deal with 'repugnancy markets' i.e. money derived from immoral, illegal or unfashionable activities. Statute and tort law can provide specific remedies. However, incentive compatible 'mechanism design' is required. That is an ideographic matter beyond or below the scope of nomothetic moral or metaphysical approaches.
What of the more general problem that money derived in repugnant ways is diffused through the entire economy? You may be inclined to say, with a Roman Emperor, 'money does not stink'. It has no memory of how it came to be earned. Still, there is a reputational benefit in having 'clean' wealth and, equally, a social penalty for being the beneficiary of tainted cash- e.g. money gained from 'trade' rather than inherited from rapacious ancestors or the bloodless practice of an avaricious profession.
It is in this context that Shaw's 'unpleasant plays' still have a message for us.
Widower's houses.
In this play, an aristocratic Doctor falls in love with the well-educated daughter of a self-made man. Initially, the Doctor, who has radical political ideas, welcomes what people of his own caste would regard a mesalliance. Then he discovers that his prospective father-in-law gains his livelihood by renting out his rectum. At that time, rent-boys were considered social pariahs. Sodomy was per se illegal. True, one could argue that Widowers need some place to place their pecker and that it is preferable that they rent rather than buy such accommodation. Since Capitalism only came into existence by swallowing the widow's mite and the orphan's portion and since its appetites have grown enormously since then, it follows that it must now replenish itself by encompassing the exiguous earnings of rent-boys servicing randy widowers and incestuous paedophiles who had previously chopped up and sold for meat any wives or children they may have had. At the end of the play, the aristocratic Doctor discovers that the wealth, power, and hegemonic role of his own Whig ancestors arose out of the fact that the soi disant 'Houses' of Parliament were but the rented out rectums of the lumpenproletariat.
Mrs Warren's profession
A prostitute turned Madam with a chain of brothels across Europe is shocked to discover that her well-educated daughter prefers to soil herself as an actuarial consultant in the City of London. Shaw does not condemn the girl out of hand. How else is she supposed to make a living? Would Jevons or Wicksteed or Alfred Marshall pay her to use algebraic topology to show that the existence of vaginas artificially skews the market for sexual services such that rent-boys suffer significant wage discrimination? Indeed, the female monopoly on child birth has resulted in the vesting of unearned rents amongst a class so idle it can afford to waste time sitting down to pee. Moreover, Regicide was rendered infructuous, the Guillotine was made mock off, by the officina gentium, the vagina nationum, of Queen Vic, Gorbless'er, under whom Finanzkapital had so burgeoned. Put simply, there is little point cutting the heads of Kings- or even those of the bourgeoisie- if kooches keep popping out babies who might become Kings or Capitalists or Christians or heterosexual males or other such abominations.
The Philanderer
A couple of men keep putting their dicks in vaginas when they ought to be bumming each other. The women are after only one thing- marriage- and to have more of that commodity are willing to outsource Divorce to South Dakota. Sadly, Bertrand Russell's brother thought such divorces were legal in Britain. They weren't and so the noble Earl was sent to jail for three months for bigamy. I'm not sure what the moral here is other than the usual Shavian one that vaginas are ikky. Stay the fuck away from them.
Adam Smith's 'a theory of moral sentiment' made an absurd claim- 'As we have no immediate experience of what other men feel, we can form no idea of the manner in which they are affected, but by conceiving what we ourselves should feel in the like situation.
This is nonsense. We use language, including 'body language', to learn how other people, or animals, are affected by things which are happening to them even if those things have never happened to us and could never happen to us. It is not necessary for me to imagine what it feels like to have a vagina or to push a baby out of a vagina to know that the thing is painful. I also don't know what it feels like to use a vibrator but can guess by the fact that there is a big market for such things, that people who use them derive pleasure from them. Indeed, there are lots of things, whose use I don't know and don't want to know, which I know to be valuable to certain people who, it is evident, will pay good money to purchase them. I may have no 'sympathy' for such people but am content to say 'different strokes for different folks' and leave it at that.
Though our brother is on the rack, as long as we ourselves are at our ease, our senses will never inform us of what he suffers.
Even if the person on the rack is a cousin, rather than a brother, we are likely to be discommoded by his piercing shrieks of agony. True, Smith was Scottish and may have been more fortunately constituted.
They never did, and never can, carry us beyond our own person, and it is by the imagination only that we can form any conception of what are his sensations.
Nonsense! If people will pay good money to escape the rack, we understand that the thing is best avoided. Moreover, if my boss texts me with a demand that I send Kuy Teav to his hotel room and I don't know what Kuy Teav is, I ask my colleagues. One of them says, 'leave it with me. My wife is from Cambodia'. I make no further inquiry. I don't care if Kuy Teav means 'rent-boy' in the Khmer language or if it is a Cambodian dish or type of sleeping garment. All that matters is that the boss is happy.
Neither can that faculty help us to this any other way, than by representing to us what would be our own, if we were in his case.
This simply isn't true. Some people may have sufficient imagination to 'put themselves in the shoes' of other people. Most don't. They don't care why people buy or sell a product. They just look at whether they themselves would find it profitable to enter that trade.
It is the impressions of our own senses only, not those of his, which our imaginations copy.
This may be true of people similar to ourselves. But our imaginations 'can copy' tales about Gods and Demons and flying unicorns. I like to think of myself as one of the latter species having marvellous adventures on the rings of Uranus.
By the imagination, we place ourselves in his situation.
Or the situation of a flying unicorn. So what? Commerce has little need for imagination. It does require a sharp eye for price movements and changes in rates of profitability. As for 'moral sentiments', they may arise from Theology, or a concern for Duty or Reputation or 'Fama', rather than Sympathy. Indeed, previously, people thought 'synderesis'- i.e. innate knowledge of the fundamental principles of moral action- was implanted in all humans by their Creator. 'Sympathy' was just a psychological term Smith used to replace a 'scholastic' one.
For Amartya Sen, Sympathy differs from Commitment in thatThis paper examines Amartya Sen’s concept of sympathy and the oversimplified, ambiguous and sometimes erroneous interpretations of this concept by Sen’s interpreters.
Why examine what is obvious nonsense?
In the first section, two types of sympathy can be found in Sen’s ‘Rational fools’ essay – a contemplative
i.e. thinking starving peeps would probably really enjoy a nice Pizza
and an active type
sending some money to a charity so they can buy starving peeps Pizza
of which the former has conceptual primacy. Following this, active sympathy is examined to ascertain what Sen means by ‘actions based on sympathy’ and why he deems these to be ‘egoistic’.
Coz the guy doing it has an ego.
Sen’s understanding of egoism means that sympathy is not straightforwardly assimilable to the orthodox theory of rational choice.
Sure it is. I contemplatively feel sympathy for myself- a guy hungry for pizza- and for other hungry guys who would like some pizza. I order a Pizza and hand around slices and feel very good about myself. This is called gaining 'utility' or 'ophelimity' or 'welfare' or 'pleasure' or 'satisfaction'. Rational choice can analyse this well enough. Suppose I order the Pizza on the phone and the guy on the other end says 'that will be two hundred quid' and my reply is 'fuck that! I'll order Chinese!' then we have a data point from which, eventually, my 'price elasticity' for Pizza can be calculated.
The section after that analyses the place of altruism in Sen’s work
altruism is a Tarskian primitive. It means different things to different people. I believe it involves letting other people smell my farts. They think it involves telling me to fuck off so everybody else can enjoy the dinner party.
and ascertains that altruism can be aligned both with sympathy and commitment,
and with farting
depending on the definition one uses.
Nope. The thing is a Tarskian primitive. It has no definition. What you think good for other people is not necessarily what they think is good for themselves and others.
The final section compares sympathy and commitment and establishes that they are to be distinguished, not according to the welfare a person expects to obtain from making choices, but according to the reason which motivates that person to make a choice.
Nonsense! Sympathy is an emotion. Commitment is more like a promise. A person may be very sympathetic to you but may refuse to promise you any type of support. Equally, another person who has no sympathy for you may credibly commit to help you for some reason of their own. Thus Hamas may feel no sympathy for Shia Iran but its commitment to help that country, for its own reasons, is credible enough. Equally, people who have zero sympathy for Jews or for Israel, may be relied upon to help that country for geopolitical reasons.
