Sen's wikiquotes analysed.

The mark of a truly great economist is that every sentence he utters must be utterly foolish and self-contradictory.

Do Amartya Sen apopgthems, as curated by Wikiquotes- measure up to this exacting standard? Let us see-

1970s
"Where is the railway station?" he asks me. "There," I say, pointing at the post office, "and would you please post this letter for me on the way?" "Yes," he says, determined to open the envelope and check whether it contains something valuable.
“Rational Fools: A Critique of the Behavioral Foundations of Economic Theory,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 6(4) (1977): p. 332.[1]

This is foolish. Nobody trusts a stranger with anything valuable- even a letter. If someone hands me a letter, trusting to my kindness and honesty, I immediately assume that the fellow is a terrorist and the letter is full of anthrax powder. He wants me to get my fingerprints all over it or to appear on the CCTV footage of the postbox. I may take the letter- because not to do so might tip off this dangerous terrorist that I have rumbled his foul plan- but I won't post it.

In this particular case, the guy who is asking about the railway station would get suspicious if it turned out that it just so happened to be in a direction in which the other guy wants you to go for some purpose profitable to himself.

Sen is speaking of a very foolish type of irrationality- one which assumes that crooks assume everyone else is honest. Such crooks soon learn the error of their ways. Indeed, in high crime milieus everyone is tight lipped and eyes everyone else with dark suspicion.

1990s
Since the conception of human rights transcends local legislation and the citizenship of the person affected, it is not surprising that support for human rights can also come from anyone—whether or not she is a citizen of the same country as the person whose rights are threatened. A foreigner does not need the permission of a repressive government to try to help a person whose liberties are being violated. Indeed, in so far as human rights are seen as rights that any person has as a human being and not as a citizen of any particular country, the reach of the corresponding duties can also include any human being, irrespective of citizenship.
Amartya Sen, "Human Rights and Asian Values" Sixteenth Annual Morgenthau Memorial Lecture on Ethics and Foreign Policy, May 25, 1997; Republished in: Tibor R. Machan (2013), Business Ethics in the Global Market. p. 69

To 'support' a right means to help the rights holder gain a remedy from an obligation holder under a bond of law. Saying I support human rights does not in fact support human rights unless the person making the declaration is providing money or material aid to at least one person whose human rights have been violated. I may say 'I support my wife'. You may reply 'you are an unemployed, drunken, hobo. You don't support your wife. You beat her and rob her off her hard earned wages.' I may reply, 'I'm a Feminist. I support women's rights. My wife is a woman. I may not support her financially, but since I support women's rights, it follows that I also support my wife.' Your reply may involve farting loudly in my face.

Sen says 'A foreigner does not need the permission of a repressive government to try to help a person whose liberties are being violated.' He does not explain how the foreigner is supposed to get to the victim of the repressive government. John Rambo, no doubt, can invade that country as a one man army. But Rambo is a fictional character. Saying 'I support Uighur detainees' does not actually help them in any way. It is just idle talk. Why? The corresponding duty or obligation is impossible to perform by anyone not sanctioned to do so by the repressive government in question.

Sen, it appears, lives in a fool's paradise where anyone can say 'I have a duty to help so and so. Thus I have in fact helped so and so even though I can't help so and so and am just talking to make myself look good.'

Democracy has to be judged not just by the institutions that formally exist but by the extent to which different voices from diverse sections of the people can actually be heard. - The idea of Justice, 2009 p. xiii

Democracy does not have to be judged at all. There is no point doing so as Sen's own oeuvre amply demonstrates.

Why has Sen never said- 'Economic Scholarship has to be judged not just by the institutions that formally exist- e.g. the Delhi School of Economics or the London School of Economics at both of which Sen taught- but by the extent to which different voices from diverse sections of the people can actually be heard'?

The answer is that different voices from diverse sections of the people would say the Econ Sen himself taught was wholly useless.

People's identities as Indians, as Asians, or as members of the human race seemed to give way — quite suddenly — to sectarian identification with Hindu, Muslim, or Sikh communities.
Amartya Sen, Reason before Identitiy: The Romanes Lecture for 1998, Oxford University Press, 1999. p. 20

Who the fuck has an identity as an 'Asian'? Nobody at all. Asia is too diverse. Indians do have a legal identity but if they are being killed by Muslim or Sikh mobs, then they band together with other Hindus for protection.  For Sen this is a big surprise despite the fact that his own family fled East Pakistan and found shelter in Hindu majority India. Why did they do so? The answer is they were Hindus.

