stashed at the end of rainbows. The other thing is the unicorns distribute that gold to impoverished asylum seekers whom the xenophobic leprechauns hold in special loathing. Fortunately, in this absolute model, Santa Claus turns up to make peace between the leprechauns and the unicorns.
This broadens the scope of human rights-based
claims by supporting the admissibility of fundamental freedoms and human
rights that are limited by resources and other cost and feasibility constraints, and
by accommodating the possibility of hierarchies, balancing and trade-offs.
These were occurring before Sen was born. Sadly, the post-Trumpian world may give short shrift to woke virtue-signalling. If you care about Poverty so much why don't you marry it?
Sen has argued that the ‘capability approach’ provides grounds for far-reaching positive obligations of assistance and aid,
e.g. providing free and compulsory training in sodomy for senior citizens who may have never experienced it because of widespread homophobia when they were young.
as well as negative obligations of omission and restraint.
We must omit listening to and actively restrain 'deplorable' working class people complaining they can't afford to turn on the heating because the Green bastards have made fuel unaffordable while the fucking bleeding hearts have doubled their taxes so as to finance 'pay-for-slay' by jihadi nutjobs.
The valuation of ‘capability freedoms’ gives rise to associated claims on others to respect ‘capability freedoms’ (through non-interference) and to defend and support ‘capability freedoms’ (through positive acts of assistance and aid).
Why stop there? Why not value the valuing of the valuation of 'capability freedoms' so as to waste yet more time and money? That is bound to persuade deplorable people to hand over their entire income to the tax-man so it can be squandered in various politically correct ways.
Sen was related to B.R Sen who as head of the FAO persuaded Governments that famine was preventable- profitably so. But Herbert Hoover- later the POTUS- had done great things in getting food to starving people before Sen was born.
The Characterisation of Human Rights As ‘Goals’ In taking these ideas forward, Sen has argued that the greatest support for the elucidation of positive obligations of assistance and aid — including positive obligations to relieve poverty, hunger and starvation — may arise in moral structures that are ‘consequentialist but not welfarist’ .
Nonsense! The obligation only arises if your country is so very productive it has a huge surplus some small portion of which it can use for charitable purposes. Even then, we are only speaking of a 'moral' not a legal obligation- i.e. the thing isn't an obligation at all. It's just that you get higher marks for pretending you feel obliged for doing something which, let's face it, already has a reputational, not to speak of a soteriological, reward.
If rights are purely instrumental
if they aren't an instrument, they are merely metaphorical or 'cheap talk'
(e.g. as in the utilitarian moral approach) then there is no case for including the realization of rights in the specification of the fundamental objectives of a system.
An instrument has utility. People pay good money for spades because spades are an instrument of a useful sort. They help you grow potatoes. You can eat potatoes. They are tasty. You can't eat spades. Still, they can be valuable to have.
If on the other hand rights are viewed as fundamental, but are characterised in terms of negative libertarian constraints (as in the Nozickian framework), then individuals can pursue their self-interest within the system of negative constraints, but are not under positive obligations to pursue the goal of the maximisation of rights-fulfilments or the minimisation of rights-violations.
Unless that is what they are paid to do. It isn't the case that the plumber or the prostitute has a positive obligation in this respect.
In contrast, Sen contends that if ‘consequence-sensitive’ reasoning is adopted without the additional limitations imposed by welfarism
The two fundamental theorems of Welfare Economics impose no limitations of this type. On the contrary, they are based on the notion that effective rights to trade freely can generate the same result as the best a pure command economy can (but probably won't) achieve. In other words, you don't need a Dictator to flourish.
(i.e. if non-utility features including the intrinsic value of rights
rights have utility. People will pay for them even if only for prudential reasons. Moreover, if they aren't paid for, they may suddenly disappear when you need them most. It's all very well to defund the police but you may regret doing so if you aren't free to step out of your house without being mugged or raped.
are treated as fundamental), then human rights can be included among the goals of a ‘consequence-sensitive’ ethical system, with the achievement and nonachievement of human rights being reflected in the positive and negative evaluation of states of affairs.
Sadly, evaluations change nothing- unless they are done by smart people with the power and the motivation to improve outcomes. That is where Sen falls down. He is stupid and useless. Linking stupid useless shite to other useless stupid shite is a waste of time.
Imperfect obligations are not legally binding. One may say they are preferences of a contingent type- e.g. I would help you out but only if I won the lottery and Beyonce became my g.f.
SUPPORT FOR THE VALIDITY OF A THEORY OF HUMAN RIGHTS IN THE
CONTEXT OF ‘IMPERFECT OBLIGATIONS’
The characterisation of rights as goals
is foolish. Our goal is not to die. But there can be no right to live forever.
also breaks down the emphasis in some
theories on a binary correspondence between rights-fulfilments (and violations)
and the performance (and non-performance) of specific duties or actions,
why break this down? Every contract would become unenforceable. The Bank may decide it prefers to spend the money in your Savings account on coke whores. You have no legal recourse.
and
emphasises instead the tripartite relationship between agents, goals (or
outcomes) to which that agent has rights, and the associated obligations and
duties
There is no such relationship. It isn't the case that the fact that your Bank Manager really likes coke-whores is a good reason why he should be allowed to drain your savings account.
(This challenges theories that make
analytical space for the concept of positive obligation — but that maintain that,
in the field of poverty, hunger and starvation, positive obligations are not
associated with counter-party human rights.
They may be within a particular jurisdiction. Indeed, such is generally the case. The fact is, people don't want to see skeletal corpses littering the streets.
In responding to O’Neill, Sen has
argued that the introduction of ‘consequence-sensitive’ reasoning provides a
framework in which the value of human rights achievements and the disvalue of
non-realizations can be reflected in the evaluation of states of affairs.
Anything at all can be reflected in an evaluation. For standard Cost-Benefit Analysis, the fact that people pay for rights which they don't use is enough for them to have a mathematical representation. In a rough and ready fashion we can put a dollar figure to how much a country values not being invaded. We can also look at spending on buffer stocks to see how much the right to food, even under exigent circumstances, is valued. These are rights on which money is spent because of possible consequences.
This
evaluation is not contingent on the precise specification of duties or on legal
codification,
in which case it is simply wrong. All balances maintained for prudential reasons (so as to guard against entitlement collapse under adverse circumstances) are directly linked to specific duties and this is generally reflected in legal codes. Most societies have professional regulators who check that private and public capacity is sufficient to prevent entitlement collapse under exogenous shocks.
and in Sen’s view, the ‘consequence-sensitive’ approach provides
a basis for the conceptualisation of human rights that correspond to ‘imperfect’
as well as ‘perfect’ obligations.
It existed long before he was born. Why not suggest that a 'gravity-sensitive' approach provides a basis for us not floating off into Space?