Introduction In his essay, ‘Rational fools’ (1977), Amartya Sen uses the concepts ‘sympathy’ and ‘commitment’ to capture aspects of human choice which are not straightforwardly conceivable in rational choice theory.
Emotions we feel may have a utility of their own. I may pay to watch a movie about the Holocaust so as to feel sympathy for the victims just as I may pay to watch a horror movie so as to experience the emotion of fear. Equally, I may gain utility by committing to show up for work so as to get paid even though I am wholly out of sympathy with the notion that doing work is good for the character or for one's self-respect. Rational Choice theory has a theory of disutility just as much as it has a theory of utility. It is Sen whose theory is vacuous. Why, if he feels sympathy for famine victims, did he not become a soil scientist like his father so as to boost agricultural output, or else join the FAO under another relative of his- B.R Sen? Why was his actual 'commitment' only to lecturing on useless, stupid, shit? The answer is provided by Rational Choice theory. Sen's sympathy was overridden by the great disutility he would have experienced if he had actually done something useful.
Sympathy has been treated by Sen’s interpreters as the weaker sibling of the pair, and Sen himself is partly responsible for the modest reputation which sympathy has. He has not, for instance, developed the concept of sympathy in his later opus in a manner similar to the reworking which commitment has undergone. And sympathy is less seditious vis-à-vis the orthodox theory of rational choice than commitment, something which makes the latter concept of more interest to Sen than sympathy.
Commitment is merely a credible type of promise though, no doubt, it is defeasible by a change in opportunity cost. I am committed to buying a Pizza we can share till I realize I might have to cut back on my purchase of other things I want if I actually bought the pizza. There is nothing particularly interesting about this. I suppose Sen gasses on about it because he wants to fool us he is 'committed' to helping the poor rather than posing as a sort of Mother Theresa.
Similarly, in my work on sexology, I put more stress on having a ginormous cock than on being a tender and sensitive lover. To be clear, I want people to think I have a big cock. I don't care if they think I won't go down on a woman even if that's the only way I've ever been able to get a girl to climax.
... Sen means... states that commitment involves counterpreferential choice.
Sadly, we don't know what preferences are. We do know what revealed preference is and we can speculate whether a particular person would really have preferred something else.
Sen ultimately, in his work of the 2000s, concludes that sympathy can be incorporated into an extended version of orthodox rational choice theory which maintains the assumption that individuals pursue their self-interest in all their endeavours.
There is no need for any such assumption which, in any case, is either tautological or incapable of being controverted by any empirical observation whatsoever.
Fabienne Peter and Hans Bernhard Schmid discuss three types of motivation which Sen distinguishes. One is ‘(narrow) self-interest’: ‘One acts from self-interest when one aims at maximizing one’s own welfare’.
Again, no one can say whether this isn't the case. Suppose you say 'I will go to the shop and buy the dress which makes me look most horrible even though I yearn for praise for my beauty and elegance.' I may reply, 'I don't believe you. You are only saying this so I will think some dress could make you less hideous than you actually are, Mummy.'
Sympathy, they write, is also a type of motivation: ‘One acts from sympathy when one’s own welfare is affected by how others are doing, as in the case where helping others makes one feel better’.
But one can be very sympathetic to a person one likes to see suffer. A doting husband may poison his wife so as to have the pleasure of nursing her. Suffering has ennobled her. She no longer compares my dick unfavourably to that of the Pizza delivery boy.
The third motivation is commitment which, as Peter and Schmid write, is ‘motivationally unrelated to the agent’s welfare, however broadly conceived’. I
This is impossible. There is no way to prove that commitment won't benefit one in some indirect or unexpected way.
n this section, I contrast self-interest and sympathy and turn my attention to commitment in the final section of this paper. Peter and Schmid’s depiction of self-interest and sympathy is noteworthy for three reasons. First, that self-interest marks a type of motivation is clear from their mention of the aim behind an agent’s self-interested action – to maximise her welfare.
Nonsense! Under Knightian Uncertainty, Rational Choice involves regret minimization not Welfare maximization. The same is true for reasons connected to cost of information acquisition, complexity, computability, concurrency etc.
is sympathy always egoistic?
yes. Chairs don't have an ego but can't be sympathetic. The cat can be sympathetic but it is very egotistical.
Pettit qualifies his statement when he discusses what Sen calls ‘altruism through sympathy’
which does not exist. We may say 'that person's sympathy for the suffering led them to act in an altruistic manner'. We don't say 'that torturer's sympathetic enjoyment of his victim's screams are altruistic.'
which, writes Pettit, ‘is not self-interested in the sense of being pursued with an instrumental eye to securing some personal benefit … [but] that the person we favor is someone whose welfare matters to us, intuitively, in the same manner as our own; let them fare well and we feel good’ .
In which case we get a personal benefit.
Favouring somebody whose welfare is as important to us as our own does not sound egoistic.
Nor does favoring Saturn over Uranus. But it is equally irrelevant.
The third noteworthy point about Peter and Schmid’s portrayal is that, whereas they associate self-interest with the maximisation of one’s welfare,
which makes one feel better. Nobody likes knowing they missed out on an opportunity or ended up paying more than they had to.
sympathy, in the form of helping others, makes one ‘feel better’. Feeling better presumably includes cases in which my helping another person maximises my welfare, but feeling better might also involve increasing, but not maximising, my welfare.
If there is no Knightian Uncertainty, then whatever you do maximizes your Utility. The theory is tautological.
A question raised hereby concerns the relationship between sympathy and welfare maximisation.
It is the same as the relationship between either of them and farting. This is not a question worth answering.
In what follows, I undertake a close examination of Sen’s pronouncements on sympathy, particularly those of ‘Rational fools’. My argument issues in the following conclusions: (a) sympathy is not necessarily a type of motivation for action
Sympathy is an emotion. It is likely to be a 'Darwinian algorithm of the mind'- i.e. it exists for an evolutionary reason. This means it necessarily is a type of motivation for action which, however, may be overridden by some stronger emotion or by a rational calculation.
but can consist solely in a person’s feelings in which case sympathy is contemplative;
in which case the action that is motivated is 'contemplation'.
(b) Sen places an epistemological condition on contemplative sympathy which requires that a person, A, can only feel sympathy if she knows and does not merely believe that the welfare of another person, B, with whom A feels sympathy, has changed.
This is the reverse of the usual view- which is that it is right and proper to have contemplative suffering for a fictional character- e.g. Tess of the d'Urbervilles- but not for a woman of flesh and blood whom you could help with a charitable donation.
(c) pace Sen, ‘uncertainty’ does not necessarily leave the formulation of sympathy unaffected;
Not if Sympathy is indeed a 'Darwinian algorithm of the mind'. Evolution occurs on an uncertain fitness landscape. Thus uncertainty leaves untouched whatever formulates emotions.
(d) contemplative sympathy is the primary but not sole type of sympathy,
it is neither save by arbitrary stipulation. But I could say there is a type of sympathy only expressible by a ruminative fart and another whose origin is the sniffing of such a fart.
for there is another, active, type of sympathy which Sen clearly delineates;
does it involve farting?
(e) Sen’s understanding of egoism does not imply that the actor seeks to maximise her welfare when she performs actions based on sympathy;
Because Sen's understanding of everything is defective. Egoism is the trait displayed by things with an 'ego' or sense of possessing a self.
(f) actions based on sympathy are ‘altruistic’ only
by subjective stipulation. We don't what is or isn't truly altruistic. Still, to have a reputation for altruism can be very beneficial. But, under different circumstances, so is having a reputation as a right bastard.
on a narrow (self-interested) understanding of that term; only commitment is compatible with a non-selfinterested understanding of altruism which Sen identifies;
The only way to have a non self-interested understanding of anything is by not being the sort of self which evolved to be self-interested- in other words, not being a human being. But there are an infinite number of way of not-being human.
(g) choice based on commitment is
not a choice. Mummy offers you a choice between pizza and Chinese takeaway for dinner. You say no. You have a prior commitment to eating the shit your bride insists on cooking for you. I only came back to get my Teddy-bear. Hopefully, it will be able to keep me safe from her tonight.
distinguished, not by the expected welfare effects it has for the agent who makes that choice, but by its reason-based (as opposed to preference-based) motivational structure.