Amartya Sen, Foreword to The Passions and the Interests by Albert O. Hirschman (1996)
The Passions and the Interests does not have the policy urgency that a contribution to public decisions may enjoy (as Hirschman's The Strategy of Economic Development eminently does), nor the compulsive immediacy that the exigencies of practical reason generate (as Exit, Voice, and Loyalty superbly portrayed).

Hirschman came to the conclusion that Development Econ of the type that Sen was practicing was worthless shite. Sen took the hint and migrated to Social Choice and Moral Philosophy and pretending to know about famines. But they are equally worthless. By the late Seventies, Econ Journals were refusing to publish any more Social Choice papers. This was 'Voice' and 'Exit' with a vengeance. Sen alone showed loyalty to a long obsolete availability cascade so as to get a pay check. 

What then is so special about this book? […] The answer lies not only in the recognition that Hirschman makes us see the ideological foundations of capitalism in a fresh way, but also in the remarkable fact that this freshness is derived from ideas that are more than two-hundred-years old.

So- Sen says a book is really special because it makes us see in a fresh manner that some stupid shite is just as shite today as it was two hundred years ago.

The basic hypothesis— the articulation and development of which Hirschman investigates—makes the case for capitalism rest on the belief that "it would activate some benign human proclivities at the expense of some malignant ones."

But the same case would be made by a person defending any type of economic regime. Nobody says 'I advocate such and such form of economy because it would activate some malignant human proclivities at the expense of some benign ones'. 

Even when altruism is allowed (as, for example, in Gary Becker's model of rational allocation), it is assumed that the altruistic actions are undertaken because they promote each person's own interests; there are personal gains to the altruist's own welfare, thanks to sympathy for others. No role is given to any sense of commitment about behaving well or to pursuing some selfless objective. All this leaves out, on the one hand, the evil passions that early theorists of capitalism contrasted with self-interest and, on the other, the social commitments that Kant analyzed in The Critique of Practical Reason and that Adam Smith discussed in The Theory of Moral Sentiments.

Why does it leave out stuff from Kant and Smith? The answer is blindingly obvious. Kant and Smith lived long ago and had some absurd beliefs and prejudices. We leave out the stuff they got wrong just as we leave out Newton's theological speculations when using his laws of motion.

The behavioral foundations of capitalism do, of course, continue to engage attention, and the pursuit of self-interest still occupies a central position in theories about the workings and successes of capitalism.

Whose attention is engaged? Only some Credentialized cretins. Nobody else cares. 

But in these recent theories, interests are given a rather different—and much more "positive"—role in promoting efficient allocation of resources through informational economy as well as the smooth working of incentives, rather than the negative role of blocking harmful passions.

So what? Those recent theories too are shite concocted by shitheads. They don't promote any type of efficiency. 

I personally have great skepticism about the theories extolling the wonders of "Asian values." They are often based on badly researched generalizations and frequently uttered by governmental spokesmen countering accusations of authoritarianism and violations of human rights (as happened spectacularly at the World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna in 1993).

Sen may be as sceptical as he likes about 'Asian values'. Yet the countries which claimed to possess them have done very well. 

2000s
Globalization is not in itself a folly: It has enriched the world scientifically and culturally and benefited many people economically as well.
Amartya Sen, "Ten theses on globalization." New Perspectives Quarterly 18.4 (2001): 9-9.

A folly is a mistake made by a conscious agent with control over the relevant resources. 'Globalisation' was not the product of any conscious agent's actions. It can't be said to be either a folly or a piece of wisdom. By contrast, we can say 'import-substitution, as a developmental strategy, was a folly'. But export-led growth is not the same thing as Globalisation. With hindsight, we can see there was no true Globalisation at all. China wasn't really embracing Free Market Liberalism. Korea and Japan could easily backslide to a chauvinistic trade war. The US could do a volte face and become a champion of 'optimal tariff' theory so as to capture more of the gains from trade.

John Kenneth Galbraith doesn't get enough praise. The Affluent Society is a great insight, and has become so much a part of our understanding of contemporary capitalism that we forget where it began. It's like reading Hamlet and deciding it's full of quotations.
Amartya Sen, quoted in Jonathan Steele, "Last of the old-style liberals", The Guardian (2002)

Galbraith stopped getting praise because his predictions were falsified by events. There was no 'convergence' between the Soviet style Command economy and the progressively more 'Mixed' Market Economies.  Instead, you got Thatcher and Reagan and the collapse of the Evil Empire.