SUPPORT FOR POLICIES AND PROGRAMMES AIMED AT THE ACHIEVEMENT OF FUNDAMENTAL FREEDOMS AND HUMAN RIGHTS
is provided by those who figure out how to raise productivity faster than the expansion of current obligations. If you aren't doing that, you aren't supporting shit. You are just wanking in a vacuous and verbose manner.
Whereas the Nozickian model makes the feasibility of ‘complete realization’ a condition of the admissibility of rights-based claims,
Nothing wrong with that if 'complete realization' is subject to a 'reasonable man' test- which is the case in Anglo-Saxon jurisdictions. Sen, sadly, is not a reasonable man.
Sen has argued that feasibility cannot be a condition of coherence,
in which case we must agitate for the right of unicorns to marry homosexual leprechauns while maintaining multiple identities as walruses, actuaries, and actuarial science curious leprechauns who, however, are actually just going to settle for Accountancy because they can't hack the Math.
and that fundamental freedoms and human rights based claims can be meaningful in the context of cost and feasibility-constraints.
Sadly, they will often turn out to be meaningless because of tax-payer backlash or the country going off a fiscal cliff.
Sen has reasoned that where there are resource constraints, the positive obligations associated with ‘capability-freedoms’ and ‘capability-rights’ may not relate directly to valuable states of being and doing (x) — that may be currently unachievable — but to policies and programmes p(x) that promote the achievement of (x) as an immediate or cumulative outcome.
This is already the case with every type of obligation. Suppose you supply me with electricity under a contract. By an 'act of God' your power plant blows up. You can't supply me electricity. I sue you. The Court finds in your favour because you are doing all you can to ensure I will get electricity as soon as possible.
The violation of obligations of this type involves the absence and inadequacy of policies and programmes p(x) — rather than the non-fulfilment of (x) per se ).
But everybody already knows about this! Sen's grandfather was a judge. Many of his relatives and friends were lawyers. At the very least, he must have read the newspapers and thus been aware that obligations are subject to a test of 'reasonableness'. If the obligations holder is doing everything that, reasonably speaking, they are obliged to do, they have a defence in law. However, Courts may reject this defence. It is worth looking at the ratio in such cases.
Still, what must be understood is that Courts have no magical power. They can issue an order but that order may be ignored. Medium to long term they get disintermediated from fields where they sought to play an 'activist' role or else there is a big political backlash.
Sen writes-
All societies and cultures comprise diverse elements.
but they all become progressively less diverse.
Elements within Western societies, cultures and philosophies that are consistent with and supportive of contemporary ideas about universal human rights have coexisted with other elements that are neither supportive nor consistent with the idea of human rights (e.g. slavery, sexism, racism and fascism).
All of which were present in non-Western societies in a worse form. Hitler was less of a tyrant than many a Sultan.
Similarly, elements in non-Western societies have co-existed with elements that are neither consistent with nor supportive of this idea.
No. There hasn't been 'co-existence'. One side has crushed the other side. Look at Sen's ancestral East Bengal. It is much less 'diverse' now than when he was born.
The historical antecedents of the ideas of fundamental freedoms and human rights are not exclusive to particular societies, religions or cultures.
Sadly, this isn't true. Western law burgeoned and developed as a result of growing divergence in productivity. That's why not just Western STEM subjects and Western political ideologies and styles of jurisprudence became dominant. Even Islamic Iran is a Republic which has pursued Western style codification of the law. Apart from clerics, its officials wear suits though they may not wear a tie.
The ideas from which contemporary concepts of human rights emerged
they were secularized versions of concepts in Christian theology and jurisprudence.
— ideas of universalism, tolerance and respect for human dignity and worth, traditions of freedom, traditions of concern for the poor, needy and exploited, and traditions of interpersonal obligation and government responsibility — have broad historical antecedents that are
not regionally constrained.
Fuck off! They are so regionally constrained that Sen's family ran the fuck away from the Muslim majority in East Bengal. Also, it is noticeable that Sen prefers to gas on about poverty from an Ivy League campus.
The work of non-Western thinkers (including tolerance, pluralism and
minority protection (Ashoka)
who slaughtered Jain monks till he discovered a Buddhist monk, a pal of his, had been killed by mistake
good government
based on having lots of spies and soldiers
and famine prevention
(Kautilya) and Akbar)
because starving people can't pay taxes to finance the employment of spies and soldiers
should be re-appraised in the light of these
principles
By 're-appraised' Sen means we should tell stupid lies about Akbar- who legalized same sex marriages- and Ashoka- who underwent gender reassignment surgery because he realized it was unfair that only women had to sit down to pee.
(An) underlying concern with the reconciliation of universalism on the one hand, and diversity and difference on the other
by telling stupid lies
is central to Sen’s theoretical work on the nature of objectivity (in the argument that universal values can be compatible with variances associated with positional characteristics).
Any value can be given an objective measure for a particular purpose. If this is useful, evaluations will be independent of the individual traits or preferences of the evaluator. In other words, two very different people will come to the same result. If this happens we say there is 'naturality' or 'categoricity' (i.e. a unique model).
Whereas standard approaches characterise ‘neutrality’ in terms of some form of invariance with respect to individual observers and their positions
naturality or non-arbitrariness is better for any specific purpose. A person may be neutral but as stupid as Sen. His evaluation is worthless.
(Nagel’s ‘view from nowhere’), Sen has suggested that positional characteristics may be relevant for observations, knowledge, beliefs, practical reasons and choices and that this parametric dependence can be built into the evaluation of states of affairs without compromising objectivity.
No it can't because the relevant parameters are unobservable and, indeed, unknowable save perhaps at 'the end of mathematical time'.
Hence in Sen’s view, ‘neutrality’ is compatible with ‘position relativity’ when the observational position is variable — requiring only that evaluators in identical positions would adopt identical evaluations.
This is like Aumann agreement. But, because of Knightian uncertainty, regret minimization rather than utility maximization is better and Aumann agreement is undesirable. In any case, we can't know if evaluators are identical because there is no Momus window into the soul.
The possibility of developing universal ethical categories in the context of diversity and difference is also reflected in Sen’s emphasis on ‘second-order justifications’;
Justifying a justification. Why stop there? Why not justify the justifying of justifying justification? There is an infinite regress here. Moreover, because of Knightian Uncertainty, it may be a divergent series or something weirder or more wonderful yet.
in challenges to completeness as a condition of ethical evaluation
completeness is easily achieved by restricting the domain. Tell challengers they aren't ethical. Sen ran off with his best-friend's wife. He should stop pretending to be Mother Theresa.