A preference is a reason though you may have a reason for overriding a particular preference because of a prior commitment. That's pretty much all that can be said on the topic. Sen, however, wanted to say more. He wanted to show that if Preferences exist then it must also be the case that Democracy prevents Famine while Freedom causes Development and that true Democratic Freedom for India would involve the banning of Hinduism.
True, Sen was and is merely a virtue signaller. He has no sympathy or commitment to anything save his own self-aggrandizement but must pretend to be a brown monkey incapable of understanding why other brown monkeys, who have a bit of money, remain in India despite the fact that lots of brown monkeys there are as poor as shit. Surely, a person with proper Smithian 'moral sentiments' would run the fuck away from India so as to be a Professor of useless shite at Harvard? How can you explain Manmohan or Mohammad Yunus staying on in their shit-hole homelands? The answer is obvious. They don't have good moral sentiments. They make a fetish out of 'Economic Growth' which is a code-word for raising productivity and therefore Income for vast numbers of people. Clearly this is incompatible with Freedom as Development as the Capability to Evaluate the Freedom to Develop without having any fucking Freedom or Development whatsoever.
In responding to a letter from Janos Kornai, in which the Hungarian economist stated that Marxism was responsible for Bolshevism and Stalinism, Sen wrote-
... if I encounter an idea in Marx that I am inclined to reject after scrutiny, all I need to do is to drop that notion—and its implications—from intellectual acceptance.
The problem here is that if that 'idea' is an axiom or foundational assumption then 'rejecting it' entails rejecting the entire Marxist theory. Moreover, Marx makes a prediction- viz. Communism is inevitable. Either he is right or he is wrong. That is a decision his readers have to make for themselves.
But that selective exclusion would not force us to reject other Marxian ideas which seemed to me to be sound, such as “objective illusion” (from The German Ideology)
this is the notion that the ideas of the ruling class aren't really 'universal values'. Just because things are the way they are, this does not mean they could not be otherwise. But some 'revolutionary' ideas were simply silly. Marx tells us of 'a valiant fellow who had the idea that men were drowned in water only because they were possessed with the idea of gravity.
Marx was being silly. We float in water. Gravity does not matter. The fact that we don't possess gills is what prevents us breathing under water, like fish.
#If they were to knock this notion out of their heads, say by stating it to be a superstition, a religious concept, they would be sublimely proof against any danger from water. His whole life long he fought against the illusion of gravity, of whose harmful results all statistic brought him new and manifold evidence. This valiant fellow was the type of the new revolutionary philosophers in Germany.'
Sadly, Marx & Engels were describing themselves. They had an 'objective illusion' that they themselves were smart. They weren't. They were stupid.
Consider the following quote from the German Ideology- 'For each new class which puts itself in the place of one ruling before it, is compelled, merely in order to carry through its aim, to represent its interest as the common interest of all the members of society, that is, expressed in ideal form: it has to give its ideas the form of universality, and represent them as the only rational, universally valid ones.'
This was wholly false. The Brits became the ruling class in India by protecting all the ancient customs and laws and religions of the indigenous population. The class which gains power, be it by the power of the purse or the sword or superior administrative efficiency, retains it only by those means. True, a bunch of ranters may grab power during a period of instability, but if they don't solve the fiscal and the military and the administrative problem, their reign will be brief indeed.
Sen & Co suffered from a dangerous illusion- viz. that poverty could be cured by redistribution rather than by raising productivity. Objectively, they were wrong and thus they were increasingly disintermediated. Sen lived to see Manmohan become PM of India and then, more humiliatingly yet, Mohammad Yunus take power in his own ancestral Bangladesh.
Sen did not understand why Marxism became the official ideology of the greater part of Eurasia. It was because 'dictatorship of the proletariat' was militarily and economically feasible. Industrial workers could force peasants to hand over food and they could produce the weapons they would themselves use against invaders or insurgents. Since India refused to permit an industrial proletariat to develop, Indian Communism could never make a bid for absolute power. The soldiers were the sons of 'kulaks' and enjoyed killing brainy Bolshevik babus.
or the long-run superiority of distribution according to needs—when feasible (from The Critique of the Gotha Programme).
In which Marx said 'to each according to his contribution' till scarcity disappears. Sen thinks Marx meant the opposite of what he said.
Had I been a Marxist, I might have faced a problem in rejecting one of his ideas while accepting another.
Nonsense! Like Meghnad Desai, Sen could have been a 'Hayekian-Marxist'. But equally one could be a Jewish Pope who is also Empress of China.
But since I do not see myself as a Marxist, that choice is mine—not Marx’s.
It is one thing to pick and choose quotations from an author. It is another to say 'Marx said 'to each according to his needs' in his Critique of the Gotha Program when, the fact is, he said 'to each according to his contribution'.
For this reason, a non-Marxist has a liberty that a Marxist may not have in being able to choose with discrimination.
The reverse is the case. If you keep quoting the Bible and then confess you are an atheist, people think what you are exercising is not 'liberty' but 'hypocrisy' or 'stupidity'.
Interestingly enough, the liberty to choose one’s priorities, discriminating among them, is something on which Marx himself bestowed much praise.
Nonsense! The dude wasn't a libertarian nor, though a heavy drinker, did he demand the abolition of 'tied houses'- i.e. pubs forced to sell only the beer produced by the Brewery which owned them.
In a famous passage in The German Ideology, he recommends bringing “the conditions for the free development and activity of individuals under their own control,"
in which case there will be a smaller menu of choice
and notes that:
[it] makes it possible for me to do one thing to-day and another tomorrow,
what makes it possible? Marx says ' In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow'. Marx was wrong. Even under Communism, women, not men, would give birth. The farmer could not also be a sailor. The fisherman would not be allowed to perform heart surgery.
to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have in mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic."
Rich people in Victorian England could certainly choose any or none of these activities. Working people could not. Marx is saying 'after scarcity has ended, no one will need to work from 9 to 5.
A skilled Marxist may be advantaged in being like a good fisherman, but a non-Marxist has the freedom either to choose or to abandon fish (“just as I have in mind”).
No. A good fisherman can decide to become a Marxist. A bad fisherman can't become good by either embracing or rejecting bits of Marx.
It is the freedom of the non-Marxist which I am emphasizing here—a freedom that Marx greatly valued.
Did Marx express delight when people disagreed with him? No! He poured the vials of his wrath upon them. Marx may have valued his own freedom strongly enough to run the fuck away from places where he might be put in jail. This did not mean he wanted Kings and Plutocrats to continue to enjoy freedoms they currently possessed.
We can choose some of Marx’s ideas, rejecting others (with or without making any use of them).
We can lie about Marx- did you know he advocated compulsory gender reassignment surgery for all male heterosexuals?- but, if we do so, people will simply think we are liars rather than that we are exercising our freedom.
Some of the sadder aspects of communist regimes tended to bring out only too clearly Marx’s role as a “ruler” rather than as an intellectual, competing with others—like Hume, Voltaire and Rousseau—for the acceptance of their respective ideas.
Marx and Engels had been Revolutionaries. If the 1848 revolutions had been successful, both would have been 'rulers'. Hume, Voltaire and Rousseau had no such ambitions. Lasalle, on the other hand, had a Napoleonic streak. Marx hated him.
And yet Marx himself was not the political ruler or leader of any state
but he wanted to be.
(any more than Rousseau or Hume was), and Marx’s “promotion” to infallible political leadership happened only after his death.
Because he kept saying all the other Leftists were stupid and evil while only he himself had uncovered the dialectical logic of History.
Marx can be seen in at least two different ways
the objectively right way which squares with the historical record or else a subjective and false way which, however, may enable us to 'virtue signal'.
and our respective interpretations of Marx partly reflect that dichotomy.
I see myself as someone who got a lot from Marx’s ideas and concerns, without
contributing anything of value to Economics or Philosophy
—and this is important to emphasize—ever becoming a “Marxist.”
Though he started of as the side-kick of Maurice Dobbs. Indeed, the Sen-Dobb thesis was Stalinist to the hilt. Confiscate productivity gains from workers so as to finance industrialization through 'Five Year Plans'.
I have always felt quite free to learn from Marx’s analysis without being under any obligation to be automatically a “supporter.”
Why be a supporter if that would entail having to surrender a portion of your wage to the property? Also, you would not be allowed to run off with your best friend's wife. Such behaviour was classed as 'bourgeois decadence'. Still, Sen wasn't a 'useful idiot' but only because he was a useless idiot.
