The former mistake was made by Kosambi- a polyglot mathematician, potentially of the first rank, who somewhat ran to seed. The latter folly was committed by Patinkin who was similarly precocious as a mathematical economist. Like Kosambi, his historical scholarship, arising perhaps from his childhood immersion in yeshiva studies, had won praise and this is one commonality between them. This is because Kosambi's father- a Brahmin turned Buddhist monk (but one who continued to have sons!)- was a savant at Harvard and then a Professor at Leningrad before returning to India. Naturally, this paternal peculiarity affected the young polymath's trajectory.
The other is that both Kosambi and Patinkin were determined, or destined, to leave America for British colonies or ex-colonies- India and Israel respectively- where they would be forced to choose between the two types of radicalism familiar to them from their similarly elite American education and somewhat 'subaltern' ethnic or class origin.
Patinkin had been taught by both Oskar Lange and Henry Simons. Would he chose Government control of the economy in which planners adjusted prices in response to excess demand or would he plump for a free market approach in which severe restrictions on monopolistic practices as well as Financial institutions featured?
Patinkin's solution was creative and remains of interest both to Marxists and mainstream economists because of the manner in which it integrated money into the theory of value. However, it had little importance for Israel because of the commanding role played by the Histadrut (the monolithic Trade Union which owned and operated many businesses) which was complementary to that of the Government. This meant the one overriding law of Israeli economics remained that though plenty of very smart economising was done, all laws of economics were cheerfully defied.
By contrast, Kosambi wasn't an economist and his historiography, when not wholly eccentric, was quaintly doctrinaire albeit in a belle letrrist sophomore fashion. Nevertheless, the fact is, after Independence, Kosambi could have been part of a 'free market' based Technocratic class- he was employed by the Tatas (a leading indigenous Business House) and involved in early work on the electronic computer. Interestingly, the Tata Institute did build a computer within a couple of years of the Fuji corporation in Japan. However, competition between Japanese Corporations- for example, NEC's success using transistors in 1959- meant that f.d.i became available to the Japanese Corporate Sector for R&D in integrated circuits and thus Japan, but not India, was able to cash in on the 'hardware' revolution. It must be said, however, that the more technocratic bent of the Japanese Ministry of Trade and Industry enabled the Corporate sector to gain foreign exchange to pay for initial licensing fees.
Around this time, the Indians were trying to create a Technologically savvy cadre within the Government. Unfortunately the jealously of the old, mainly humanities trained, Civil Service killed off the program. This type of bureaucratic politics is part of the reason that people like Kosambi felt disillusioned. Perhaps there was a 'caste' aspect to such dramas. In particular, 'Brahminical attitudes'- i.e. a preference for lofty words rather than tangible results- may have been seen as the culprit.
Kosambi had no faith in Atomic Energy- preferring Solar power- and perhaps he'd have been happier resigning from the Tata Institute and joining the Communist party. Had he done so it is likely that he would have soon got up to speed with developments in Soviet Economics- indeed, his original research interests might have enabled him to contribute and compete with the likes of Kolmogorov and Kantorovitch. More importantly, he could have put forward a devastating critique of Mahalanobis's Planning Commission's puerile Leontief type model and the absurd policy prescriptions that flowed from it. Thus, in the late Fifties, Kosambi could have been in the vanguard of a salutary challenge from the Left to Nehruvian bureaucratic Socialism. The sclerotic nature of Indian Marxism- Kosambi's initial contribution was a critique of the precociously geriatric Dange- could have been effectively contested by younger and smarter technocrats and mathematicians. The same point might be made of the Mahalanobis inspired academo-bureaucratic availability cascade we associate with the early Amartya Sen of 'Choice of Technique' and the 'Seb- Dobb thesis'. Such rank stupidity was apotheosized by Indira Gandhi's servile Planning Commission appointee- Sukhamoy Chakravarty- whom Sen blames for his own changing direction from Physics (where his nullity would have soon been apparent) to Economics (which is nullity incarnate).
Chakravarty's theoretical defense of the Mahalanobis model would have been easy for Kosambi to defeat in advance because he had the equipment to apply control theory to complex dynamic systems. Like Busemann, he understood that the associated Finsler spaces need not be locally Euclidean but rather could feature Minkowskian line segments.
The Mahalanobis model made absurd assumptions re. different classes of Capital goods or different types of Consumption dependent on whether a person is employed or not. Thus its prescriptions were garbage in, garbage out. Both Capital and Consumption are complex processes. The Pontyragin principle as applied to an absurdly partitioned Reimann space can't say anything about optimality at all. But, considered on the Finsler space, Bellman's principle points to something we see in the real world viz. discontinuities arising from mimetic effects, or 'endogenous growth', constituting scandal-free geodesics which render complex dynamics tractable and productive. This answers Chakravarty's dilemma as to how to know when structural change has occurred and what to do about it because, from the start, a complex dynamic system is properly modeled as not locally Euclidean but Minkowskian and so, though there are discontinuities in the perceived statics, no scandal arises re. the dynamics. I'm sure there are far less stupid ways to say this but, historically, I imagine that Kosambi would have clarified similar points on his way to a more general conclusion. This could have completely changed the fate of Indian Marxist Historiography and Peasant Studies- unless of course R.S. Sharma was right and, for some phylogenetic reason, the Dynasty- even once Italian rather than Indian- can always create, by some magical power, not just sycophants but brain-dead serfs out of our indigenous jhollahwallah careerists. It is a small mercy that Kosambi didn't live to witness his own apotheosis at the hands of this feudal cult which claims him as its progenitor.