(with practical proposals for applying the ideas of capabilities
capabilities are unknowable
and rights
which can be given a well defined extension by 'buck stopped' protocol bound juristic systems. However this is arbitrary.
emphasising the limits that value pluralism may impose on the development of evaluative systems);
Why bother? Evaluative systems cost money. Either they serve a useful purpose or they are ignored.
and in practical proposals for the assessment of poverty
which were implemented before Sen was born even in India
(in the argument that an invariance in capability and
functioning may correspond to a variance in commodity space)
But capability and functioning are themselves represented in that 'space' (though it can't be a topological space because there is no well defined set) which is why it is impredicative and can't be evaluated save arbitrarily for some particular purpose.
Sen’s Contributions in Economics
are meaningless or self-defeating
Sen’s
research agenda has focussed international attention on the critical importance
of fundamental freedoms and human rights for economic analysis.
This was done long ago. The idea that liberty and free enterprise raises productivity and opulence has been around for a very long time.
In the past,
the idea of fundamental freedoms and human rights has often been neglected in
theoretical and empirical economics.
By whom? Hayek? Milton Friedman? Thomas Sowell?
Dominant approaches have evaluated the
adequacy of economic processes and arrangements in terms of income
expansion,
Don't try to raise productivity. Talk stupid bollocks instead. That is the Bengali way.
whilst standard frameworks in welfare economics have evaluated
interpersonal advantage and the efficiency and fairness of competitive market
outcomes in terms of utility — with no explicit recognition of instrumental and
intrinsic value of fundamental freedoms and human rights .
Nonsense! People pay for the freedom to do things or get things under bad states of the world. Clearly they derive utility from this. Money is just 'transferable utility'. If it is being spent on securing a right which might never be needed, then there is utility in that right.
In
contrast, Sen has set out a far-reaching critique of standard frameworks that fail
to take account of fundamental freedoms and human rights,
Money spent on Defence and the Justice system figures in the National Accounts. It has already been taken into account. Sadly, nobody told Sen this. Like most Bengalis, he didn't get that what India was paying its British masters for was fundamental rights- e.g. that of Hindus to live in Muslim majority areas- including the right not to become slaves of the Japanese Emperor.
opening up important new lines of enquiry, and pioneering the development of
radical new paradigms and approaches that take account of these concerns .
His paradigm is 'lets just talk endlessly about this in between consulting impartial observers from Patagonia or the Planet Pluto.
His contributions include far-reaching proposals for the
incorporation of new variables and concerns into theoretical and empirical
economics including individual entitlements , capabilities and
functionings (2.3), gender discrimination (2.4), civil and political rights (2.5),
‘freedom of choice’ and ‘opportunity freedom’ (2.6) and ‘liberty rights’ and
‘basic rights’ (2.7). These proposals have contributed to
bureaucrats and shitty academics virtue signalling while talking endless bollocks. Also nobody should be allowed to do anything useful till there has a been a review of environmental impact, DEI impact, and whether any Transgender people have been traumatized by the use of the wrong pronoun.
important paradigm
shifts — away from an exclusive concern with income, growth and utility,
don't be concerned with what is useful. Talk useless bollocks instead. Soon your country will become the equal of Bengal in terms of opulence!
towards a range of human rights-focussed variables and concerns — and
provide a framework for the instrumental and intrinsic valuation of fundamental freedoms and human rights in economic assessment and empirical economic
research.
Why are stupid people like Elon Musk making cars and rocket ships and so forth? Don't they understand that only incessantly assessing and evaluating assessing and evaluating can enable Mankind to reverse climate change or, at least, find new homes amongst the stars?
The critique of ‘standard’ frameworks
those frameworks were and are useful. Critiques weren't. Still, people understood that darkies wanted to pretend that Bangladesh was richer than Baltimore and famine victims there were merely dieting for aesthetic reasons.
Sen’s critique of income-focussed frameworks has emphasised the finding that competitive market economies and trajectories of development and growth can generate many different outcomes
They haven't. Why? Tardean mimetics. Smart peeps imitate those who are more successful. That's why more and more of Europe began to look 'American'. But so did other places which wanted to get ahead- e.g Dubai, Shanghai- even Mumbai has sky-scrapers and shopping malls.
and that non-income variables (including institutional conditions and respect for fundamental freedoms and human rights) are among the variables that can affect these results.
But they haven't! That's why people are prepared to move to Dubai or Singapore or even Shanghai. Only income matters. But that depends on productivity. Economic freedoms have, certainly, promoted productivity growth and that is why even Communist China established them to a greater or lesser extent.
On the other hand, the 'rights based approach to development' led to productivity stagnation for the majority and a growing danger of entitlement collapse as Nations go off a fiscal cliff. However, before this happens, the Judiciary is disintermediated or ignored unless it gives up 'activism'.
For example, effective development and growth may critically depend on a wide range of non-income variables such as the presence or absence of pro-poor public policies related to basic education, health care and employment generation and the institutional context in which markets function, including respect for fundamental freedoms and human rights.
The evidence suggests otherwise, effective development means growth in productivity for an increasing proportion of the population. Pro-poor policies create more and more clients clamouring for freebies. Why work when you can get paid not to? As for basic education and health care- who will provide it? Not public sector workers who have powerful unions and can't be sacked. As for 'employment generation'- that just means Government jobs or wage subsidies to the private sector. That is the primrose path to fiscal collapse.
Income-focussed approaches concentrate on a particular means (or instrument), resulting in the neglect of the intrinsic value of ultimate objectives and goals (including the intrinsic value of fundamental freedoms and human rights), as well the neglect of the instrumental value of other (non-income) instruments.
Non income-focussed approaches ask for money and then piss it up the wall by incessantly assessing and evaluation the assessment of the evaluation of assessment and evaluation. Also, how come we don't have a Transgender Jihadi Lesbian on the Committee? If we don't hire one immediately, people may call us Islamophobic TERFs.
An exclusive focus on income
is good if it raises productivity and thus income. This means we can pay crazy Sen-tentious clowns to eat their own shit.
can therefore result in systematic bias and policy failure because of (1) the focus on a single instrument when many may be relevant; (2) the focus on the ‘wrong’ policy target (Drèze and Sen (1989) and Sen (199a; 2001b)).
Very true. Moreover, the imposition of a single identity upon us by the law causes us to focus on things like wiping our own bum. This prevents us from simultaneously being Walruses who wipe the bums of leprechauns on the rings of Uranus. Clearly, life forms which evolved by natural selection have focused on the 'wrong' policy targets- e.g. staying alive rather than getting eaten.
In welfare economics, individual well-being is often characterised in terms of the concept of utility (understood in terms of
what is useful to the person.
individual ‘pleasures and pains’, happiness and/or desire-fulfilment) and operationalised in terms of revealed preferences and actual choices.
As opposed to choices our other identity as a Walrus might want to make.
Sen has developed a far-reaching critique of ‘welfarist’ frameworks for concentrating on an overly narrow view of human rationality and well-being.
A broader view would admit that we are also Walruses and leprechauns.