I am not persuaded that Hayek got the substantive connections entirely right. He was too captivated by the enabling effects of the market system on human freedoms and tended to downplay - though he never fully ignored - the lack of freedom for some that may result from a complete reliance on the market system, with its exclusions and imperfections, and the social effects of big disparities in the ownership of assets. But it would be hard to deny Hayek's immense contribution to our understanding of the importance of judging institutions by the criterion of freedom.
"An insight into the purpose of prosperity", Financial Times (September 20, 2004)

What is our understanding of the importance of 'judging institutions' by any criterion other than cost effeciveness? The answer is that we understand any such judging to be mental masturbation. Hayek may have made an immense contribution to masturbation of one sort or the other, but that's not why he is remembered. Rather, it is as providing intellectual ammunition for a roll-back of the State that the man is still revered. 

Our debt to Hayek is very substantial. He helped to establish a freedom-based approach of evaluation through which economic systems can be judged (no matter what substantive judgments we arrive at).

Hayek did not establish any approach to evaluating economic systems. That was done by people concerned with National Income Accounting. Hayek believed that more freedom in economic matters would translate into better outcomes. This was certainly true of certain societies. However, other societies would still have torn themselves apart no matter what economic or political regime they adopted.

He pointed to the importance of identifying those services that the state can perform well and has a social duty to undertake.

No he didn't. He didn't know, as we don't know, what services the state can perform well and whether or not it has a social duty to undertake it. In 1927, Churchill, as Chancellor of the Exchequer thought he had a social duty to take a shilling off Income Tax rather than put it into the Royal Navy. This decision cost Britain many billions of pounds. The truth is we don't know what technological possibilities exist and whether or not Governments have a duty to develop those technologies so as to avert an existential threat.

We still don't know whether there any services- other than those of a 'Night Watchman'- which the private sector can't discharge more efficiently than the Government. Hayek did not point to the importance of making the sort of identification he himself, if pressed to do so, would have been wholly unable to make. 

Finally, he showed why administrative psychology and propensities to corruptibility have to be considered in determining how states can, or cannot, work and how the world can, or cannot, be run. "An insight into the purpose of prosperity", Financial Times (September 20, 2004)

Nobody can 'show' any such thing. In any case, it would be pointless to do so because nobody listens to stupid Academics living from paycheck to paycheck. If these guys are so smart why aren't they billionaires? How come they haven't found the cure to cancer? At the very least, they should put on a cape and fight crime like Batman. 

Given what can be achieved through intelligent and humane intervention, it is amazing how inactive and smug most societies are about the prevalence of the unshared burden of disability.
quoted in Andrew Balls, "Donors urged to focus more on disability link", Financial Times (December 2, 2004)

Why is it amazing? Intelligent and humane intervention has stopped a lot of people becoming disabled in the first place while allowing more and more disabled people to be economically active.
Those who are inactive and smug may stir themselves to do something for themselves only if their own economic condition worsens. Why puzzle your head about the curious failure of smug and inactive people not to be smug and inactive? What's next? Will you find it amazing that cats aren't dogs? 

People's priorities and actions are influenced by many different affiliations and associations, not just by their religion. For example, the separation of Bangladesh from Pakistan was connected with loyalty to Bengali language and literature, along with political - including secular - priorities, not with religion, which both wings of undivided Pakistan shared.

Nonsense! East Pakistan was more populous, so once free elections were held East Pakistanis would have formed the Government. West Pakistan responded by unleashing a genocide. That is why Bangladesh chose to become independent- with Indian help.

Muslim Bangladeshis - in Britain or anywhere else - may indeed be proud of their Islamic faith, but that does not obliterate their other affiliations and capacious dignity.

What about Hindu Bangladeshis? How many of Sen's own family survive in the Islamic Republic which was their ancestral home? What happened to their 'capacious dignity'? Why did they run away?

Multiculturalism with an emphasis on freedom and reasoning has to be distinguished from "plural monoculturalism" with single-focus priorities and a rigid cementing of divisions.

Why must some stupid shite be distinguished from some other stupid shite? Will Multiculturalism with an emphasis on freedom start masturbating in public if it isn't distinguished from 'plural monoculturalism'? I suppose so. The latter is an oxymoron. If it exists then all dogs are cats and giving a lecture is the same thing as jizzing on the upturned faces of your students in the lecture hall. 

Multicultural education is certainly important, but it should not be about bundling children into preordained faith schools.