Indeed, even as I saw that my intellectual horizon was being extended by Marx’s analyses, I did think that some of his ideas were, in my view, seriously mistaken.
'Objective illusion' was mistaken.
I do think, for example, that “the dictatorship of the proletariat” is an unsustainable idea
It worked. Trotsky got factory workers to kill 'Whites' and 'kulaks' who resisted food requisition. Later, Stalin collectivized the land which the peasants had seized for themselves during the Revolution.
and reflects some kind of muddled thinking by Marx—one with sad consequences for many.
Marx saw that the French peasant who received land after the Revolution were valiant soldiers for Napoleon. He could see the military potential of the industrial proletariat. In 1848, General Napier had shown the 'Physical Force' Chartists his canons. He had 'Physical Force'. They did not. But military technology was changing. Surely a day would come when the workers in the pistol or machine gun factory could seize control of it and arm their fellow workers? At that point, snipers could kill be artillery men before they could fire off their canons.
His lack of interest in how political power would be exercised—and even more in how it could be restrained (we do not find any significant discussion in Marx of a Galbraithian “countervailing force”)
Marx was suspicious of Trade Unions- in particular those of the highly skilled. They were likely to make common cause with the petit bourgeoisie and adopt Imperialism as their ideology.
—seemed to me to be a notable lacuna in Marxian political economy.
Sen picks out the things which made Marxism feasible as a political program and calls them 'lacunae'. He truly has shit for brains.
Marx’s conceptions, aside from those that have remained rather pure (like “exploitation”),
which Morishima, Sen's colleague, erected into a 'fundamental theorem of Marxian economics'. Its utility is to show that if even one dick enters one vagina and jizzes without the woman jizzing equally and oppositely, then all Women are exploited. Only by chopping off all heterosexual dicks can Equity be achieved.
have been discussed so much, mixed with other approaches, that they come into our thoughts in very many different ways (for example, many people are surprised to learn that the idea that every person has many distinct “identities” had an early appearance in Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme)
Very true. Marx showed that Clark Kent was also Superman. This greatly influenced Nietzsche- right? Wrong. What Marx said was ' The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals. Thus the first fact to be established is the physical organisation of these individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of nature....
The fact is that 'physical organization' refers to the physical body. Marx says identity is confined to that body. We don't also have an immortal soul nor is there anybody who appears as a wood-cutter over here but who is also the Emperor of China.
Men can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion or anything else you like.
Men have names and addresses and dates of birth. If I catch hold of a cat thinking it is my cat, it has no way to convince me of my mistake. It has to scratch and bite me till I let it go.
They themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence, a step which is conditioned by their physical organisation.
This means men can tell you not just their own names but what belongs to them by reason of the labour they expended in producing it.
By producing their means of subsistence men are indirectly producing their actual material life.
Which is why you have to use a lot of force against them if you desire to take away their means of subsistence. Communist Parties in some countries were able to wade through a sea of blood to establish their absolute power.
Sen believes that Marx was for the 'Welfare State'. The truth is he bitterly opposed Lasalle's 'State Socialism' which envisaged massive state loans to found large-scale cooperatives that would eventually take over all industry and all branches of the economy. This process would culminate in socialism. Bismarck rejected this but did bring in collective insurance. This provided the impetus for the emergence of the Welfare State as opposed to the previous patchwork of assistance to the poor at the Parish level . Marx considered such 'reformism' to be reactionary.
the idea of the “welfare state” in post-Second World-War Europe did draw on Marx’s prioritization of needs (going beyond rewarding work) and of social sharing.
Marx objected to this type of charity more particularly if it was done by the State. Why? It would give the poor and the vulnerable a stake in the existing economic order. They would be less attracted to revolutionary politics.
European countries had been moving towards collective insurance and the State takeover of welfare functions from parishes from the 1890s onward. Marxists played no role in this.
Yet it also had other inputs, particularly from the empirical research—by R.J Hammond, Richard Titmuss and others—of social benefits of war-time sharing—particularly of food and medicine.
They looked at the outcomes of policies over which they, initially, had no influence. Sen must be aware that Leftists at the LSE hated Titmuss. Hammond's account of war-time rationing was read by Indians though Britain had far greater State capacity and esprit de corps. What worked during the Blitz for Britishers would not work for Indians.
A different—but related—point to this contrast is that Marxian inspirations have often been quite splendidly used in a productive way by non-Marxists who happen to sympathize with some parts of Marx’s general reasoning, including his radicalism.
Were they economists or political scientists? If not, what they produced or didn't produce is irrelevant.
There are lessons even in the contrast between Sergei Eisenstein’s work as a relaxed film director before the Soviet regime took firm and inflexible form (his film “Batleship Potempkin” is a good example of his work from that earlier period) and his work later on after he had become a celebrated citizen of the strongly disciplined USSR.
This is nonsense. Eisenstein was a Red Army soldier who was promoted for producing effective propaganda. Following the Party line, he initially was a 'Proletkult' theatre director scoring his first success with a 'Eccentricism' influenced production of a play by Ostrovsky. He was also a theoretician who was wise enough to keep in step with the ever-changing Party line. To say 'Potemkin' or 'Strike' were 'relaxed' is simply false. They were highly mannered. This drew criticism, more particular after Potemkin became a world-wide success. Eisenstein then promised to embrace 'social realism'- the new dogma of the party. Still, if his brief stint with Paramount in Hollywood had been a success, he have remained in the West. The truth was his 'formalism' did not match the new aesthetic of the talkies which eschewed grand Guignol gestures. Still, Eisenstein's skills as a sycophant finally won over Stalin and so he got to make Nevsky which then paved the way for his hagiography of Ivan the fucking Terrible.
To take a sharper example,
A stupider example. Eisenstein was a Party hack. Picasso wasn't.
Pablo Picasso’s politics as a member of the Communist Party may have benefitted both from
the fact that Stalin had helped the Spanish Republicans and were doing the heavy lifting in the war against Hitler.
his political understanding and from the distance at which Picasso placed his work from the details of his political beliefs. That distancing did not affect the excellence of such paintings as “Guernica” which
was disliked by the Soviet Union as was 'massacre in Korea'
were clearly political and influenced by Picasso’s political sympathies. However, as his agent and dealer, D-H. Kahnweiler, claimed, Picasso “has never read a line of Karl Marx, nor of Engels of course."
But Picasso was aware that the Anarchists had been pretty shit in the Spanish Civil War. Anyway, the French Communist Party might take power. The Americans might prefer this if the aim was to contain Germany.
Familiarity with Marx’s understanding of the world did benefit Picasso’s vision,
though he did not in fact have any such understanding himself.
but it would be hard to speculate what degree of closeness—and distance—may be most productive in one’s relation with Karl Marx.
For a painter or a plumber- none at all. Economists and Political Scientists, however, have to make a decision- was Marx right or was he wrong? The answer, sadly, is he was wrong. It is true that the 'dictatorship of the proletariat' can be achieved, but the difficulty is how to stop proles from running away from it.
However, having an understanding of Marx may not be such a terrible thing to happen to a non-Marxist.
Terrible things would have happened to Sen in his natal Bengal if he had come out as a critic of Marx. Still, once Mamta came to power, there was little point pretending to be a crypto-Marxist.
Turning back to Kornai- who regained salience with his powerful attack on Orban a decade ago- it is important to understand that he had abandoned Marxism way back in 1956. He was very much part and parcel of the Western 'positive' Econ tradition though, no doubt, he wished to be useful to his country and thus had to make compromises- e.g. only publishing what the Party would consider permissible.
Bernard Chavance writes-
In Contradictions and dilemmas (1986), Kornai wrote that we are faced with inescapable dilemmas resulting from the conflict of different value systems.
Why? The answer is 'concurrency'. There is no 'natural' way to choose which value to prioritize. The thing is bound to be arbitrary. But this also means resources will be invested in 'gaming the system' so as to get more favourable results. But, this is like 'rent dissipation'- i.e. is wasteful.
For instance, 'there is a contradiction between the efficiency conditions on the one side, and the ethical principles of solidarity and security on the other.