His work has ‘unpacked’ the ‘welfarist’ foundations of a wide range of conceptual and technical apparatus and has analysed the limitations of this informational base from the perspective of fundamental freedoms and human rights
as opposed to the human right to be also considered a walrus and a leprechaun.
— for the prediction of individual behaviour,
I predict that if the Government gives me money to support the many dependents Walrus-me has, then I will attain the power of levitation. Won't that be cool?
the characterisation of interpersonal advantage and the evaluation of the efficiency and fairness of competitive market outcomes.
People who can predict behaviour or who can say 'that dude is better off than you. You should go into his line of work' get paid a lot of money. If Courts will accept your testimony that a particular market outcome is fair and allocatively efficient, you will get rich as an 'expert witness' in court cases involving Competition policy.
Key limitations include: Neglect of the relevance of fundamental freedoms and human rights to the characterisation of human motivation and rationality and the prediction of individual behaviour.
This is easily compensated for. Just add a note that this country is seeing a lot of exit of skilled professionals because of lack of freedom. In any case, this will be reflected in projected GDP estimates.
Standard frameworks assume
nothing. They are merely a mathematical formalism.
(1) that individual utility can be interpreted in terms of the real representation of individual preferences (via the utility function);
Anyone can interpret anything any which way. Has GDP gone up? It must be because everybody is having gay sex. My income hasn't gone up. It's because I refuse to take it up the ass.
(2) that individual preferences are motivated by ‘self-interested utility maximisation’;
you can switch to 'regret-minimization' easily enough.
(3) that individual preferences can be deduced from individual choices (the theory of revealed preference);
Preferences are epistemic and impredicative. That's why they are unknowable. Still, for some useful purpose, we can arbitrarily estimate them.
Sen may not have noticed, but the fact is guys who are good at 'deducing preferences' get paid big bucks as marketing consultants. My point is that if anything in Econ is worth doing, it is already being done. A useless cretin like Sen can't add any value. If he could, he'd be as rich as fuck.
(4) that ‘maximal choices’ can be equated with ‘optimal choices’.
If there is a 'naturality square'- sure. That's just a fact about mathematics- albeit a type of math Sen is ignorant of.
Sen has argued that these assumptions result in an overly narrow view of human motivation and rationality and can result in wrong predictions.
He has never made a correct prediction. Those with a 'narrow view' have done so and lived to tell the tale. Sen's people took a 'narrow view' of the motivation of their Muslim neighbours in Dacca and fled the place as soon as the Brits started packing their bags. That's the only reason Amartya is alive- or not named Abdul.
Sen has
argued that ‘welfarism’ is an overly narrow informational base for
characterising personal interests because it focuses on the well-being
aspect of a person (relating to his or her own personal physical and
mental interests), whilst neglecting the agency aspect (relating to the
goals that a person values, desires and has reasons to pursue);
Nonsense! People pay for exercising 'agency'. That's transferable utility and is captured by conventional Welfare Econ.
on a single
dimension of human wellbeing (utility),
Transferable utility has a single dimension- money. This is because, at the margin, otherwise incommensurable values become fungible and thus commensurable. Thus I say that I won't have Gay Sex. But if I am offered a billion dollars to fuck Timothy Chalamet, I might just go for it.
whilst neglecting other
dimensions (including entitlements, capabilities and functionings,
opportunity, freedom and human rights);
all of which have money costs associated with their provision or maintenance. Thus they are captured by National Income accounts. The question is whether such provision is adequate as circumstances change.
and on outcomes, whilst
neglecting process-sensitivity
this is already captured by the fact that people spend money so as to access processes they prefer. I could cook myself a Curry or I could order takeaway. The difference in what I spend reflects my sensitivity to the tedious process of cooking and the fact that I have a hangover and, anyway, there's a big pile of dirty dishes in the sink.
and the intrinsic value of individual
freedom of choice and participation.
Why stop there? What about the intrinsic value of farting? By that metric, I'm richer than Elon Musk and super-models should want to sleep with me.
Furthermore, interpersonal
comparisons based on individual ‘mental states’ such as happiness and
desire-fulfilment
which have nothing to do with utility and thus aren't part of the 'standard framework'.
may be systematically biased because of the
phenomenon of ‘adaptive expectations’.
Sen thought because very sick people in Bihar sometimes said 'I'm fine' when asked how they were doing meant that Uncle Sam tore up the fat check he had been planning to send them.
Everyone has adaptive expectations. At my age, I don't think shaking my booty at the local Discotheque (what? Surely such things still exist?) will lead to a bunk-up with a busty 18 year old. My expectations have adapted. Boo fucking hoo!
Standard approaches in welfare economics adopt utility-based
interpretations of Pareto Optimality as a necessary condition for
economic efficiency and distributional fairness.
They don't need to. Just see whether if transaction costs fall, or information becomes cheaper or trust increases, people sell or swap things. If they do, we know there was a potential Pareto improvement. The point about this criterion is that it motivates us to find ways of decreasing transaction costs. Ebay does a great job at that. Its founders are as rich as fuck. That's a Pareto improvement right there!
The fly in the ointment is that if a person has two conflicting objectives- i.e. can't maximize utility because they are conflicted as to what is useful to them- then there can be no Pareto improvements. So, if an angel from heaven flies down from Heaven to give me a nice piece of cake, though nobody is harmed, still, if I have the objective of losing weight which conflicts with my objective of eating cake, then the assumption that I am better off can't be resolved.
A different problem has to do with the possibility that outcomes are interdependent. Suppose my getting cake causes me to feel less angry with Society. I decide not to assassinate the Archduke. This means outcomes for a lot of people are better- because there is no Great War- but, maybe, the outcomes for even more people are worse- because a Great War would result in political and economic changes favourable to them.
Now, for any practical purpose, we can assume no interdependence and no conflict of objectives and proceed well enough. But stupid pedagogues can pull on either of these threads to say nasty things about Economics like how it ignores the fact that if I iz bleck or that I have a dick and this is unfair coz lots of peeps don't have dicks and thus have to sit down to pee. Also, did you know Economics didn't come to my birthday party? Fuck you Economics! Fuck you very much!
Turning to 'distributional issues'- they don't arise at the margin (i.e. whether I get a slice of cake does not materially affect the distribution of income and wealth) . In any case are only concerned with out absolute standard of living. Distribution does not matter unless it represents rent extraction. But to get rent extraction you need to increase general purpose productivity. That is the only lasting solution. The fact is, envy is an ugly emotion. Moreover, if we 'level down', the productive will flee the jurisdiction and we will be worse off.
Sen has critiqued this
concept on the grounds that it is ‘supremely unconcerned with
distributional issues’.
Only if people are. If they aren't, the rich will help the poor. That's a Pareto improvement if the thing is uncoerced.