Could Kosambi have gatecrashed the Mandarins or Mad Hatter's Tea Party at the Planning Commission? I don't know. I recall reading of one Dr. Jayanti Dharam Teja- supposedly a nuclear physicist who had made a lot of money in the States in some high tech field- who managed to swindle even more money out of Nehru's Government. Could Kosambi- who attended Harvard- not have done something similar but of opposite social valency? I suppose not. He was never a rich man nor hankered after wealth, whereas, in New Delhi, it is money that talks.
Still, the Fifties was the time of 'Hindi-Chini bhai bhai' and Kosambi had made an impression on the Chinese- he'd even published a paper in that language. I believe he tried to get Chern a berth in Bombay at the Tata Institute. I image that sort of cosmopolitanism would have given the handsome and charismatic Kosambi some small edge in whatever politicking was required in New Delhi.
It may be that there were purely political forces militating against a rejuvenation of Indian Marxism- even at that early date. However, Kosambi's interest in ancient history might, under Party discipline, have enabled him to device a superior econometric approach to agrarian issues which would have been very useful in connection with planning for the Green Revolution. This may be a rosy eyed view. It may be that Indian Marxists were always senile shitheads concerned only with fucking over the peasants in the manner of Bukharin & Preobrazhensky's puerile ABC of Communism.
The fact that Kosambi neither embraced the free-market nor the Marxist option and thus had no coherent economic theory, probably has to do with his lack of like minded peers- the penalty he paid for leaving America, or- later on- losing the comradeship of Andrei Weil. By contrast, Patinkin had been drawn into the Cowles Commission and, later on, Israel was not as cut off as India from advances in the West.
In writing this, I am speculating as to what might have happened if Kosambi's professional life, post Independence, had been happier or more productive. I am also making some, no doubt, very simplistic assumptions which I'd better explicitly set down.
1) Patinkin's indoctrination in Hebrew and the Talmud inspired, as it did in Solomon Maimon, a distrust of facile 'harmonious construction' type reasoning. He was interested instead in disequilibrium and discontinuity. He chose practical Zionism- building a first world knowledge economy in a small third world country on a permanent war footing- precisely because the task seemed quixotic and in defiance of the Historicist logic of both Rabbi and Professor.
Kosambi had no similar indoctrination in Sanskrit or Mimamsa or Navya Nyaya. Even if he had, the fact is there is no similar doctrine in Hindu thought. All meaning can be a wholly chaotic permanent disequilibrium. For Buddhism, Reality itself is but momentary and though intentionality simply is; intensionality, being complex, is not.
As a matter of fact, Kosambi's literary and historiographical researches were motivated by his great facility with languages and his retentive memory. Unfortunately, pride of caste overpowered him. He decided that the Brahmins had some magical power such that, though disparate in origin and geographically dispersed, they somehow managed to impose a exploitative system of social stratification across a vast swathe of land without any coercive power over and above their bare charisma.
2) Kosambi had better tools to understand disequilibrium and heterogeneity. We can now get an idea of how those tools yield a theory of far greater generality but, for that very reason, no predictive power or historicist content. In the Indian context, that was a good thing. The State could have developed a technocratic cadre which worked with selected 'Nationalist' Corporations in a manner that enabled productive investment to increasingly pay for itself rather than require a 'Sen-Dobb' type confiscation of surpluses from the pre-modern, or intermediate sector. In other words, endogenous growth was possible precisely because a more general, mathematically advanced, theory of the economy was part and parcel of rapid, Muth rational, endogenous growth. In the mid Thirties and again in the late Fifties, engineers and mathematicians could have put India on such a trajectory. In both cases this failed to happen because it seemed more urgent to fight some fundamental culture war which had to do with some past epistemic violence or humiliation. There was a puritanical element to this. Consumerism was simply considered to be wrong and evil and unsustainable. In Calvin's Geneva, goldsmiths and jewellers had to become watchmakers as conspicuous consumption was frowned upon. That was a good thing. The Swiss gained a high value added export. India's anti-Consumerism, by contrast, rejected even the utilitarian watch in favour of more Research Institutes and PhD programs churning out a parodic type of scholarship whose claim to salience arose out of shrill denunciation and aleatory vigilance against people buying nice stuff or eating something tasty or watching an entertaining movie or other such heartless atrocities committed against the poor and suffering whom we shall always have with us.
Israel and India are, of course, very different. Israel's small size, meritocratic ethos, and the extraordinary intellectual stature of its diaspora have enabled the much smaller country to take far greater strides. Bizarrely, an Indian like me now distrusts, or considers worthless, works by Indian origin Ivy League academics while still finding Israeli Indological works quite useful. Why? The Israelis will do some alethic research. The Indians will simply recycle worthless availability cascades and then play the race card.
I suppose Kosambi's somewhat bizarre Marxism simply reflected an obvious truth- Marxism is silly in a segmentary society. As for praising one's own caste- even by the back handed method of ascribing the power to brainwash others to it- well, in India, it helps pass the time.
In the end Don Patinkin and D.D. Kosambi- though highly rated by shite academics- will perhaps be remembered for negative accomplishments. Patinkin, despite being a first rate economist wasn't able to fuck up the Israeli economy very much. Kosambi too just beat around the bush rather than proclaiming the great truth of Indian Marxism- viz. India is a shithole. Always has been and always will be. Any other view is nothing but Hindu chauvinism and arrant consumerism and populist majoritarian fascism of a sort which only Indians- those evil little shits- need to be protected from so as to preserve the sub-continent as a vast and bottomless begging bowl.
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