Parents do bundle their kids into schools so as to get a break from their ceaseless whining. If they bundle their kids into faith schools- in the hope that the nuns will smack them silly- we may term this outcome as having to do with 'multiculturalism'. Why pretend that Governments are doing the bundling? The thing is purely a function of parental choice. 

Awareness of world civilisation and history is necessary.

For what? Sen writes utter shite but it isn't because he has no awareness of history. WTF is 'world civilization'? No such thing has ever existed. There were a number of large civilizations in the world but never one large all encompassing world civilization. 

Religious madrasas may take little interest in the fact that when a modern mathematician invokes an "algorithm" to solve a difficult computational problem, she helps to commemorate the secular contributions of Al-Khwarizmi, the great ninth-century Muslim mathematician, from whose name the term algorithm is derived ("algebra" comes from his book, Al Jabr wa-al-Muqabilah). There is no reason at all why old Brits as well as new Brits should not celebrate those grand connections. The world is not a federation of religious ethnicities. Nor, one hopes, is Britain.
"Solution to cultural confusion is freedom and reason", Financial Times (November 29, 2005)

Religious madrasas don't care about algebra. Sen does. Thus he should want to prevent British kids being sent to madrasas. Maybe he does want that. But he is too cowardly to say so. The fact is the word alcohol comes from the Arabic 'al kuhl'. Would knowing this fact cause Muslims to want to drink Spirits? The word 'bugger' comes from the Latin 'bulgarus' or Bulgarian. Would knowing the origin of the word bugger cause British people of Bulgarian ancestry to become raging sodomites? If not, why bring up the topic?

I agree with Mr Wolf that freedom is centrally important. But how should we see the demands of freedom when habit-forming behaviour today restricts the freedom of the same person in the future? Once acquired, the habit of smoking is hard to kick, and it can be asked, with some plausibility, whether youthful smokers have an unqualified right to place their future selves in such bondage.

Similarly, studying a useless subject at a young age- as I did- can restrict one's future life-chances. Once acquired the habit of bullshitting like an Economist or a Philosopher can be hard to kick. Once can ask, with great plausibility, whether young people have an unqualified right to study worthless shite. 

A similar issue was addressed by the leading apostle of liberty, John Stuart Mill, when he argued against a person’s freedom to sell himself or herself in slavery. […] Another question to ask is: who exactly are the “others” who are affected? Passive smokers are not the only people who might be harmed. If smokers are made ill by their decision to go on smoking, then the society can either take the view that these victims of self-choice have no claim to public resources (such as the National Health Service or social safety nets), or more leniently (and I believe more reasonably) it could accept that these people still qualify to get social help. If the former, we would live in a monstrously unforgiving society; and happily I do not see Britain or France going that way. If the latter, then the interests of “others” would surely be affected through the sharing of the costs of public services.
"Unrestrained smoking is a libertarian half-way house", Financial Times (February 11, 2007)

Economists may not be the smartest people in the world but even they know that the solution to the problem of 'de-merit goods' is to tax them punitively while placing increasingly onerous restrictions on where and when they can be consumed.  Talking bollocks about John Stuart Mill is a waste of time.

Libertarian logic for non-interference, when consistently exp­lored, can have extraordinarily stern implications in invalidating the right to assistance from the society when one is hit by self-harming behaviour.

So tell Libertarian logic to go fuck itself. Why 'consistently explore' its cavities? The loathsome thing probably gets off on it. Don't touch it with a barge-pole. 

If that annulment is not accepted, then the case for libertarian “immunity” from interference is also correspondingly undermined.

Nonsense! I had an 'immunity' from interference when it came to choosing what to study at Uni. Since I picked Econ, I was doomed to be a worthless cretin. No doubt, some people who feel sorry for cretins like me could have enabled me to become a Professor at a University which had worthwhile Departments. But, I'd still be a cretin. Indeed, I would have grown more cretinous- like Sen.

Would it be the case, that had I refused to become a Professor on the grounds that I had turned myself into a cretin voluntarily, I would have been obliged to agree that I had no 'immunity' in the matter of choosing what to study at Uni? No. Of course not. That immunity would still obtain. I am not obliged to give up my right to study worthless shit just because there are nice people who will pretend that shit isn't worthless and is in fact deserving of an extra special Nobel Prize for very very special elderly cretins.

We should not readily agree to be held captive in a half-way house erected by an inadequate assessment of the demands of liberty.
"Unrestrained smoking is a libertarian half-way house", Financial Times (February 11, 2007)

We should not agree to be held captive anywhere. All assessments of the demands of liberty are inadequate because only stupid cretins like Sen bother making them.