A state can be Pareto Optimal ‘with some people in
extreme misery and others rolling in luxury,
if those rolling in luxury don't give a shit about the miserable. If they are so callous, they may also be ruthless enough to kill anyone who tries to 'cut into their luxury'.
so long as the miserable
cannot be made better off without cutting into the luxury of the rich’
A State can turn to shit if 'the luxury of the rich' is cut into with the result that they run the fuck away causing productivity to collapse.
Furthermore, the concept of Pareto
Optimality is insensitive to
only things people are already insensitive to- e.g. the glaring injustice that gender reassignment surgery hasn't made compulsory for practicing heterosexuals.
the possibility of entitlement failure and
starvation,
So is Sen's Capability approach. He doesn't get that it could lead to a country going off a fiscal cliff which in turn would cause entitlement failure- even starvation.
and can conflict with respect for individual liberty-rights.
As can farting. We need a more fart-sensitive account of how assessments of evaluations are assessed and evaluated by people who have to smell my farts.
These limitations feed into judgements about the efficiency and fairness
of competitive market outcomes through the Fundamental Theorems of
Welfare Economics.
Which merely says that anything a Command economy can do, open markets can also do subject to a number of caveats- e.g. the fact that no agent possesses God-like omniscience.
Sen says
‘The assessment of ‘value’
which is useless unless the guy doing it is an expert and is assessing the value of an antique or an enterprise
has to take us well beyond utilities
Utility is a 'Tarskian primitive'- i.e. is undefined. There is nothing 'beyond' what is undefined.
…
[T]he evaluation of consequences [should take] explicit note of the
violation and fulfilment of [freedoms and] rights
This is easily done. Anyway violating or fulfilling rights costs or saves money and thus gets captured by National Income accounts. Stalin spent a lot of money on his Gulags and secret police.
… by
incorporating the value of right fulfilment and the disvalue of
rights violation into the assessment of resulting states of affairs’
As I said, this can be done easily enough in a rough and ready fashion. Indeed, it has been done. Dictators realize they can have more super-yachts if they cut down on paying spies and torturers. Sadly, they may then discover that the people don't really lurve and worship their Benevolent Leader.
Is anything suggested by Sen 'operationalizable' (i.e. can it put numbers to things and thus promote Social Choice) ? No. Every 'intension' (e.g. 'capabilities') Sen mentions has an unknowable 'extension'. The thing isn't a set. It has no mathematical representation.
The ‘entitlement approach’ provides a framework for assessing the impact of the ‘rights-structure’ that prevails in a particular society on poverty, hunger and starvation.
It existed in India fifty years before Sen was born. Different sub-populations had different entitlements to Famine Relief. Sadly, if there wasn't enough food, or if crooked politicians and bureaucrats diverted food to the black market, then there was 'entitlement failure'.
Whereas the concept of rights focuses on the relationship between two agents (two individuals, an individual and the state etc.),
No. A 'right' is a 'Hohfeldian incident' under the Law. It is a list of things and the legally permissible actions concerning those things which a particular person is entitled to do. A violation of a right by a second party can give rise to an action in tort for damages in addition to which there may be a criminal punishment.
the concept of entitlement focuses on a person’s ‘command over things’,
as does the 'endowment set' of the standard model. Sen forgets that there is such a thing as 'Robinson Crusoe economics'. No second or third party need exist.
given the complete specification of the rights and obligations that an agent has vis-à-vis others, and the rights and obligations that others have vis-à-vis him.
There can be no such 'complete specification' unless at least one person is omniscient. Moreover, there are contingent rights and obligations. You may need to consult a lawyer to find out what these are in your own case.
In Sen's Bengal, people had an entitlement to food from the Government under Famine Conditions (this was defined clearly in a Bureaucratic manner). The two famines Bengal experienced during his life-time were not 'exchange-entitlement failures'. They were failures of corrupt, incompetent, callous, elected politicians to give enough food to the starving. Incidentally, when Britain introduced rationing during the Second World War, they brought in Charles Tegart (who had previously crushed the revolutionaries in Bengal) to crack down on the Black Market. Bengal, as a wholly autonomous Province, could have done the same thing using the policemen Tegart had trained. It chose not to.
Sen has hypothesised that ‘[m]ost cases of starvation and
famines across the world arise not from people being deprived of things to
which they are entitled, but from people not being entitled, in the prevailing
legal system of institutional rights, to adequate means for survival’
In the case of Bengal he is wholly wrong. In other cases, there was no 'prevailing legal system' and thus no question of legal entitlements.
His empirical research
he has done none. He just fabricates the 'facts' he relies on.
supports this argument by suggesting that in large famines in the recent past, in which millions of people have died, starvation has occurred as a consequence of entitlement shifts resulting from the exercise of rights that were perfectly legitimate in legal terms.
There was no right to supply food to, or buy food from, the black market. Sen may not have understood this. He was a very stupid boy.
Furthermore, important variables other than aggregate food supply can undermine a person’s entitlement to food. Starvation deaths often arise when there is no overall decline in food availability,
No famine has occurred without a sizable food availability deficit for the affected population. You may say, 'such and such country exported food while its people starved' but there was a concurrent exogenous shock which reduced food availability. You may not be able to take food from exporters because they have goons with guns who will fucking kill you. But that food was never going to go to the starving subset of the population. Generally, it would be 'high value to weight'- e.g. prime beef, not potatoes.
with entitlement failure arising, for example, when particular population groups were unable to trade their labour power or skills (Sen 1981; also see Drèze and Sen (1989)).
because there wasn't enough food to give them in return for their services. Why bother denying the obvious? Famine is caused by food availability deficit and alleviated by bringing in lots of food and getting it to the hungry.
These research findings have helped to focus international attention on
bureaucratic, time wasting, nonsense.
the importance of food security policies that take into account the determinants of the differential ability of individuals, groups and classes to command food in practice.
Fuck off! Food security policies have to do with maintaining buffer stocks, having futures markets and crop insurance, and diversifying away from 'monoculture'. Countries need to plan for quickly changing land usage in case of an exogenous shock. The 'demand' side of things has to do with a public distribution system or planning for the creation of such a system in the event of a natural disaster or the outbreak of war.
Thus the UN Special Rapporteur
which means 'worthless cretin' who thinks wee Scottish bairns are at risk of starvation because their Mummies lack access to arable land to grow turnips. This is because Evil Tory Lairds whip them and grab their land using 'Enclosure' laws.
on the Human Right to Food has recommended that the first step in a national food security strategy is to
eat UN officials. They taste nicer if roasted and sprinkled with hot sauce.
map the situation for different population groups,
e.g. Glaswegians who lack access to arable land and thus are forced to eat only deep fried Mars bars.
taking into account a range of variables including occupation, gender, ethnicity, race and rural/urban location. This approach reflects the
utter uselessness of the woke bureaucratic class.
complex causes of starvation and hunger and importance of the precise identification of the food-insecure — who they are, where they are located
Scotland. Did you know that trillions of Scottish babies are dying everyday because Mummy forces them to eat deep fried Mars bars? You can't blame the Mums. Evil Tory Lairds whip them if they try to buy milk.
and the particular causes underlying their vulnerability
The SNP demands independence for Scotland because, as the UN Special Velociraptor said, trillions of Scottish women and children are starving to death due to evil Tory lairds who all went to Eton and who probably bum each other incessantly.