Either 'solidarity' raises efficiency (e.g. allocative efficiency improves if you help me when I need help and I reciprocate or 'pay it forward') or it does not. If the thing results in 'rent dissipation'- e.g. everybody going on strike to raise their relative wages- then there is a nuisance which must be curbed. The same thing can be said about 'security' which reduces Knightian Uncertainty and thus is 'regret minimizing'.
With his well-known image of the supermarket he criticized the notion of an optimal economic system as naive and said that all real economic systems are organic wholes, containing good and bad features.
There may be occulted 'linkages' such that policies aimed at one sector of the economy have unintended consequences elsewhere.
They consequently constitute « package deals », it is not possible at will to choose only the beneficial and to exclude the detrimental components of different systems – as unemployment for capitalism and shortage for socialism.
It may not be desirable to get rid of unemployment or shortages. It is a good thing that I am unemployed though there is a big shortage of Algebraic Topologists. This is because I have shit for brains and ought not to be employed doing anything which requires a high IQ.
He concluded with a kind of impossibility theorem:
It seems to me that it is impossible to create a closed and consistent socioeconomic normative theory which would assert, without contradiction, a politico-ethical value system and would at the same time provide for the efficiency of the economy.
In other words, Sen & Co are seeking to do the impossible- or, rather, pretending to seek to do it.
It is impossible if that theory seeks to be realistic and wishes to take into account the true behavioural characteristics of people, communities, organisations and social groups. (Kornai, 1986, p. 137)
We don't know those characteristics in different states of the world. If we did we would know if this kid is capable of becoming a great basket-ball star while that other kid could be the next Terence Tao. Anyone with the ability to spot talent of this sort could get very rich as a scout or 'head-hunter'.
5A task of research was to find an answer to the question: « what compromises between the different normative principles are brought about by the social forces of the different social systems »? (ibid., p. 137-138).
This is not a task for 'research'. It is 'discovery' made by the people empowered to make the compromises. However, what is easier is to do what was previously done and then hire some guy to pretend that it represents 'ethical' investing or diplomacy or whatever.
6Keynes had a similar attitude, when in « The end of laissez-faire » (1926) he insisted on distinguishing the assessment of capitalism from the point of view of comparative economic efficiency or from a moral perspective. These two approaches led to opposing conclusions in his eyes, and he famously stated that acceptable compromises had to be searched for: « Our problem is to work out a social organisation which shall be as efficient as possible without offending our notions of a satisfactory way of life. » (Keynes, 1926, p. 294)
The whole world would soon realize that economists like Keynes had shit for brains.
7A second stance in Kornai is linked to the idea that you cannot add up or aggregate the different assessments of diverse phenomena to reach a kind of unified utility function (Kornai, 2013a).
But you can get a good enough measure of real GDP and thus future Tax Revenue. Work to raise that in a sustainable fashion.
He gave in 2006 a quite unique appraisal of the experience of the great transformation in Central and Eastern Europe:
some countries preferred to 'front-load' the pain of austerity and thus were able to have a shake-out followed by rapid and sustainable growth. Others were complacent or corrupt. Ukraine should be wealthier and more secure than Poland. But it refused to make the difficult choices.
in a long-term perspective, it was for him a success as a swift and peaceful historical change that took place in the direction of the main tenets of Western civilization, capitalism, and democracy, but in an existential and middle term perspective for the populations who went through numerous hardships it represented a failure. « I keep two accounts and not one, and do not merge them. On one account, I gladly acknowledge a great success at the level of world history: a system was created superior to the former one, without bloodshed, with incredible speed. On the other account, I have the list of good and bad experience in everyday life; much joy and much pain. I consider it both sensible and defensible to say that what has happened in this region can be simultaneously considered a success in terms of its global historical significance, and a failure in many important aspects because it caused pain, bitterness and disappointment for so many people. » (Kornai, 2006a, p. 241)
Kornai didn't predict that Orban would offer a better deal to middle class families and thus get a lock on power.
His moral reflections in his autobiography also contained an analogous view – where he hinted with irony at a « methodological advance » – about the assessment of personal life actions: « I do not believe that the wrongs done by a person in one stage of his or her life can be righted by useful service to humanity in another stage. We need at least two accounts here. In one the wrongs indelibly remain, but we must of course strive to gather as many and as effective a body of good deeds in the other account. » (Kornai, 2013a, p. 10; 2006).
Why? One may point to a chap who devotes himself to arcane research and say 'that fellow is a parasite. He rides his own hobby horse while being fed at the expense of the productive people in society.' Yet some such people may make discoveries of enormous benefit to the whole of society. One day soon, Socioproctolgy will be recognized for what it is- viz. a cure for insomnia.
1.3. Supremacy of democracy
Thirdly, we also find a distinctive judgment – at some variance with the dilemma and compromise view – that could be coined Kornai’s axiological primacy of the political. He dismissed as « repugnant » the tradeoff that some posit between democracy and growth for China, being disposed to renounce the former for the benefit of the latter (Kornai, 2014, p. 11).
Who will fight a war against the Red Army to liberate China from the iron grip of the Party? Consider the fate of the Chinese Republic which quickly degenerated into War Lordism and the Japanese invasion.
He put forward his lexicographic ordering of preference between ultimate values. « Of primary value are democracy and the values closely tied to it, such as respect for fundamental human rights. Abandoning those cannot be compensated for with material goods, faster growth, or great welfare. There is no tradeoff whereby it would be “worth” sacrificing a slice of democracy for a rise in GDP ».
Kornai was wrong. If India could be ruled by a Dictator (it can't because 'assassination tempers autocracy) people would vote for such a Dictator even if he or she decides to establish a dynasty- like the one in North Korea.
The principal standard is the rule of a democratic regime. « If that requirement is met (or approximately met), then and only then can we start to weigh the secondary, tertiary etc. criteria. And if the assessment has reached that point, it becomes possible to consider tradeoffs among the secondary, tertiary, etc. criteria. » (Kornai, 2013a, p. 9)
One may equally say 'the first priority is the establishment of Islamic rule. Once that is established, we can have elections. The Creator must be served before his creatures can be served.'
Kornai’s approach of democracy had a specific tone. He usually referred to a minimalist and procedural definition inspired by Schumpeter, underlining the dismissible character of the government:
a popular uprising can cause the elected leader to flee. De Gaulle initially fled from Cohn Bendit and his revolting fellow students.
A “democratic minimum” is fulfilled if a government of a country comes into power as a result of a competition for the votes of the citizens and can be removed from office within the framework of a civilized process without a palace putsch, military coup, assassination, or revolution. (Kornai, 2006a, p. 215)
India meets this condition but only because Rahul doesn't want to meet the same fate as this Daddy and his Granny.
On the relation between capitalism and democracy, Kornai moved away from Schumpeter, who thought democracy could evolve outside capitalism. His essential point was that « capitalism is a necessary, but not sufficient condition of democracy » .
India isn't Capitalist. At the time when its first general election, under universal adult suffrage, was held, only about twenty percent of the population was wholly within the 'cash nexus'.
We observe that he did not attempt to develop the theoretical reasons for such a thesis, it was for him, as it were, a conclusion derived from historical observation.
which ignored large swathes of Africa and Asia.
A similar position may be seen in his 1990 article where he asserted the historical strong links between private property and market coordination on one hand, and between state property and bureaucratic coordination on the other, as another argument against market socialism that would attempt to combine state ownership and market coordination – a case of « weak links » (Kornai, 1990).
Kornai was aware that all was not well in Tito's Yugoslavia. What he, and everybody else, failed to predict was that the 'divorce between ownership and control' in Western economies would lead to the rise of mega-billionaires like Musk who would have outsize political influence.
Beyond Kornai’s courageous and early critique of the decline of democracy and the shift to autocracy in Orbán’s Hungary, we see that his last great study published was dedicated to the evolution of political regimes in the capitalist post-socialist world, where he found about one tenth of the population living in democracies and nine tenth in autocracies and dictatorships (Kornai, 2016b).
Just say 'countries will be ruled they always have been ruled' and you have hit the mark.