The Human Right to Freedom from Hunger and Competitive Market Outcomes The ‘entitlement approach’ has also generated debates about whether famines can occur under conditions of perfect competition with rational behaviour.
Yes, if there is a big enough food availability deficit. The type of economic regime is irrelevant. What is truly scandalous is that, under Capitalism, Death has not been abolished because of bribes paid to legislators by wealthy Undertakers all of whom went to Eton and who bum each other incessantly.
This debate is important for assessing what markets can and cannot achieve under the idealized conditions of perfect competition from the perspective of fundamental freedoms and human rights.
The debate is not important. It is silly. Anyway, perfect competition can't exist in the real world. Starvation can.
Sen’s analysis suggests that there is a possibility of a situation in which competitive markets clear, but in which not everyone gets an adequate food entitlement to guarantee survival.
Because of food availability deficit. The price system is a rationing device.
Where individuals and groups have no direct food entitlements there may be non-survival, with insecure food entitlements arising not as a result of market failure (as this is standardly understood), but when markets work.
It would also occur under a command economy or one where everybody was a goat. Animals die when their food supply is inadequate.
This analysis challenges approaches that rule out the possibility of starvation death due to an inability to buy sufficient food through production or exchange,
in which case, why not get arrested for public indecency and get fed at the tax-payer's expense. The problem is that if there is a food availability deficit, you won't be sent to jail. The police may content themselves with shoving bumboo up your bum-hole.
and/or that maintain that if all economic agents are rational, there will be an appropriate behavioural response to famines that can be anticipated (e.g. insuring against food insecurity by storing grain or expanding food production).
That works. But tax-payers can delegate this to the Government. After all, the Government too can be a market phenomenon.
Incidentally, Meghnad Desai- despite being Gujju- heaved his carcass onto this stupid bandwagon
[T]he tragedy of starvation can arise in economies characterized by perfect competition.
No it can't. Why? Everybody is a price taker. This means if the wage goes below the subsistence level, everybody starves. But, because 'perfect knowledge' is assumed, nobody works because what's the fucking point? You get less calories than you expend. The market for labour collapses. That's market failure right there you stupid Gujju! Get a fucking A level in Econ to avoid elementary errors like saying-
Then starvation is not a result of market failure …
It is for the reason I mentioned. You have to memorize the conditions for perfect competition to get your A level in Econ. Sadly, it appears, if you teach at the LSE, you don't need to bother with any such thing. But that's why kids who went straight into the City after their A levels made much more money than Lord Mehgnad Hayekian-Marxist Desai.
[Like] involuntary unemployment
which does not exist under perfect competition though, as I said, the market would crash because there is no point expending more calories at work then you can buy at the end of the day.
… it is not the result either of unnecessary institutional rigidities in the labour market.
Fuck off! The 'rigidity' in question is bio-fucking-logical.
Instead, it is an entirely natural phenomenon of a neoclassical economy with surplus labour.
But without perfect competition which requires homogeneity, perfect knowledge, etc.
Only after excess labour has been removed through starvation can general equilibrium arise’
No. There still won't be 'general equilibrium' because this is a disequilibrium model though it may have a 'steady state'. But that won't occur 'after excess labour' has been removed because real wages will rise before falling back to the steady state level. The sad thing about the LSE is that people who had done an A level in Econ became stupider there- but only if they listened to their professors rather than, as I did, just stayed drunk in the Student's Union bar.
Capabilities, like Preferences, are epistemic, impredicative and thus not well defined and hence can have no mathematical representation.
Proposals for capturing and formalising individual substantive
freedoms in the form of the valuable ‘beings’ and ‘doings’ in ‘capability space’
build on the ‘entitlement approach’ but recognise that the mapping between a
person’s entitlements (i.e. their command over commodities) on the one hand,
and a person’s capability to achieve valuable functionings on the other, depends
on personal features (such as bodyweight, health status and aspects of a persons
situation reflected in ‘environmental conditions’).
Sports coaches already do this. They spot a kid with talent and say 'he has the capability to be a star'. They then figure out a personalized regime of diet, training, motivation and emotional support, as well as creating tactics and strategies tailored to his unique strengths and weaknesses.
‘Capability space’
Sadly, this can't be a topological space because there is no underlying well defined set.
takes
account of this parametric dependence on personal features by introducing a
‘characteristics function’
there can't be a function for the same reason
(that governs the conversion of commodity
consumption into valuable characteristics) and a ‘personal utilisation function’
(that governs the conversion of characteristics into valuable things that a person
can do and be).
see above. Still, a Sports Coach may be able guess at such things well enough.
The different combinations of beings and doing that i can
achieve (such as being nourished, clothed, mobile or taking part in the life of the
community) are captured and formalised as ‘functioning vectors’ (i.e. as
‘points’) in ‘capability space’.
There can't be such a vector because functionings aren't factorizable or would be impredicative if they are factorized.
What Sen is doing is mathsy masturbation of a wholly useless type. Essentially, he is sticking with Arrow-Debreu formalism though it was known to be 'anything goes' by the early Seventies. Also, it ignores Knightian Uncertainty- i.e. is irrelevant for beings who evolved on an uncertain fitness landscape.
Turning to a question which has become more relevant than ever- is authoritarianism good for growth? It needn't be, but over the last 25 years, the evidence seems to be in its favour.
In 1999, Sen wrote-
[S]ome relatively authoritarian states (such as South Korea … Singapore and, recently China) have had faster rates of economic growth than some less authoritarian ones (such as India, Costa Rica and Jamaica). But the overall picture is much more complex than these isolated observations might initially suggest, and systematic statistical studies give no real support to the claim that there is a general conflict between political rights and economic performance’
This is because only cretins do 'systematic statistical studies'. The question is whether a country can ignore nutters who seek to prevent growth or whether it needs to beat the fuck out of them. In the former case, it doesn't need to be authoritarian. In the latter case, it is fucked if it doesn't wield the big stick. I suppose, just defunding woke nutters may be enough but if this leads to massive rioting and looting the choice is between authoritarianism and anarchy.
Sen’s empirical findings establish that no major famine has occurred in a democratic and independent country with a relatively free press,
except his natal East Bengal on two separate occasions.
and that this statement applies not only to the affluent countries of Europe and America,
how come the rich don't starve? Is it because they have the right to vote? Why not give starving snow leopards the right to vote? That will cause, by magic, lots of nice rabbits to appear which the leopards can eat.
but also to the poor but broadly democratic countries such as India. For example, the incidence of famines in India until independence in 1947 (for example, the Bengal famine in 1943 killed between 2 and 3 million people
because, as in 1974, in Bangladesh, elected Muslim politicians were running things.
) contrasts with the post- independence experience
of Uncle Sam sending food aid to prevent famine. Had LBJ not sent ten million tons of food to India in the mid Sixties. Without it, there may have been 10 million or more excess deaths.
following establishment of a multiparty democratic system
which was irrelevant. What mattered was whether Uncle Sam would help so as to prevent the place turning Commie.
and provides inter-temporal evidence of the positive impact of democracy in reducing the risk of famine.
East Bengal shows democracy can have a negative impact on both famine and ethnic cleansing. The plain fact is, 'the instrumental role of civil and political rights' may lead to famine and genocide rather than development and growth.
(Sen) developed a series of technical proposals
for
doing something which already existed viz.
incorporating the possibility of choosing and the range and adequacy of
opportunities available into preference relations (‘chooser dependence’
where you want the big piece of cake but don't take it till the other guy takes the small piece of cake. This isn't a problem on open markets. Moreover, the best course is not mentioned which is to appear to faint and say 'OMG! My blood sugar is crashing! I shouldn't have skipped so many meals because I was so busy helping disabled orphans. Quick hand me that cake!' In this scenario you can eat all the cake while still getting a lot of sympathy and a reputation as a Saintly person.
and
‘menu dependence’
There is no such thing. Sen forgets that a 'market maker' can 'unbundle' and 're-bundle' menus such that as competition in the field increases (under standard assumptions) menus don't matter.
The mistake Sen makes is to think that if he stipulates for a perverse situation, a smarter person can show that even under his own stipulation, there is a work around provided there is enough competition. But this is just Edgeworth's result- or the notion of the core in Game theory- as the group concerned gets larger.
and for the formal representation of constraints on choice
(e.g. by distinguishing between (1) ‘optimizing’ choice functions requiring a
best choice and (2) ‘maximizing’ choice functions requiring the choice of an
alternative that is not judged to be worse than any other (e.g. Sen 1997a).
These aren't constraints on choice, they are decision rules. (1) says evaluate all alternatives. (2) says 'stop at the first one which is known to be as good as the best'. Neither are interesting because all alternatives have to be evaluated in either case.
Proposals for enhancing the formal representation of the nature and scope of
individual options in economic analysis have also included the development of formal axioms for capturing and formalising the idea of individual ‘opportunity freedom’
Opportunity freedom is just freedom. If the thing is available to you, you are free to take or leave it. The problem is that you can never be sure the opportunity existed or exists. I may say I had the opportunity to sleep with Margaret Thatcher when I was a school boy in Finchley. You may doubt this. It was actually a bag-lady who approached me and said 'I'm the fookin' Prime Minister, mate. You can do me for the price of a pint and a packet of pork scratchings'. I recall, in my first week at the LSE buying a bottle of sherry for Joan Robinson who slept on a bench near the campus. It was a Bangladeshi friend who introduced me to her. Her speech was somewhat indistinct but I gathered she disapproved of Keynes because as she often spoke in harsh terms of 'pooftahs'. I suppose you might say that I passed up the opportunity to gain Joan as my mentor but, the truth is, I found her smell unbearable.
. These axioms relate the assessment of freedom to
the evaluation of the nature and scope of the options available, and the
preferences and values of the individuals concerned.
In other words they relate the assessment of something undefined to the evaluation of what can't be known and the preferences of people who think such 'assessments' and 'evaluations' are a waste of time.
This approach challenges
(1) cardinality-based formulations that characterise individual freedom purely in
terms of the number of options available (e.g. Pattanaik and Xu (1990));
Why challenge nonsense? Everyone has an uncountable infinity of options just concerning how they assess the assessing of their own farts.
(2)
‘flexibility-based’ formulations
this is Koopmans-Kreps
that suggest that uncertainty about future tastes
is a reason for valuing current time freedom of choice in economics (e.g. Arrow
(1995))
It could equally be a reason for not valuing it at all and seeking to curb it. The problem is that once there is uncertainty re. future tastes, there will also be uncertainty over current preferences. This means a 'regret minimizing' course will be taken. You really want cocaine right now but you reflect that your future self may have other preferences. Maybe you should just settle for cognac.
. Sen rejects (1) on the grounds that it fails to give weight to the value of
the options available to the individual concerned;
You have the option of doing umpteen things over the course of the decade. I'm going to die in an hour's time. Sen doesn't think you are better off than me because the value of the option I have- which is to either die shitting myself or not shitting myself- has not been given sufficient weight.
and (2) on the grounds it
represents a purely ‘instrumental approach’ that fails to reflect the intrinsic
value of freedom of choice.
Instruments reflect 'intrinsic value'. Otherwise they wouldn't be used. No one would make such useless things.
In cases where there is no uncertainty, a set of
options would still be evaluated in terms of the value of the maximal (most
preferred/chosen) element or elements in the choice set — with the other
elements of the menu not being taken into account.
Even where there is uncertainty, it remains the case that you can't have your cake and eat it too.
The characterisation of the First Welfare Freedom in ‘Opportunity-Freedom’
Space
The formal axioms discussed above also provide the basis of a recharacterisation of the First Theorem of Welfare Economics in terms of
‘opportunity-freedom’ rather than utility.
Why bother? Just say 'utility' is the same as 'ophelimity' is the same as 'opportunity-freedom' is the same as %V"2i which is the name Mitzi, my cat, has chosen to give it because Mitzi is a bit peculiar in that respect. The problem here is that a perfect competitive equilibrium could be populated entirely by slaves or robots. The word 'freedom' and the word 'opportunity' have no meaning here. Utility is fine. We could say the robot is maximizing the utility function it was programmed to maximize or that the slave is doing what he has been told to do even though, if he were free, he would do something else.
Standard frameworks equate
economic efficiency with the efficiency of utilities and assume that (1)
preferences are determined by choices;
Nonsense! Preferences may be reflected in choices.
(2) choices are motivated by self-interested welfare maximization.
rather than the desire to be reduced to penury but your actions could still be deemed self-interested because what interests you is to fuck yourself up
Sen has argued that the basic analytical results
of the ‘Arrow-Debreu’ Theorem are independent of assumption (2)
because they are meaningless.
and that the
proposition that competitive market outcomes are efficient under certain
conditions (such as the absence of externalities) will hold if some interpretation
of individual advantage other than utility is adopted (with the utility-based
interpretation of Pareto Optimality loosing its status as necessary condition for
social optimality).