2. Kornai, Marx, and capitalism
12Amartya Sen discusses the relation of Kornai to Marx, focusing on the questions of equity, power, and freedom. We observe that Kornai abandoned marxism in the 1950s, defined himself as an anti-marxist in the last decade, and stated that in his eyes Marx had a responsibility in Bolshevism and Stalinism (Kornai, 2009). But his relation to Marx’s thought cannot be reduced to such statements. Theoretically, the latter remained a major influence on Kornai’s Weltanschauung. In his article « Karl Marx through the eyes of an East-European intellectual » he wrote:
I sought to integrate various schools of thought. If forced to name those who have influenced me most, I mention the names of Schumpeter,
who was an odd sort of Marxist
Keynes
who, in Malthus, has a common intellectual ancestor with Marx and Lasalle
and Hayek,
there were Hayekian Marxists- like Meghnad Desai-in the Eighties.
but first on the list comes the name of Karl Marx. (Kornai, 2009, p. 982-983)
Which is why Kornai was a bit krap.
13The author of Capital was at once an economist, a sociologist, a political scientist, and a historian;
He was none of these things. He was a journalist of a polemical and paranoid type.
he « was the great pioneer and incomparable practitioner of the system paradigm ».
Which is wholly useless.
Alluding to his contrasting view of socialism as a shortage economy
i.e. features 'repressed inflation'
and capitalism as a surplus economy,
Nonsense! A Cartel would prefer to create an artificial shortage and to allocate goods through other than open market processes. When I was in School, our teacher explained that some Levi jeans were deliberately damaged so they could be sold as 'seconds'. This was pure price discrimination. In monopolistic competition, you may deliberately create a shortage- e.g. a restaurant with a long waiting time which does not raise prices because of the 'scarcity indicates quality' fallacy.
he also notes: « I learned mainly from Marx how important it is to study and explain the persistent deviations from market equilibrium » .
Like what? A 'reserve army' of unemployed people keeping wages down? But, during booms, there was no such reserve army.
The Socialist System, published in 1992, presents grand dynamics of socialism with its emergence, institutional forms, development, laws of motion, and eventual crisis and collapse, which have a decisive and unique marxian flavour.
In other words, the thing was garbage.
2.1 High incomes, inequalities and innovation
14In a friendly comment, Sen imagines what could have happened if Kornai had taken up Marx’s line of thought and expanded it in the direction of « incentive compatibility », about distribution questions.
Marx was not a fool. He knew that the rich and the talented would run the fuck away from regimes they found personally 'incentive incompatible'. The question was, would the productivity of the land and factories they left behind be impaired? The answer, sadly, turned out to be 'yes'. Get rid of the Jew and the guys who look a bit Jewy and other guys who do the kind of high IQ stuff Jews are good at and, what happens? You lose the fucking Second World War because the guys who can discover how to make nuclear bombs have found refuge in America.
However, while Kornai generally characterized high inequalities as a feature of capitalism, and mentioned equity on his list of important values, he often opposed what he saw as marxist or populist views on this topic. The conservative colour that Sen disliked in the american title of The Road to a Free Economy (1990), was seen in his attitude towards income inequalities. In his Essays on the Nature of the Capitalist Economy, he underscored in a schumpeterian spirit the innovation impulse and resulting dynamism as great positive characteristics of capitalism and viewed the « huge rewards » expected by potential innovators as a necessary incentive for risk-taking (Chavance, 2015).
He was behind the times. The Econophysicists and even some Social Choice mavens were groping towards the notion that volatility drives liquidity drives Capital markets. Creative destruction was about more than innovation. It was about a realignment of control rights under a Social Contract that is necessarily incomplete.
After the 2008 financial crisis, when public opinion was « upset by skyrocketing earnings of many business people and top managers », and demanded measures against such tendency, he asserted: « Although the anger is morally justified and psychologically understandable, nevertheless an (unpopular) caveat is needed. » How difficult it would be to imagine « the work of an honest and competent jury […] able to draw the line between a well-deserved and an undeservedly high reward. I am not prepared to propose a practical decision, but just want to draw the attention to the two (mutually contradictory) aspects of very high business income. » (Kornai, 2013b)
What nobody understood was that the Fed taking on more and more 'down-side' risk and doing Quantitative Easing would result in the absurdity of billionaires like Trump getting big big cheques from the Treasury. He should have been thanking Obama, not pretending he was born in Kenya.
It is all the more striking to see how in his last publication, as Amartya Sen observed, the great thinker somewhat altered his general historical and theoretical assessments.
He didn't like Orban.
Recalling his expectations in Hungary in 1956, in view of all further historical developments, he had a disillusioned and bitter thought.
'Now I see that my expectations about the benefits to come from capitalism and democracy were unrealistic.
What is realistic is to admit that a highly productive people who are determined to become yet more productive, will do well regardless what type of political or economic regime they have.
More than six decades later, the image formed in me is much more sober. I know how much injustice and inordinate income-inequality is born of capitalism.
It is unjust that Beyonce earns much more than me just because she is pretty and talented whereas no one wants to see my booty shake.
The institutions of democracy are unable to prevent the abuse of power and corruption, albeit to different degrees in different countries. (Kornai, 2021)
This depends on the independence and reliability of the judiciary and other statutory bodies which are meant to act as 'checks and balances'. That in turn depends on the ethos of the people of the country. I recall a talk given by a leading Indian barrister at the LSE. Actually, I am lying. I don't recall what he spoke about. It was above my head. But, later on, at the bar, he spoke to us students in Hindi. He said 'English Justice worked in England because the English considered it shameful to lie on oath. In India, you were considered a fool if you didn't lie your head off when facing a Judge.'
János Kornai gained a large recognition in different strands of economic thought.
No, but he provided a bridge for economists in Communist countries to, timidly, move towards less stupid economic policies. Sen could have done the same but couldn't be arsed. Manmohan shone in that respect.
His work always aroused interest and debates, including of course criticism. Usually, he did not enter directly in controversies with his opponents, but later modified his ideas if he recognized value in their commentaries. The respect he obtained from his followers and his critics alike was a consequence of his intellectual and moral integrity.
Whereas Sen is reviled by non-Bengalis because he doubled down on virtue signalling by telling stupid lies.
In the second Nehru Memorial lecture, delivered in 1968, Lord Mountbatten revealed that he had demanded plenipotentiary powers from Atlee- in other words, he was the first Viceroy not subordinate to the Secretary of State for India. He was truly a 'pro-consul'. His second revelation had to do with why he brought forward the date for the transfer of power. He had previously met the Indian political leaders who seemed in no great hurry. Indeed, Nehru thought India's most salient problem was economic while others mentioned niceties of constitutional law.
Then he talked to British officials.
I invited the eleven Governors of the provinces of British India to stay with me and had fruitful meetings with them. They told me of the August riots in Calcutta with 5,000 dead and 15,000 injured, followed by massacres in Noakhali and then Bihar, which had now reached the Punjab. They gave me a terrifying picture of the internal situation, as the pendulum of counter-massacres between the communities was swinging ever higher. Their accounts convinced me that the transfer of power would have to take place much earlier than we had planned in London. I then invited the Residents of the Political Department in the principal Indian States to stay with me for discussions. They painted an equally black picture. I had been friends with ten of the principal ruling Princes since we were on the Prince of Wales’ staff together twenty-five years before. Practically all came to see me now to renew their friendship and offer their help. Their views could not have been more disturbing.
In other words, British officials and even bone-headed Princes saw the looming catastrophe. Tens of thousands- perhaps hundreds of thousands would be killed. Yet Indian politicians weren't talking about how peace was to be maintained or an orderly exchange of populations (in the event of partition) could be effected.
I tried to tempt Jinnah by offering him Bengal and the Punjab unpartitioned
there was no point doing so. On Direct Action Day in Calcutta, the Hindu majority had turned the tables on Premier Suhrawardy and his Muslim goons. In other words, just being in charge of the whole Province didn't mean you could impose your will. The minority would prevail in districts where it was the majority.
provided he would agree that, though the Provinces with Muslim majorities would have self-government, they must be within an overall federal government at the centre. However, he said he would sooner have a moth-eaten Pakistan that owed no allegiance to a central government
and thus have an Army of its own
than a larger and more important area which came under it.
For the reason I've mentioned.
I then ascertained from the Congress and Sikh leaders that, heartbroken though they were at the very thought of partitioning India, if the Muslim League would not accept a transfer of power on any other basis, they would have no option but to accept if they were not to remain indefinitely under British rule. At this stage of developments such an alternative would have been unthinkable and also quite unworkable. There had been no recruitment to the Indian Civil Service or Police since 1939 and the British means of administering India were irreversibly running down. However, I was determined that the British should not be saddled with the responsibility of breaking up the unity of India, which it had taken them so many years to create and build up. So I devised a scheme whereby the elected members of the Constituent Assembly should vote, province by province, whether they wished power to be transferred to a unified or a partitioned India.
Thus Mountbatten was able to throw not just the blame for dividing India on to the Indians, he also absolved the Brits of responsibility for the Partition genocide. To be fair, it was indeed the fault of the Indians that they made no provision for vulnerable minorities. But, being independent does mean you can choose to let innocent people of your own kind die horrible deaths. Still, it must be said, Mountbatten lets the cat out of the bag when he tells us that it was he, nobody else, who gave the leaders of the two new dominions just ten weeks before power was transferred. True, they probably would still have done nothing if given ten months, yet it tells against Mountbatten himself. He was, after all, a sailor not a statesman. Still, what he was doing was giving Atlee- and thus the Labour party- an alibi for the Partition blood-letting. Mountbatten had been a 'pro-consul'. Everything was his fault. The problem with this view is that the British Constitution firmly subordinated the Viceroy to the Secretary of State for India. It wasn't till the office of Viceroy was replaced by that of Governor General that the Crown in Parliament ceased to be paramount.
Yannis Palaiologos is Greek and thus, but for his miseducation at Oxford, would be as smart as fuck. He has a foolish interview with Amartya Sen titled 'Economics needs a moral awakening'. In other words, it must stop concerning itself with scarcity and focus on 'non-rival' goods- e.g. saying everybody should get everything from the Magical Money Tree.
“Let us not forget that economics is a moral science,” Emmanuel Macron told the Financial Times in a recent interview.
If it were, it would be enough to say 'scarcity is immoral' for scarcity to cease to exist.
This is one of the central thoughts animating the work of Amartya Sen, a Nobel prize winner in the dismal science but also a renowned political philosopher.
thanks to 'intellectual affirmative action'. Sadly, his pal Manmohan became a two term Prime Minister of India while fellow Laureate Mohammad Yunus is now ruling the roost in Sen's ancestral Bangladesh. It seems being an economist does not necessarily entail being useless and impotent.
Kathimerini contacted the great Indian thinker at his home in Boston and asked him about that quote from the French president and about whether, in the age of Covid-19, it is finally time for economics to widen its view of human behavior and of the ends of economic policy by reconnecting with moral philosophy.
Why stop there? Why not reconnect with Alchemy?
“I remain an eternal optimist,” the 86-year-old Sen replies. “I still believe that a much wider understanding can emerge.
That wider understanding is that Sen was always just a waste of space.
Policymaking reflects our level of understanding. We must realize in a deep way that not only economics, but society as a whole must reflect our moral values –
Some societies do reflect the moral values of their people- which is why kaffirs run away from them.
we live together well when we help each other.
Neanderthals helped each other. This didn't prevent their going extinct.
This truth of our fundamental interdependence can be seen particularly clearly at the time of a pandemic.
The reverse was the case. The lockdown meant staying the fuck away from each other.
If we don’t grasp it, that will be a major epistemic failure with large ethical implications.”
The pandemic taught us that the only epistemic failures which have ethical implications occur in STEM subjects. Guys working in laboratories, not moral philosophers, developed the vaccines which permitted the ending of lockdown.
He says that the understanding of the relationship between epistemology and ethics
there is no such relationship.
can be traced back to many sources, including Aristotle, in “The Nicomachean Ethics”
the dude was wrong. There is no 'best' way to live. True if you get paid to teach shite, you then say that the good life consists in learning that shite.
and “Politics.” For Sen, the upcoming US presidential elections will be a crucial battleground where the ability of propaganda and fake news to obscure the moral demands of our mutual dependence will be tested.
Four years later, voters decided that sleepy Joe and comatose Kamala were shit. Trump was a better President.
Still teaching at Harvard (online these days), Sen is the author of the capability approach to political philosophy, according to which a person is free only to the extent that they are capable to pursue the ends that give value to life.
A slave may have that capability. A free man may not. Many decide that what is truly valuable is only what happens after death. They may live in a more moral and philanthropic manner as a result.
Thus, a lack of access to healthcare is an element of unfreedom,
It isn't. It may arise because one is not in jail. There is a considerable cohort, in America, whose longevity, health and educational outcomes improve if they are incarcerated for long periods during their adolescence and early manhood.
even for someone living in a politically and economically liberal polity.
If you suffer from a condition for which Medical Science has not found a cure, then you can't access appropriate health care irrespective of the type of regime you live under.
Does the pandemic highlight the importance of capabilities as a constitutive element of freedom?
No. It shows it was useless shit. Under lockdown, those capable of helping others- e.g. the neighbour of a disabled person who previously helped her with household chores- were prevented from doing so in order to prevent the spread of a dangerous virus.
“The European welfare state, including the national health service, is an excellent example of
a collective insurance scheme.
the conception of freedom as capability,
there was no such foolish talk at the time when the NHS was created. Indeed, Churchill railed against the proposals of the Labour Party in an infamous BBC broadcast before the 1945 election
He said ' ….there can be no doubt that Socialism is inseparably interwoven with Totalitarianism and the abject worship of the State. …liberty, in all its forms is challenged by the fundamental conceptions of Socialism. …there is to be one State to which all are to be obedient in every act of their lives. This State is to be the arch-employer, the arch-planner, the arch-administrator and ruler, and the arch-caucus boss.
'A Socialist State once thoroughly completed in all its details and aspects… could not afford opposition. Socialism is, in its essence, an attack upon the right of the ordinary man or woman to breathe freely without having a harsh, clumsy tyrannical hand clapped across their mouths and nostrils.
'But I will go farther. I declare to you, from the bottom of my heart that no Socialist system can be established without a political police. Many of those who are advocating Socialism or voting Socialist today will be horrified at this idea. That is because they are shortsighted, that is because they do not see where their theories are leading them.
'No Socialist Government conducting the entire life and industry of the country could afford to allow free, sharp, or violently-worded expressions of public discontent. They would have to fall back on some form of Gestapo, no doubt very humanely directed in the first instance. And this would nip opinion in the bud; it would stop criticism as it reared its head, and it would gather all the power to the supreme party and the party leaders, rising like stately pinnacles above their vast bureaucracies of Civil servants, no longer servants and no longer civil. And where would the ordinary simple folk — the common people, as they like to call them in America — where would they be, once this mighty organism had got them in its grip?'
This did not mean Churchill was against collective health and unemployment insurance. Indeed, he had championed both at an early point in his career. What was missing from the speeches of Atlee, Aneurin Bevan or anybody else at that time was talk of 'capability' or 'unfreedom'. It was Communists who said that in Stalin's Russia 'positive freedoms' (e.g. to remunerative employment) were guaranteed by the State. Thus the proletariat were able to develop their potential capabilities to the full. Sadly, the one capability they most wanted to exercise was the capability to run away to the decadent, Capitalist, West.
Sen, too, was unenthused by the prospect of developing his capability to spin cotton in Gandhian India.
including but going well beyond the ‘negative’ conception of liberty as the absence of coercion,” he says, alluding to Isaiah Berlin’s classic taxonomy.
which he made after the 'Butskillite' consensus on the Welfare State had become the bedrock of post-War British politics.
He characterizes the 2008 global crisis as stemming from “an overreliance on ‘negative liberty,’ as the banks were allowed to engage in practices with no social benefit but great potential for destruction, like the insuring of bonds they didn’t own against default.”
My insurance company is very evil. It is exercising 'negative liberty'. It insures me against my house burning down even though it does not own my house! What possible 'social benefit' does the Insurance industry provide? Also, how come I have unemployment insurance even though the insurer does not own my body? The 'negative freedom' to pay me unemployment benefit is socially undesirable. Only the person whose slave I am should be allowed to give me money when and if I have no remunerative employment.
The ideal, he says, is a “balanced approach” between positive and negative freedom –
why not a 'balanced approach' between positive and negative unicorns?
something understood by the great theoreticians of political economy, from Adam Smith and Condorcet to J.S. Mill, Karl Marx and A.C. Pigou.
None were foolish enough to speak of 'negative freedom' or 'morose unicorns' or other such imaginary creatures. There are Hohfeldian 'immunities' which a Court might uphold- e.g. my immunity from sucking your cock even if you really really want me to. There are no 'negative freedoms'.