This is false. You can't say 'this is a general equilibrium' if, the very next moment, people start swapping things. This is like when Rachel, on Friends, is pleased with herself for getting an order right and, the moment she leaves, her pals start exchanging their beverages because Rachel gave the wrong cup to each person.
Note, the above happens even if a particular person would prefer to hang on to the wrong beverage order. Still, it isn't theirs and utility in this case means 'doing the right thing' which is why Chandler has to hand over the girlie drink he has been wrongly assigned and receive something more manly in exchange from Monica. The ultimate payoff is he gets to marry a beautiful chef.
For example, his results establish that the basic efficiency
results reflected in the ‘Direct Theorem’
viz the first fundamental theorem of Welfare econ which says, if an equilibrium exists, then the perfect competition equilibrium will feature no 'hold out' or other such problem and thus every mutually beneficial trade would already have occurred. The problem is that a concurrency problem in setting prices might prevent such an equilibrium from existing. True, prices could be set exogenously i.e. the particular market we are looking at is a price taker on the global market. But how are those prices set? Either complete information conveys that knowledge. Or complete information means complete ignorance of and isolation from the globe. In the former case, there is a possibility of strategic behaviour invalidating the result. In the latter, the thing only applies to some primitive community which treats the price vector as a supernatural phenomena. But if so, some other supernatural oracle may compete with it. 'Yea!' sayeth the Walrasian auctioneer, 'Verily have I received the divine price vector! Let trading commence!' 'Halt' says the Crazy Prophet, 'Verily have I received an even more divine revelation. We must all dance around naked with a radish up our bum till the Holy Goat manifests and gives us all his magical dung!' Obviously, the chance to get naked is not to be passed up lightly and, anyway, lots of people keep radishes up their bum. I'm not necessarily speaking of myself here. It's just common knowledge that lots of folk- even if they didn't go to a really posh boarding skool- like the way it feels.
Turning back to a wider problem with any General Equilibrium- which is that it is 'anything goes', we may be tempted to stipulate that there are no income effects and no hedging. But in that case we aren't talking of actual markets which only have arbitragers (i.e. market makers) for that reason. In other words, the condition for the 'direct theorem' to say something meaningful about market equilibrium is that markets must not exist.
can be carried over from the ‘space’ of
utilities to the ‘space’ of individual substantive opportunity-freedoms
by arbitrary stipulation- sure. But they could also be carried over into the space of my farts by such stipulation.
(both in
terms of freedom to choose commodity baskets
not to mention being hypnotized to choose
and in terms of capabilities to
function)
or the incapability to fart away that capability in a timely manner while becoming the first walrus to qualify as an actuarial scientist in Peru.
‘Liberty-rights’ and ‘basic rights’
Sen has finally moved human rights based discourse in economics
which is about as useful as fart based discourse in quantum mechanics
forward by
developing a series of influential proposals for incorporating the ideas of
‘liberty-rights’ and ‘basic-rights’ into the theory of social choice.
That theory was pronounced D.O.A almost fifty years ago. The fact is nobody accepts a Social Contract under which people get to vote on whether or not he should be permitted to scratch his own bum while in the privacy of his own home. Everybody stipulates for the rule of law such that there are capacious Hohfeldian immunities and only a very strictly limited sphere of action where 'Social Choices' are implemented.
The notion of 'basic rights' just means a situation where the Government promises to do something. But Governments have sovereign immunity. They can break their own promises with impunity citing force majeure or high reasons of state or saying there isn't enough money in the kitty.
This is something we all know deep in our bones. Suppose the PM says 'we all have the very basic right to refuse to dance around naked with a radish up our bum and I assure you that I will shed every last drop of my blood to prevent this happening to even the poorest and most vulnerable of you.' We sigh resignedly because we know, before the day is out, the PM will be dancing around naked with a radish up his bum because Rupert Murdoch told him to.
Turning to game theoretic formulations, I have to say most are stupid because the guy doing it is too stupid to fully specify available options. Take Nash equilibrium. It just means a guy stupid enough to think he has rigged a game, thinks he has rigged the game because he is as stupid as shit. He doesn't get that people will find ways of upsetting a game that has been rigged in a manner harmful to the guy doing the rigging.
Gaertner et al (1992) capture and formalise the idea of individual rights in terms of admissible behavioural strategies — with individual rights and duties conceptualised in terms of the permission of each agent to choose admissible strategies, and the obligation not to choose a non-admissible strategy.
That's not how justiciable rights work. What is being described is the rules of a particular game. But justiciable rights include playing whatever you game you like or not playing at all. Rights may subsist even if not asserted. Equally they may come into effect by adverse possession or other acts which 'break the rules'.
Sen has in turn highlighted in the limitations of formulations that focus exclusively on formal permissions and obligations to act or not to act in terms of the critique of ‘consequence-independence’ set out in Part I.
The thing is plain wrong. It suffers the same 'limitation' as the attempt to fly into the sky powered only by one's own farts.
Whereas game-theoretic models of liberties and rights often reflect the Hayekian-Nozickian position on outcome-independence,
because the umpire is not allowed to shoot one player so that the other can win
Sen has argued that the likely consequences of different game-form specifications should be analysed in terms of the things that people value in the domain of fundamental freedoms and human rights.
Like the umpire shooting all the other contestants so I get the Olympic gold medal for fart assisted high jump. I would value that greatly.
This concern can be achieved within a gametheoretic framework by working backwards — from consequences to antecedents
Backward induction which to my best knowledge is first recorded in the Barbarik episode of the Mahabharata.
— and taking account of the social states ‘induced’ by the specification of sets of admissible strategies in a game-form.
None are. The thing could only be done 'at the end of mathematical time'- i.e. trillions of trillions of trillions of years after the destruction of our Universe.
In this way, the game-theoretic approach can be conceptualised in terms of the specification of sets of derived rights or rules for bringing about the affirmation and realization of sets of basic rights
No. Because the thing is an epistemic, impredicative, intension without a well defined extension and thus can't have a game-theoretic or other mathematical representation.
Conclusion
(The) development of a ‘scholarly bridge’ between human
rights and economics has been shown to be an innovative and important
contribution that has methodological as well as substantive importance, and that
provides a prototype and stimuli for future research.
I suppose those who advocate more Human Rights legislation as well as lawyers arguing Human Rights cases which would impose a financial burden on the Government could invoke the name of Nobel laureates in Economics. But if the Economics is wrong- as Sen's economics is wrong- the effect will be mischievous. Moreover, it may provoke a backlash such that the whole program is expunged.
Key challenges in taking
this work forward include: Clarification and further conceptual development in relation to
foundational issues.
The same thing could be said about alchemy whose foundational issue is that it is fraudulent. Still if people who get tenure as Alchemists and nobody got round to abolishing the Alchemy Department, further clarification and conceptual development can be done by stupid and useless people who got a sheepskin in that shite.