This approach “was the foundation of the post-war welfare state in Europe.”
Nope. The Welfare State grew out of previous 'Poor Law' and Parochial provisions as well as collective insurance schemes of various types.
Sen brings up the example of World War II Britain,
which was like World War I Britain except that Rationing was introduced sooner
where “there was a fear that there would not be enough food
which is why the government stockpiled food
and that people would starve. So the policy of rationing and of controlled prices was implemented.
Tegart, the police chief who crushed the Bengali, Jugantar, Revolutionaries, was brought in to crack down on the black market.
As a result, not only was starvation averted, but undernourishment declined greatly,
for some sections of the population. But the same thing happened during the Cuban 'Famine' of the Nineties. The plain fact is, when people eat less of what is bad for them, their health improves.
and severe undernourishment disappeared altogether.” It took the war, he explains, “to make the British government take on the responsibility of feeding the entire British population
The British Government has been feeding its people since Tudor times. The last famine in England was in 1623.
– though this did not extend to its colonial subjects in India, where there was a major famine during the war years.”
Sen is lying. Britain had transferred all power over Food, Land, Supply etc. to an elected Government in Bengal. It was corrupt and incompetent- which is why there was such high mortality relative to the food availability deficit. Democracy caused a famine twice in Sen's ancestral homeland. The first was in 1943. The second was in 1974. The solution was to raise food output four fold.
He observes that “unfortunately” in the current crisis the “culture of sharing does not seem, so far at least, to be gaining much ground –
Modi shared. Biden was reluctant to do so.
though the problem is less acute in Europe than it is in the US or India.”
India supplied a lot of vaccine.
He speaks of the negative global influence “of the dominance of an American economic philosophy that goes back to Ronald Reagan,
Carter, not Reagan, was the first fiscal conservative. Nixon was the first and last avowed Keynesian. Sen knows nothing about either American or British economic history.
but which was followed by subsequent presidents, including Bill Clinton, who himself thought later on that some of these policies were mistaken.”
No. He pretended that he was more like Bernie Sanders only because he was trying to help his wife win.
And he is keen to point out that the first economic thinker to highlight the need for regulation to protect the economically vulnerable was none other than Adam Smith:
Nonsense! Scotland had Poor Law acts from 1579 onward. The aim was to get the 'economically vulnerable' to work rather than subsist by vagrancy or theft. Scotland, like England, had laws to force the able-bodied to work. After the Jacobite uprising, the power of Barons' Courts to extract forced labour was reduced. Smith considered regulation to be mischievous or unenforceable. As for the 'economically vulnerable', they were also biologically vulnerable. They would die unless they had the foresight to emigrate.
“In ‘The Wealth of Nations,’ he says that the intervention of the state on behalf of the workers is almost invariably right,
He never said any such thing. The plain fact is, regulations regarding the poor or the wages payable to workers was decided at the parish level. There was no separate mechanism of State. India had such a thing. Scotland did not.
whereas intervention on behalf of ‘the masters’ – that is, the rich capitalists – is quite often wrong.”
The rich paid the rates which sustained the parish. They decided on all matters to do with the poor or the working class. Smith does say that the law could be used to prosecute the ring-leaders of 'Labour Combinations' but it turned a blind eye to Employer Cartels. But his broader point is that there will be emigration or depopulation if wages are pushed down to a level where workers can't reproduce themselves by having enough babies.
In that spirit, Sen criticizes eurozone policy during the euro-crisis,
Why did Germans not pay the pensions of Greeks so they could all retire at 55?
“under the direction of the European Central Bank and certain member-states.” “The leader then of the ECB, Jean-Claude Trichet,
who had opposed the fifty percent haircut for private investors in Greek bonds
is in many ways a powerful thinker – and I am proud to call him an old friend – but he got this one quite wrong.”
The private investors accepted the haircut insisted on by Merkel. She who pays the piper...
Their insistence on directly reducing deficits and debt, in the midst of a downturn, he says, “led to severe cuts in public expenditure.”
That public expenditure should never have been made in the first place. The Greeks had cooked the books. When they were found out, it was a case of hair-cuts all round.
Yet “the deficits – quite often – grew because of the need to stimulate the economy in the face of widespread banking failure. It was really a crisis of capitalism, not primarily that of an over-extended state.”
Nope. It was a crisis of a bad actor which had been cooking the books and spending too much while permitting tax evasion and corruption on a gargantuan scale.
And the result of the harsh austerity imposed was “a real loss of protection for the poor and the working class in Europe
in Greece. But lots of middle class people were badly affected.
– the consequences of which we are experiencing even now with the difficulty in dealing with the pandemic.”
Greece responded very well to the pandemic. They are a smart people with great civic sense. Their mistake was to let Professors of stupid shite hold high political office.
This policy mistake, he argues, exacerbated the negative consequences of the misguided effort to shrink the welfare state which actually preceded the financial crash.
Nobody was shrinking anything before the crash.
Sen is largely in favor of the “unorthodox policies” implemented by the ECB under Mario Draghi and his successor, Christine Lagarde, and also of the fiscal flexibility granted by the EU to member-states to deal with the crisis. “A relapse into orthodoxy would badly hurt the poor and the economically vulnerable,” he warns.
What hurts the poor is low productivity. As for the economically vulnerable, haircuts on their savings hurt them disproportionately. Sen-tentious economics which pretends there is a Magic Money Tree is what prevents policy makers from focusing on raising productivity and ensuring there will be no hair-cuts for savers.
Locked down and out in India
Sen is particularly critical of the way his home country has dealt with the pandemic.
He criticized Mamta's handling of the lockdown- right? Wrong. He'd have had his head kicked in. However, since Modi is Mamta's enemy, he is obliged to pretend that Modi is the Devil.
The policy of the Indian government,
like the policy of the West Bengal and Bangladesh government
“under the influence of the better-off classes,” he says, “focuses very largely on controlling the spread of the virus, not paying adequate attention to the economic repercussions.
Next time, both Bangladesh and India will do what Pakistan did- viz. nothing- at least in the poorer states.
For the poor, the sudden imposition of the lockdown meant that, from one moment to the next, they were left without work and without an income, facing the prospect of starvation.”
The Indian authorities did not know how big the migrant population was. Some states, like Kerala, had the state capacity to reassure migrants they would be fed. Others did not. That's why a lot of people ended up walking home so as to be sure to get food from the public distribution system in the place where they were registered. 'One Nation, one Ration Card' was supposed to have helped but migrants in a State whose language they don't speak may well disbelieve that their entitlements will be effective.
The policy that has been adopted is not only “blatantly unjust”; it is not even effective in achieving its stated goal: “When a large number of people, who work far from their homes, were left without income, they were forced to walk back in masses to their villages (train and bus services were suspended as part of the lockdown), spreading the virus to new areas.” In addition, the very limited testing carried out in India means “we don’t know the scale of the epidemic in the country.”
In other words, if you want to help the poor and the vulnerable, you actually have to raise productivity and state capacity. Gassing on about capabilities won't help.
Along with Raghuram Rajan, former governor of the Indian central bank, and current Nobel Laureate Abhijit Banerjee, Sen wrote an article in the Indian Expres
this article was published in the middle of April, 2020. The joke was that the Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Anna Yojana ( Prime Minister's Food Security Scheme for the Poor) had been scheme announced a couple of weeks previously on March 26 2020. Indians were laughing at the NRI Professors presuming to advise Modi from their Ivy League Ivory Towers.
s urging the use of the food stocks of the Food Corporation of India – a state institution that buys up farmers’ products at guaranteed prices and then either sells them or distributes them to those in need – to feed the poor.
Which is what Modi did. 800 million will be given free food for the next five years. Was this because of Sen or Rajan? No. It was a case of buying votes.
“Not using a part of the huge food stocks – far in excess of stocks in the past and much larger than what is needed for the purpose of stabilization – for more generous support of the poor is a serious omission,” Professor Sen says. “The central government could use even 40-50 million tons without endangering food security, and this would have relieved hunger across the country,” he points out.
But Modi knew this better than Sen. Remaining in India means you end up knowing more about Indian economics. Sen may have had some such 'capability' but he lost it when he ran off with his best friend's wife to the LSE. From this immoral slumber nothing can wake him.
